People visit museums with differing motivations. We use Falk’s visitor identity model to examine visitors’ motivations to visit an art museum. We assess (1) the prevalence of different motivation types; (2) how visit motivations and outcomes relate to visit satisfaction and length; and (3) the relation between visit motivations and fulfillment of expectations. We found that (1) visitors most strongly endorsed motivations and visit outcomes related to exploration and least strongly to facilitating another’s visit; (2) visit outcomes predicted visit satisfaction and length more strongly than did visit motivations; and (3) visit outcomes largely met or exceeded the visitors’ pre-visit expectations. The present findings suggest that outcomes of the visit matter more than motivations for visiting. We suggest that examining the entirety of a visit—pre-visit motivation and post-visit outcomes—may provide new insights about art museum visits that may be obscured when focusing on just one of these aspects.

In general, people assume that looking at a real artwork-versus a reproduction-provides an experience that is qualitatively heightened, also called the genuineness effect. In this study, we used meta-analysis to assess the current evidence for the genuineness effect. We found a meta-analytic effect of Hedges's g =.32 (N = 11). However, only three studies did not include a context confound (i.e., real artworks in a museum vs. reproductions in the lab), and when this moderator was considered, the effect seemed to disappear. Furthermore, we found a lot of heterogeneity between studies. Thus, we looked at additional moderators: type of genuine artwork, type (and quality) of reproductions, aesthetic experience measure, and number of artworks included. We found that only the type of reproduction and the number of artworks were significant moderators of the effect. In addition, we found the best model fit for a random-effects model including confound, reproduction type, and number of artworks as moderators (Akaike information criterion [AIC] = 36.96, Bayesian information criterion [BIC] = 48.93, R 2 = 61.91). Nonetheless, even this model had significant residual heterogeneity. The findings suggest that it is too early to conclude that there is no genuineness effect, and we provide one theoretical explanation (the facsimile accommodation hypothesis) and two methodological explanations (a potential anchoring effect and using the wrong experience measures) that could explain why our meta-analysis (after considering the context confound) found no effect. Additionally, based on the included moderators, we discuss methodological concerns for future studies on the genuineness effect and for empirical research on art in general.

In empirical aesthetics, choosing stimuli, especially artworks, is a persistent challenge. Artworks differ largely in terms of style, complexity, formal features, and valence, as well as historical context, presentation quality, genre, and content, all of which might influence aesthetic experiences. To advance the comparability of studies and increase our understanding of studied effects, it is important that the research community develops and, ideally, utilizes common standards or even data sets for stimulus selection. Here, we present the Vienna Art Picture System (VAPS), which provides such a comprehensive data set of visual artistic stimuli consisting of 999 fine art paintings from 347 European painters and from 13 art historical periods/styles from 1434 to the beginning of the 21st century. The artworks correspond to five genre categories: scenes, portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and paintings with increasing levels of abstraction. As a base for future research, the data set contains rating information (based on a German-speaking student sample of 60 women and 60 men) on five variables: liking, emotional valence, emotional arousal, visual complexity, and familiarity. The VAPS is freely accessible to the scientific community for noncommercial use at https://osf.io/a7xcr/. Thus, the VAPS offers a normed (mean, standard deviation) set of fine art pictures that can be used as a tool for researchers in the field of empirical visual aesthetics, and experimental psychology, to select stimulus sets suited to their needs and that can provide a basis for more standardized and comparable research across individual laboratories and researchers in the rapidly expanding assessment of experiences with art.

The aesthetic experience of a group of artworks-such as an afternoon spent wandering in a museum-is not simply the sum of experiences of the individual works. In the present research, we explored visit-level aesthetic experiences in a field study of 298 visitors to a museum of modern and contemporary art. In particular, we focused on emotional diversity: the richness, complexity, and heterogeneity of the emotions that people experienced during their visit. After their visit, participants reported the degree to which they experienced, if at all, 10 emotions, from which we calculated diversity metrics reflecting their emotional variety (the number of emotions experienced) and emotional balance (the relative evenness between emotions or dominance of a single emotion) during the visit. Overall, the sample reported a rich aesthetic experience, but there was wide and predictable variability. Among other findings, emotional variety was higher for people with greater openness to experience and among first-time visitors to the museum; emotional balance was higher among people high in openness to experience and people with greater interest in art. The concept of diversity-the richness and complexity of someone's emotional experience of the arts-appears promising for understanding holistic aesthetic experiences, such as entire museum visits rather than single works, as well as for many other questions in empirical aesthetics.

The pain- and stress-reducing effects of music are well-known, but the effects of visual art, and the combination of these two, are much less investigated. We aim to (1) investigate the pain- and (2) stress-reducing effects of multimodal (music + visual art) aesthetic experience as we expect this to have stronger effects than a single modal aesthetic experience (music/ visual art), and in an exploratory manner, (3) investigate the underlying mechanisms of aesthetic experience, and the (4) individual differences. In a repeated-measures design (music, visual art, multimodal aesthetic experience, control) participants bring self-selected “movingly beautiful” visual artworks and pieces of music to the lab, where pain and stress are induced by the cold pressor test. Activity of the pain and stress responsive systems are measured by subjective reports, autonomic (electrocardiography, electrodermal activity, salivary alpha-amylase) and endocrine markers (salivary cortisol).