Ben Panko in Smithsonian:
The “Mona Lisa,” one of the world’s most famous works of art, hangs on a featureless tan wall in a large, sparse room in the Louvre. There’s little to draw one’s eye away from Leonardo da Vinci’s small painting. Now a psychologist argues that this design scheme, common in traditional art museums from the early 20th century onward, actually plays into human psychology—because humans that aren’t distracted are better able to appreciate beauty. "Museums have often tried separate art from life and to create a pure, neutral environment," says Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. This so-called "white cube" layout isn't how things always were, however. Throughout the 1800s, patrons would often find art crammed from floor to ceiling. But by the late-19th century, the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink model was under fire. “The general mental state produced by such vast displays is one of perplexity and vagueness, together with some impression of sore feet and aching heads,” wrote one William Stanley Jevons in an 1882 essay titled “The Use and Abuse of Museums.” To combat this “museum fatigue,” art scholars recommended that, among other things, institutions displaying art should simplify. Boston Museum of Fine Arts secretary Benjamin Ives Gilman, for example, recommended that curators avoid the “perpetual variety of wall coloring, found in many newer museums,” in favor of a neutral, standard color. By the early 20th century, the cleaner, sparser style had become in vogue.
Anne Brielmann, a graduate student of psychology at New York University, got the idea to study the effects of distraction on art appreciators after dropping out of a painting program in Europe. Inspired by her time at art school, she has turned her focus to the growing field of neuroaesthetics, which aims to understand how our brains decide whether things are aesthetically pleasing using psychological experiments, brain scanning and other tools of neuroscience. "It would be wonderful if I could combine these two passions and do a psychological and scientific investigation of this phenomenon," Brielmann says of her motivation. Given that neuroaesthetics is a relatively new field, Brielmann and her adviser, NYU psychologist Denis Pelli, turned instead to philosophers, who "have been talking about this topic for thousands of years." They came across the work of the influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that beauty is not an inherent property of an object, but is instead subjective to the person observing it. Kant’s argument, in Brielmann’s interpretation, depends on the idea that a person must exert conscious thought to determine whether something is beautiful or not. So it follows that, "if we do need thought to experience beauty, you should not be able to experience beauty any more if we take your thoughts away from you," she says.
More here.
