Separating art from the artist: The effect of negative affective knowledge on ERPs and aesthetic experience

Abstract

Some artists do terrible things. But does knowing something bad about an artist affect the way we perceive the work? Despite increased public interest, this question has yet to be addressed empirically. In this pre-registered study, we used aesthetic ratings and electrophysiological brain responses to shed light on the issue. We found that paintings of artists associated with negative-social biographical knowledge were liked less and found more arousing than paintings of artists associated with neutral information. Such paintings also elicited an enhanced brain response associated with fast and reflexive processing of emotional stimuli (early posterior negativity; EPN). Evaluations of quality and later, more controlled brain responses (late positive potential; LPP) were not affected. Reflecting the complexity of aesthetic experience, this pattern of results became more differentiated when the visual relatedness between the contents of the painting and the artist-related information was taken into account. Overall, our findings suggest that emotional aspects involved in art reception are not spontaneously separated from the artist, whilst evaluative judgments and more elaborate processing may be.

Fluency, prediction and motivation: how processing dynamics, expectations and epistemic goals shape aesthetic judgements

“…recent US debates about the harms of teaching children about Michelangelo's 'David'). These observations are consistent with empirical evidence showing that learning information about an artist's immoral behaviour in real life influences not only the viewer's moral judgements, but even the very perception and aesthetic evaluation of the artwork [113]. This is in part because there is a stronger connection between artistic works and their creators' personalities and behaviours than in other domains [114], which makes it more difficult to separate the evaluation of art from the unacceptable behaviours of the producers.…”

Art perception is affected by negative knowledge about famous and unknown artists

“…Indeed, history is rife with examples of famous artists made infamous through their actions, rhetoric or beliefs. Emerging evidence suggests that negative information about (unnamed) artists can influence aesthetic outcomes and underlying emotional processes 2 ; however, the influence of social–emotional biographical knowledge about famous artists has yet to be studied systematically. To this end, we analysed aesthetic judgments and electrophysiological brain responses associated with the perception, evaluation, and emotional arousal evoked by artworks attributed to both well-known and unknown artists, whilst orthogonally manipulating the valence of the biographical information.…”

“…Overall, the research shows that different types of information can affect the processing of an artwork at different stages, resulting in a diverse pattern of aesthetic outcomes 18 . It also suggests that our experience of an artwork may not be entirely separable from knowledge about the artist, although some facets of the experience may be more susceptible to influence than others 2 .…”

“…Turning to the impact of social-emotional biographical knowledge, the link between artist and artwork is less direct and not as well-researched. A recent study explicitly investigating the influence of negative-social (vs neutral) information about artists reported effects on aesthetic evaluations and neurocognitive measures 2 . Participants learnt either neutral or negative socially relevant information about the artists of a series of paintings, and rated each image for liking, arousal and quality.…”

“…To address these issues, we adapted the design of the aforementioned study 2 to include the factor fame and conducted a behavioural, online experiment (Experiment 1) and an EEG experiment (Experiment 2). We systematically varied the valence of the artist-related information (social-negative vs social-neutral) as well as participants’ familiarity with the artists (famous vs unknown).…”