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. 2016 Apr 13:10:155.
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00155. eCollection 2016.

Private and Shared Taste in Art and Face Appreciation

Helmut Leder  1 , Juergen Goller  1 , Tanya Rigotti  1 , Michael Forster  1
Affiliations

Private and Shared Taste in Art and Face Appreciation

Helmut Leder et al. Front Hum Neurosci. .

Abstract

Whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder or shared among individuals is a longstanding question in empirical aesthetics. By decomposing the variance structure of data for facial attractiveness, it has been previously shown that beauty evaluations comprise a similar amount of private and shared taste (Hönekopp, 2006). Employing the same methods, we found that, for abstract artworks, components that vary between individuals and relate to personal taste are particularly strong. Moreover, we instructed half of our participants to disregard their own taste and judge stimuli according to the taste of others instead. Ninety-five women rated 100 abstract artworks for liking and 100 faces for attractiveness. We found that the private taste proportion was much higher in abstract artworks, accounting for 75% of taste compared to 40% in the face condition. Abstract artworks were also less affected than faces by the instruction to rate according to others' taste and therefore less susceptible to incorporation of external beauty standards. Together, our findings support the notion that art-and especially abstract art-crystallizes private taste.

Keywords: abstract art; art appreciation; beauty; facial attractiveness; private and shared taste.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Relation of the liking/attractiveness ratings between the own taste and the others’ taste group, plotted separately for artworks (blue) and faces (red). The dashed, black line represents a perfect correlation with no difference between both groups. Dots left of this line represent artworks/faces which have been rated higher in the others’ taste group than in the own taste group. Dots right of this line represent artworks/faces which have been rated higher in the own taste group than in the others’ taste group. The regression lines and the scatter-plots show that both, artworks and faces, were generally rated higher in the others’ taste group. Furthermore, faces show a higher correlation between the groups and therefore a more consistent increase from own taste to others’ taste.
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References

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