How Lasting is the Impact of Art?: An Exploratory Study of the Incidence and Duration of Art Exhibition-Induced Prosocial Attitude Change Using a 2-Week Daily Diary Method

Abstract

The use of art installations to mediate people’s responses toward societal challenges— climate change, refugees, general prosocialness—is emerging as a main interest for arts institutions, artists, policy, and, recently, empirical study. However, there is still much need for data regarding whether and in what ways we might find detectable change. Even more, important questions concern whether typical methods, with two data points and theoretical question constructs, can reliably detect subtle impacts and, even if we do find change, how long effects last—a question which is almost completely unanswered in empirical research. We assessed an exhibition focused on power imbalances and acceptance for refugees, employing both a pre-post design (Study 1) and (Study 2) a daily diary method, which tracked participants’ reports, over two weeks, regarding how they had actually felt or acted each day and employing multilevel modeling to assess estimating changes from a first baseline week. The pre-post paradigm detected some reduction in self-assessed xenophobia and increased negative mood. However, effects were small/inconsistent with also some intriguing suggestions that people self-assessed as less empathic/prosocial than before visiting. The diary detected, inversely, several significant quadratic trends involving increased empathic concern and prosocialness-related thoughts and actions, but which returned to baseline by the next day. Only ‘trying to consider others feelings’ and ‘reflecting about oneself’ showed increases into the following week. Although non- significant, the diary changes also suggested some negative relations with the hypothetical self- assessment answers for the same questions, within participants, providing intriguing findings for much future research

On the Impact of Public Art: Engaging a Pedestrian-level Exhibition Improves Neighbourhood Connectedness and Well-being

“…Art has long been acknowledged as a social node for shared sensibilities, values, and experiences. It allows individuals to communicate and share certain emotions and experiences (e.g., between artist and viewer; for review, see Pelowski et al, 2022) while also providing a communal space for people to experience art together (Becker, 1974;Eaton, 1995). The existence of a public realm is essential for gathering people and relating them to each other through a sense of permanence (Arendt, 1958).…”

“…Art has often been noted as a communication tool that connects the artist to the viewer (Dehove et al, 2024;Pelowski et al, 2020), yet it is unclear whether the degree to which the viewers feel the emotions intended by the artist and curator can lead to greater impacts. To address this question, our assessment followed our team's emerging empirical methodology (Pelowski et al, 2020, with art students;Pelowski et al, 2022, with artists from the 57th Venice Biennale): we asked the curator and artist to identify emotional and cognitive states that they aimed to evoke in the viewer (see for another usage of the list of emotional and cognitive states, see Trupp et al, 2022).…”