“I like how it looks but it is not beautiful”: Sensory appeal beyond beauty

Abstract

Statements such as "X is beautiful but I don't like how it looks" or "I like how X looks but it is not beautiful" sound contradictory. How contradictory they sound might however depend on the object X and on the aesthetic adjective being used ("beautiful", "elegant", "dynamic", etc.). In our study, the first sentence was estimated to be more contradictory than the latter: If we describe something as beautiful, we often intend to evaluate its appearance, whereas it is less counterintuitive to appreciate an appearance without finding it beautiful. Furthermore, statements including "beautiful" appeared more contradictory than those including "elegant" and "dynamic", pointing to its greater evaluative component. When related to artworks, sentences could appear less contradictory due to readers' consideration of the divergence between conventional beauty and art-related sensory pleasures that can even include negative valence. Such ambivalence might be more frequent in art-objects than in other artefacts. Indeed, in our study, sentences referring to artworks were estimated to be less contradictory compared to sentences referring to other artefacts. Meanwhile, an additional small group of graphic design students showed a less clear difference between art-related and non-art-related sentences. We discuss the potential influence of art experience and interest as well as theoretical and methodological challenges like the conceptualization of beauty.

Ecological Art Experience: How We Can Gain Experimental Control While Preserving Ecologically Valid Settings and Contexts

“…Interestingness was strongly impacted by Aesthetic Aha for Rothko as well as Pollock paintings in the current study and is a variable of much interest in recent streams of empirical aesthetic studies (Silvia, 2005a(Silvia, , 2008Muth et al, 2015a). And indeed, whereas classical studies and theories mainly refer to beauty and liking, more recent ones -especially those investigating contemporary or "challenging art" (Belke et al, 2015) -do focus on interest for the inspection (Silvia, 2005b) or focus on the promise to understand parts of an artwork (Muth et al, 2015a(Muth et al, , 2019aMuth and Carbon, 2016).…”

Seeking (dis)order: Ordering appeals but slight disorder and complex order trigger interest.

“…Specific semantic and episodic contexts allow for a great variety of pleasures which could be relevant for an evaluation (think of artistic contexts which can even allow for liking despite negative affect, Muth, Briesen, & Carbon, in press). And liking evaluations comprise a very broad range of corresponding affective responses with a positive tone.…”

“…When referring to orderedness instead of meaningfulness, we could imagine that patterns containing higher order structures that can only be revealed with effort might indeed appear more beautiful. In a study by Dörner and Vehrs (1975) such patterns were evaluated as more “aesthetically satisfying.” It is unclear at this point whether people utilize a corresponding conceptualization of beauty or if they rather refer to generally accepted standards when describing something as beautiful (see also discussion by Muth et al, in press) and how much people differ in this regard. Jacobsen and Höfel (2002) for instance reported positive correlations of beauty evaluations with symmetry as well as with complexity but also major individual differences in the direction of these relations (e.g., cases of preferred asymmetry).…”

Emotional Creativity in Art Education: An Exploratory Analysis and Research Trends

“…This classification of scientific research published by the driving agents of this subject by subject, related to the criteria of centrality and density, assumes that scientific research, understood as the set of systematic and empirical processes applied to its study, is dynamic and evolutionary. For this reason, it is (i) basic, when it produces knowledge and theories such as those dedicated to the aesthetic education of emotion [61] or a conceptualization of emotion within art and design education [62,63], or (ii) applied when solving practical problems. For this reason, the dissemination of scientific research culminates when it is published in a scientific journal; since only then will it be known by the academic community, its results will be discussed, and its contribution will be part of universal scientific knowledge.…”