Could you spot the difference between real art and an altered copy? Why do people respond to art, and what is the psychology behind it? A session on psychology and the arts at the British Association meeting in Leicester attempted to answer these and similar questions yesterday.
Researchers presented results from a number of studies, which attempted to understand the nature of our reaction to art. "The arts dominate everything we do in life," said Prof Chris McManus of University College London, who organised the session. We chose music, decided on a colour for the bathroom walls and made similar decisions every day.
"There are aesthetic judgments everywhere," he said, adding, however, that psychologists spent very little time trying to understand the motivation behind them.
His own work involved trying to determine why pictures look nice and appeal to us. He pursued this goal by taking three original works by the Dutch artist, Pieter Mondrian, and altering them slightly. The object was to see if a viewer would be able to identify the ersatz Mondrian.
"People could distinguish a pseudo-Mondrian from a real Mondrian," he found, with most people getting it correct between 55 and 65 per cent of the time. Some, however, failed every time. People seemed to be able to detect an imbalance brought into the art by Prof McManus's alteration.
Prof Paul Locher of Montclair State University studied the way people scrutinised a painting, using recording equipment that could track the way the eyes scanned a picture, occasionally fixing on some feature on the canvas.
"There is a clear connection between good design and the amount of information they take in and whether they find it pleasing," Prof Locher said. The better the composition the more information that could be absorbed, and the better the subject generally liked it.
He found, however, that there was a marked difference between individual paintings when subjects were asked to choose between viewing an original and viewing a computer screen copy or photographic copy.
Prof Locher presented subjects with specific pictures, for example, Vermeer's Young Woman and a Jug, and the majority favoured viewing an actual picture compared to a copy. Subjects were indifferent about the original of El Greco's Toledo and of Pieter Breugel the Elder's The Harvesters, however.
They expressed no preference to see either of these pictures as opposed to an image on a computer screen.