What Do We Get Out of Art?

Museums shape our experience of art

Source: Amy Leigh Barnard/Unsplash

People have made art since the dawn of civilization. Entering the Altamira caves leaves one speechless with awe. Art is valuable because it deals with human experience and it can often express understandings and emotions that are difficult to put into words. When we encounter art, we learn about the world. But how does this happen?

The artist starts their process with an idea, with feelings they want to communicate, and they work to make the vision a reality. In their creative process, artists experience emotions themselves and the feelings can find their way into their pieces.

On the other end, audiences see art in a particular space (gallery? museum? office?). They are attracted to some works and not others, come to understand some pieces better than others, and have a broad range of emotional experiences. Let’s unpack.

How do we understand art?

Researchers wanted to examine the fundamental question of what kinds of art are best understood. They set up an experiment in which they showed study participants two different groups of artworks. One group was negative in content, portraying uncomfortable subjects. These were works such as Friday Kahlo’s Without Hope, Edvard Munch’s By the Death Bed, and Dorothy Tennant’s The Death of Love. Another group of artworks was positive in content, showing something pleasant, like Edouard Manet’s Boy with Cherries, Edgar Degas’ Dancer with a Bouquet of Flowers, Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, and others.

Researchers also asked participants about their interest in art—how much they like to talk about art with others, whether they tend to look for new artistic experiences in their everyday life, whether they routinely find art objects fascinating. Finally, people indicated how much they understood the artworks they saw and how much artistic value they considered the artworks had.

What researchers found is that positive artworks were understood better than negative ones. However, negative artworks were perceived as having more artistic value. In other words, artworks showing positive themes are easier to understand, but negative art can be more intriguing or invite more engagement.

The nature of the art is not the only thing that determines what we understand. What we bring to the experience shapes what we get out of it. People who are more interested in art end up understanding it better, and this is true especially for negative art. When we are interested in art, we can approach it with an open mind and we are more motivated to understand it.

Ultimately, we tend to like better the art we understand.

What do we feel when we encounter art?

Art both portrays emotions and evokes them in the audience. The question is whether the emotions artists intend to portray are the same as those that the viewers experience.

In one study, researchers asked art students about emotions they experienced while creating their pieces and about emotions they intended to communicate; they specifically asked about being anxious, moved, overwhelmed, thrilled, shocked, and more than 30 other feelings. Then, they displayed the works and asked viewers what they experienced in front of the artworks and what they thought artists aimed to portray.

Scientists found that viewers and artists spontaneously shared their emotions. Viewers indeed experienced whatever the artists were feeling in their creative process. And viewers were also able to guess with approximately 80% accuracy what artists intended.

Researchers repeated their study with professional artists exhibiting at the Venice Biennale. They compared artist intentions based on curator interviews and emotions viewers saw in the artworks.

The range of emotions in the artworks was broad, from mysticism, reverence, and fear to empowerment and self-awareness, to calm and melancholic feelings. Again, results showed that viewers were able to guess which emotions artists tried to convey, and this was the case regardless of the nature of the artworks.

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When we engage with art, we are communing with the artists. The artworks are like a mirror: Artists project feelings and viewers recognize them.

Where we see art matters

Imagine Monet’s painting of water lilies in a traditional Impressionist gallery. You see it among other pieces with similar themes, colors, and similar short visible brushstrokes. Now imagine the same water lilies in a special retrospective of Monet’s work. The painting is hanging next to his early work that was done in a more traditional style.

When museum visitors are asked how influential a painting is, they see it differently depending on its context. If it is surrounded by similar works, it is not seen as particularly influential. But if it is in an exhibit where it is seen as departing from tradition, we see it as more influential. In other words, we don't experience artworks in isolation, at least not in a museum. Their placement and curatorial choices influence what we see and how we interpret it.

The museum context can strengthen what an artist is trying to say, but it can also limit or diminish it. If we go to a small gallery, we might be able to look at each artwork in detail. But if we go to a major art museum, like the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we are likely to experience museum fatigue. The more art we see, the shorter we look at each work and the more the quality of our experience decreases.

Art can delight and move, create a sense of deep spiritual encounter, fill us with wonder, or leave us speechless with awe. The experiences that make us feel fully alive are created by a combination of artists’ intentions and skills, our own interest and engagement with the works of art, and the nature of places we encounter art.

It is not surprising that art was one of the first markers of human culture. It expresses who we are and what the world could be.