How Psychologists and a Team of Monkeys, Babies, and Elephants Proved That Abstract Art Takes Talent
By ARTINFO
Published: March 7, 2011
Courtesy Boston College
Hans Hofmann's "Laburnum" (1954) was one of the abstract paintings used in the study.
Not just anyone can make abstract art, and a degree in art is worth something — at least when it comes to judging an artwork. Such are the findings of a study recently released in the journal
Psychology Science, which sought to put to bed the old my-child-could-paint-that canard about abstract art.
The study, performed by Boston College's Angelina Hawley-Dolan and Ellen Winner, involved 72 undergraduates, about half of whom — or 32, to be precise — were majoring in studio art. Participants were shown 30 paintings by Abstract Expressionists, which were paired with a painting by either a child, a monkey, a chimpanzee, a gorilla, or an elephant, with the pairs selected based on superficial similarities in terms of color and morphology. Respondents were then asked to guess which was which, but also which they preferred. Ten pairs were unlabeled, ten were incorrectly labeled, and ten were correctly labeled, so that the test would be able to measure to what extent information associated with the work biased taste.
The results? "In all conditions, both art students and psychology students chose the professional works as more preferred and of better quality,"
reports Psychology Today, summarizing the findings. "And most of the time preferences were pretty immune to labels." Moreover, art students were less swayed by the mislabeling issue, and got the answers right more often.
Interestingly, by far the strongest bias effect was seen among non-art students when a work was correctly labeled. A mere 57.75 percent of these participants chose the correctly labeled painting as their favorite, but at the same time a whopping 79.25 percent correctly identified it as the real deal. In other words, the correct label really helped non-art students determine an artwork was actually art, but by no means did this make them like it any better. By comparison, the number of art students who picked the right work was the same under these conditions as the number who said that work was their favorite — 65.4 percent chose the actual Ab-Ex masterpiece as their "preference," while 65.51 percent correctly identified it as being by an adult human.
In a follow-up, Hawley-Dolan wrote to Psychology Today to point out a further aspect of the study of interest to art theorists: Apparently, when study participants were asked to explain why they picked the works that they chose as their favorites, they made more references to the painter's intentions when they were speaking about works that were actually by professional artists than when they were describing the child or animal artworks — regardless of labeling condition. In other words, somehow, viewers sensed which works were by mature humans.
"This finding shows that we can see the mind behind the art," Hawley-Dolan explained. "We see more than we think we do when we look at abstract art."
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