New article by Hannah Kaube and Rasha Abdel Rahman:
Art perception is affected by negative knowledge about famous and unknown artists
Do we separate art from the artist? To add an empirical perspective to this age-old debate, we examined the influence of negative biographical knowledge about artists on the perception of their artworks. We also investigated whether an artist’s fame protects their paintings from such influence. Participants rated a series of paintings on the dimensions of liking, arousal, and quality, before and after learning either social-negative or neutral information about the respective artists. The artists were either famous or unknown. After learning the information, brain activity was recorded using an electroencephalogram (EEG).
Paintings associated with artists characterised by negative biographical information were liked less, evoked greater feelings of arousal, and were judged lower in terms of quality than paintings by artists associated with neutral information. We did not find a significant modulation of artist renown, indicating that works by both unknown and famous artists were vulnerable to the knowledge effect. Paintings attributed to ‘immoral’ artists also elicited enhanced early brain activity related to visual perception (P1) and early emotional arousal (early posterior negativity; EPN). Together, the findings suggest that negative knowledge about famous artists can shape not only explicit aesthetic evaluations, but may also penetrate the perception of the artwork itself. The insights garnered by the study underscore the importance of including empirical perspectives when considering or discussing questions typically approached in theoretical terms.
Paper: https://rdcu.be/dD1BL