Visual Art

Excerpt

In this chapter, I explore these issues in aesthetics through the lens of cognitive neuroscience. The term aesthetics is used broadly here, to encompass the perception, production, and response to art, but also to include the responses to objects and scenes that evoke a response that could be considered aesthetic. The nature of this response is something to which I shall return later in this chapter. I start by reviewing recent comments on the relationship of art and the brain made by visual neuroscientists. I then describe a framework that might guide research in neuroaesthetics. Following that, I review empirical work conducted thus far. Finally, I suggest how progress could be made in this nascent field.

At the outset, I should be clear about limits to defining art (Carroll 2000). Some philosophers have claimed that defining art with necessary and sufficient conditions is not possible (Weitz 1956). In response to such claims, recent theoreticians have defined art by its social and institutional (Dickie 1969) or its historical context (Danto 1964). Cognitive neuroscientists are unlikely to address sociological or historical conceptions of art. They are likely to sidestep definitional issues and focus on accepted examples of artwork or properties of these works as probes for experiments.