Is This Art? An Experimental Study on Visitors’ Judgement of Contemporary Art

Is This Art? An Experimental Study on Visitors’ Judgement of Contemporary Art

This is a journal article that talks about the judgement of contemporary art, you can found it here. If you want to read other articles this web page is fantastic.

‘Is this art?’ is a question often raised by museum visitors when encountering contemporary artworks. But what factors influence museum visitors’ judgement on contemporary art? To what extent do visitors’ prior knowledge, socio-demographic background, emotional experiences, and specific aspects of the artwork itself, influence their judgements? In the context of the Swiss National research project eMotion – Mapping Museum Experience, we investigated these questions experimentally. The site specific intervention created by the renown artist Nedko Solakov in the St. Gallen Fine Arts Museum allowed us to conduct such a concrete experiment. We interpreted the findings by statistical analyses of the data gathered from entry and exit questionnaires (n=291) in view of sociological art theories dominant in the last few decades. Against theoretical expectations, we found that the judgement art/non-art was driven by several factors not anticipated by those theories.

Vol 8, Issue 3, 2014

Keywords art, art experience, psychology of art, sociology of art, empirical aesthetics, aesthetics judgements, audiences, art galleries, art reception, cultural consumption, experimental methods

Reference: 

Tröndle, M., Kirchberg, V., & Tschacher, W. (2014). Is this art? An Experimental Study on Visitors’ Judgement of Contemporary Art. Cultural Sociology. 8(3), 310-332. Retrieved from https://eds-a-ebscohost-com.udlap.idm.oclc.org/eds/detail/detail?vid=1&sid=c0d5cf1d-9812-4467-8dcc-cae2ed3f22fd%40sessionmgr4010&bdata=Jmxhbmc9ZXMmc2l0ZT1lZHMtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=98360241&db=sih