The Vienna Art Picture System (VAPS): A data set of 999 paintings and subjective ratings for art and aesthetics research.

Abstract

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.

Art in an age of artificial intelligence

“…Imagine a nuanced taxonomy of words that describe different kinds of art and their potential impacts on viewers. At a small scale, such projects are underway ( Menninghaus et al, 2019 ; Christensen et al, 2022 ; Fekete et al, 2022 ). These research programs go beyond asking people if they like an image, or find it beautiful or interesting.…”

Aesthetic Preference for Negatively-Valenced Artworks Remains Stable in Pathological Aging: A Comparison Between Cognitively Impaired Patients With Alzheimer's Disease and Healthy Controls

“…Eight artworks for each of the three stimulus sets (positive, negative, neutral) were selected from the Vienna Art Picture System (Fekete et al, 2022) which contains a total of 1,000 artworks in five categories (scenes, portrait, landscape, still life, abstract art). Different art styles were included, because previous studies did not find an effect of art style on preference stability in AD and their controls (Halpern et al, 2008;Silveri et al, 2015), but only artworks from the subcategory scenes were chosen, so that each image depicted one or more figures interacting with their environment.…”

Visiting Virtual Museums: How Personality and Art-Related Individual Differences Shape Visitor Behavior in an Online Virtual Gallery

“…Twenty-four artworks were selected from the Vienna Art Pictures System (VAPS; Fekete et al, 2022) for use in the current study. VAPS is a comprehensive dataset of 999 art images PERSONALITY & VIRTUAL ART VIEWING 12 developed for research in empirical aesthetics.…”