Mere Exposure to Bad Art
+Author Affiliations
I
Why do we make the aesthetic judgements that we do? Luck and happenstance—our environment, our upbringing, our friends—presumably play some role. But most philosophers of art presume that works of art have stable aesthetic or artistic values to which judgement is also sensitive. Hence the standard philosophical (and perhaps commonsensical) view that artistic value is a primary determinant of canonical status.
By contrast, many scholars from other disciplines are sceptical about the aesthetic domain: they presume that sociocultural processes are the primary determinants of aesthetic judgement, ‘value’, and canonicity.1 In addition to the power of art insiders, or socio-political forces which favour privileged groups and exclude outsiders, an aesthetic sceptic might also suggest that our (putatively) carefully cultivated aesthetic tastes are largely a product of contingencies and chance encounters. Such a sceptic might even marshal recent evidence from psychology on her behalf. A recent set of studies by the psychologist James Cutting demonstrated that merely exposing people to certain Impressionist paintings produced an increase in their liking for them.2
Cutting’s research prompts important questions about the conditions under, and the extent to which, exposure influences aesthetic preference and judgement. Is it the case that no matter what images people are exposed to, they will grow to like the ones they see the most? This would suggest at best an extremely limited role for aesthetic value in determining our aesthetic tastes. Perhaps Cutting’s study might be taken to support such extreme scepticism. Alternatively, the study might suggest that exposure only works under fairly limited constraints. Perhaps it is only when all other factors are kept equal that mere exposure plays a role; that is, among paintings of equal quality, people will prefer those they have seen most often.3 While less extreme than the sceptical view, such a reading nonetheless puts pressure on the soundness of many of our comparative judgements. Perhaps we mistake the effects of mere exposure for superior artistic quality much more commonly than we would like to think.
This paper addresses the interaction between mere exposure and the quality of the artworks to which we are exposed. It focuses on an experiment we conducted to test whether mere exposure increases or decreases liking for bad visual artworks. The results indicate that mere exposure to bad art makes people like it less. We argue that these results suggest that exposure itself is sensitive to value. If this is correct, sceptics about aesthetic value and the canon cannot straightforwardly rely on Cutting’s results to support their position. Even when exposure makes a difference, aesthetic value appears to remain in the picture.
Section II briefly introduces the mere exposure effect. Section III considers in detail Cutting’s experimental studies concerning preferences for Impressionist artworks. Section IV discusses the potential philosophical implications of Cutting’s results. Section V describes the experiment we ran and provides an extended account of the results of that experiment. We found that mere exposure decreased liking for the bad paintings to which we exposed our subjects. Section VI explores potential explanations for our results—results which seem to be in tension with the extreme sceptical position described above. Section VII discusses our study in relation to earlier research on mere exposure and ‘negative’ stimuli. We argue that there are good reasons to resist characterizing the stimuli used in our study as ‘negative’—at least in the sense in which that term is ordinarily used by psychologists. Section VIII explores the potential philosophical significance of our results, and Section IX comprises a brief conclusion.
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