Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Every Baby’s a Critic: Tots Drawn to Complex Art

February 25, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
pollockesque

Can you tell a real Jackson Pollock painting from a watered-down replica? If so, don’t feel too superior: So can your eight-month-old baby. That’s one finding of a new study that compares the ways infants and adults look at abstract art. The research's intent is to discover whether responses to such works are innate or learned. The tentative answer: a bit of each. In a set of experiments, the eyes of both babies and adults were drawn to images featuring greater contrast and complexity. To the researchers, this suggests that while some aesthetic preferences are shaped by cultural ... Read More

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Soup? Art? The Quandary Thickens.

August 30, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Talk about coming full circle. Beginning Sunday, most Target stores will be selling special-edition cans of Campbell’s Tomato Soup featuring colorful labels that evoke the work of Andy Warhol. For Trudy the Bag Lady, the Lily Tomlin character who attempted to define the difference between soup and art, life has just gotten considerably more complicated. Warhol’s now-iconic paintings of Campbell’s soup cans in the 1960s brought the imagery of mass marketing into museums and art galleries. They were, on one level, a critique of our consumer culture, but a sly one: Warhol wasn’t ... Read More

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Paint By Numbers

August 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Boy with a Pipe

Artists and collectors looking to cash in on the reported one percent’s run on the international art market can take cues from a recent Washington State University study on auction house sales of paintings by Picasso, Magritte, Munch, and a dozen other impressionist and modern masters. Among the preliminary findings, a single percentage point increase in Google hits on the artist—the assigned indicator of popularity—corresponded to a chunky price increase of 38 percent. Arzu Aysin Tekindor, an artist and economics PhD candidate, employed hedonic regression theory—a modeling system ... Read More

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Paintings, Poems: You See Forest, I See Trees

July 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Are you apprehensive about abstract art? Are you frequently vexed by free verse? New research suggests this difficulty may reflect the way you process information—specifically, whether you zero in on the details or the big picture. It finds that, when it comes to comprehending “ambiguous, complex and abstract stimuli,” forest-focused folks are better than their tree-centric counterparts. “When people verbalize their thoughts and analyze their reasons, they focus on reasons that are accessible in memory, plausible, and reportable,” writes a research team led by University of ... Read More

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Branding Bilbao: A Cultural Investment That Paid Off

June 27, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

There isn’t a lot of good economic news coming out of Spain these days. But newly published research suggests one Spanish city made a very smart investment 15 years ago, which continues to pay off today. The city is Bilbao, and the investment is the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, a postmodern palace for contemporary art designed by visionary architect Frank Gehry. “Culture-led branding has had real economic returns in Bilbao,” a research team led by economist Beatriz Plaza of the University of the Basque Country reports in the Journal of Cultural Economics Japan. “Since the Guggenheim ... Read More

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Why Thomas Kinkade’s Art Touched So Many

April 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Alexis Boylan felt a jolt as she leafed through the October 15, 2001, issue of The New Yorker. An art historian just completing her doctorate in contemporary American art, Boylan was pleased to see a profile of a painter and printmaker, but in her years of scholarship, she had never come across the saturated pastel colors of Thomas Kinkade. Then she started seeing his imagery everywhere: prints of stone cottages nestled in verdant gardens, calendars showing small-town main streets, coffee cups featuring sunsets over lighthouses perched on rocky cliffs. “An often-cited figure is that ... Read More

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Documentary Frames Graphic Art’s Political Ferment

March 2, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Documentary Frames Graphic Art’s Political Ferment

Back in the day, being a socially committed graphic artist was a particularly dangerous undertaking. Honoré Daumier was imprisoned for his work, and died impoverished. Käthe Kollwitz and Otto Dix had their work declared “degenerate” by the Nazis. George Grosz was arrested for allegedly insulting the German army. And so incendiary were Francisco Goya’s masterpieces, Disasters of War, the aquatint prints were not published until 35 years after his death. “In the past, the documentation of these artists had a terrific effect, which was why back then it was more dangerous to do ... Read More

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Fear Heightens Appreciation of Abstract Art

February 14, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Are you puzzled by Picasso? Perplexed by Pollock? Do you feel you’re missing out on something profound when friends discuss their intense reaction to abstract art? You could do some research to better understand what you’re looking at. Or you could turn off the lights and watch a DVD of Psycho. A newly published study finds people are more likely to be moved and intrigued by abstract paintings if they have just experienced a good scare. This suggests the allure of art may be “a byproduct of one’s tendency to be alarmed by such environmental features as novelty, ambiguity, and the ... Read More

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Drawing Helps Kids Recount Details of Sex Abuse

November 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

As we have once again been reminded, the sexual abuse of children is an ongoing tragedy, one that creates multiple long-term problems for the victims. Police and prosecutors often find themselves at a disadvantage; such crimes tend to take place in private, and the victims — many of whom cut themselves off emotionally from the experience as a form of psychological self-protection — are often reluctant witnesses. So how can authorities get these traumatized kids to explain what happened in sufficient detail to bring a criminal case against their perpetrators? A 2010 study provides an ... Read More

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Portraits Can Get Your Pulse Pounding

July 26, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Art exhibits are not generally thought of as opportunities to get our pulses racing and skin tingling. But newly published research suggests aesthetic appreciation is, in fact, a full-body experience. Three hundred and seventy-three visitors to a Swiss museum agreed to wear special gloves measuring four physiological responses as they strolled through an art exhibit. Researchers found an association between the gallery-goers’ reported responses to the artworks and three of the four measurements of bodily stimulation. “Our findings suggest that an idiosyncratically human property — ... Read More

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