Art, Aesthetics, and the Brain

"This book represents the most comprehensive contemporary take on neuroaesthetics. Most of the authors are investigators who are actively working in the field. It covers art, dance, music. It covers the neuropsychology and the evolution of art that we talked about. If someone wanted to step into this field and ask, what are people doing now? What is the thinking now? Then this book is the place to go. I work with a group of collaborators involved in the International Neuroaesthetics Network. There’s a collaborator in Toronto, a collaborator in Mallorca—who was one of the editors of the last book, a very strong lab in Vienna, and in Copenhagen. Recently the Max Planck Institute started a new Institute of Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt focused on music and literature, so that’s an important place. London is another place where interesting work in dance and music is being conducted: especially at the University of London. There’s also a professional organisation that’s been around for over fifty years called the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics that meets every other year. That group is not restricted to neuroaesthetics; it has a range of investigators who approach aesthetics scientifically. It’s a relatively small field, but with a dedicated group. There has been an influx of growing interest in programmes and publications with the field moving from the scientific edge into the mainstream. Sure. I think, as scientists, we’re always looking for generalisable principles. One way to do that is to conduct cross-cultural studies. I think in some instances, for example in questions of beauty, there’s been more work done: i.e., do people across cultures find similar faces beautiful or not? With art, not as much. I think it’s a matter of time before there’s more cross-cultural work in the way in which art affects us. Typically, the stimuli chosen for experiments are from the western canon. There is an increasing interest in parts of Asia, particularly southeast Asia and China, in aesthetics. As lines of research develop and evolve in these and other parts of the world, they will naturally introduce cross-cultural perspectives. So, one can think of cross-cultural perspectives as western scientists studying other cultures’ artwork or the scientific infrastructures and interests in non-Western cultures developing sufficiently so that they are pursuing neuroaesthetics. I am very fond of Cézanne. He was an important artist who was the source for later trends, such as the cubist sensibility, or the decorative style that Matisse developed. A lot of my other academic work involves thinking about spatial cognition. The way that Cézanne used planes to create volumes and at immerse you in his spatial imagery is extraordinary. He also kept refining his craft over many many years. If I had to pick one artist off the top of my head, he would probably be the one."