In my retirement I end up spending a considerable amount of
time pursuing art. This includes learning about art (paintings, music,
photographs), admiring what the masters have created, and doing my own little art
creation (in the form of photography and digital imaging). As I do that, I ask
myself why is art such an important aspect of our existence? What makes it so?
I found that this is an active area of investigation by all
types of people: Neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, evolutionary
biologists, behavioral economists. Here are some interesting nuggets I
discovered.
According to a story in Huffington Post (5/18/2011), “New
research by Semir Zeki, Professor of Neuroesthetics at University College
London demonstrates that viewing a beautiful work of art creates the same
chemical response as love. Both experiences trigger the feel-good chemical
dopamine.” Aha, there you go. Good old
domamine. “There is a reason why art has served as a means of soulful
self-expression for centuries upon centuries. All forms of art, from painting
to dancing to music, are very personal and emotional experiences — both for the
artists and the viewers. While it is a common experience to fall in love with a
certain artwork, scientists now have evidence that shows the brain reacts
similarly when viewing artwork and when falling in love.”
A more scholarly explanation is found in a paper written by
Mohan Matthen (“The Pleasure of Art” in Australasian Philosophical Review,
2017). He writes that art appreciation is a “facilitating pleasure”, or
f-pleasure, that is learned. This is distinct
from f-pleasures that nature
provides, such as what you get out of drinking cold water when you are thirsty.
He distinguishes f-pleasure from a more primitive relief or r-pleasure, which
includes things like coughing, sneezing, defecation, relieving an itch or
orgasm. (I am relieved to note that the pleasure of viewing art is different
from what I get when I go potty J)
He further
proposes that a necessary ingredient for deriving f-pleasure is a “nexus”--- a
coordinated group of mental and bodily ‘preparations’ that encourage, ease, and
optimize the physical act. The learned
f-pleasure, which includes art or music appreciation, requires formation of its
own nexus. He goes own to say, “Aesthetic pleasure arises from a difficult and
costly mental engagement with an object and activates a learned nexus that
seeks to maximize the pleasure of this mental engagement. We judge objects to have aesthetic
merit when they are a good fit for our aesthetic psychology. Aesthetic pleasure
comes from contemplating something intellectually and, in the case of visual
and performing arts, perceptually as well—focusing on the object and its properties.”
OK, so now
I know why I like certain types of music and not others, or why I find appreciating
the more recent Western Classical music difficult---because it does not fit
with my aesthetic psychology.
Dr. Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale University
is author of a book titled "How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We
Like What We Like." Ira Flatow, the host of Science Friday on NPR,
interviewed him.
According to Dr. Bloom, “The starting point for a lot of our
pleasures is that they're biological adaptations. It's why we like food. It's
why we like sex. It's why we like the company of other people. And it's also
why we have a curiosity. It is very beneficial for an animal like we are
to be motivated to explore the world and to get a flush of pleasure from
discovering new things.” It is this curiosity that has brought art as a way of
getting pleasure.
Dr. Bloom has an interesting taken on the importance of the
“essence” of art in the degree of pleasure we get out of it. “We get pleasure
from something, it's not merely based on what we see or what we hear or what we
feel. Rather, it's based on what we
believe that thing to be. So, in general when we look at a painting,
you don't just look at the patterns of color and the shapes and the perceptual
input. Rather, you try to reconstruct what went on its creation. What's its
history? What's its real nature? And that determines how much you like it.” This
is why an original work of art fetches a lot more money than a copy although
they both look identical.
“If you think you are drinking an expensive wine, you get a
far more pleasurable reaction, even at very low-level pleasure circuitry in the
brain, than if you think you're drinking cheap swill. So another way of
looking at it is you can enhance your pleasure simply by learning more about
something, where it comes from, how it works.”
This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you can
increase pleasure by knowing more about a work of art (or wine). On the other
hand, your propensity to pay more for what you think to be an authentic item
makes you susceptible to deception.
In summary, I can go
on and enjoy a work of art because it will be just like falling in love. In
doing so, I will get involved with difficult and costly mental engagement while
further developing my learned f-pleasure nexus. Finally, I will increase my
pleasure by learning that the painting I bought for $10 at the neighborhood
pawnshop is an authentic Monet. J
