Today, experimental philosophers and philosophically inclined psychologists are designing experiments that can help to answer some of the big philosophical questions about the nature of art and how we experience it – questions that have puzzled people for centuries, such as: why do we prefer original works of art to forgeries? How do we decide what is good art? And does engaging with the arts make us better human beings? [...]
According to the formalist position, when the original and the forgery are visually indistinguishable, they are not aesthetically different. For example, Monroe Beardsley in 1959 argued that we should form our aesthetic judgments only by attending to the perceptual properties of the picture before us, and not by considering when or how the work was made or who it was made by. So why did people change their evaluation of the Vermeer painting once van Meegeren confessed to being the artist? According to Alfred Lessing, writing in 1965, this response can be chalked up to social pressures: ‘Considering a work of art aesthetically superior because it is genuine, or inferior because it is forged, has little or nothing to do with aesthetic judgment or criticism. It is rather a piece of snobbery.’ This view assumes that artworks have perceptual properties that are unaffected by our knowledge about the background of the work.
According to the historicist position, what we perceive in a work is influenced by what we know about it. Despite the original and the forgery being visually indistinguishable, they are aesthetically different precisely because of what the formalists deny is relevant – our beliefs about who made the work, when, and how. The German critic Walter Benjamin in the 1930s argued that our aesthetic response takes into account the object’s history, ‘its unique existence in a particular place’. He believed that a forgery has a different history and thus lacks the ‘aura’ of the original. The philosopher and critic Arthur Danto took a similar historicist position in 1964 when he asked us to consider why a Brillo box by Andy Warhol that is visually identical to a Brillo box in a supermarket is a work of art. To determine that the box in the museum is a work of art ‘requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld’. Denis Dutton claimed in 2009 that we perceive a forgery to be aesthetically inferior to an original because we take into account the kind of achievement the work represents – the artist’s process – and a forgery represents a lesser kind of achievement than an original. [...]
Clearly, people don’t behave how the formalists thought that they should. What is causing their appreciation to be diminished? One possibility is that our sense of forgery’s moral evil unconsciously influences our aesthetic response. Another is that our knowledge of forgery’s worthlessness on the art market has the same kind of unconscious effect. But if we could strip forgery of its connection with deception and lack of monetary value, would it still be devalued? And, if so, can we demonstrate that the historicist position is correct?[...]
Experimental psychologists have begun to seek evidence of fiction’s power to induce empathy. In one study, after reading a story about an injustice committed against an Arab-Muslim woman, participants were less likely to categorise angry ambiguous-race faces as Arab. But did this translate into kinder behaviour? This was not examined. In another study, after reading an excerpt from Harry Potter about stigma, children reported more positive attitudes about immigrant children at their school. But note that this change of mind (or heart) occurred only for children who identified with Harry, and only after a discussion of the reading with their teacher – and this might have been the deciding factor. Meanwhile, after reading a story about a character behaving prosocially, participants were more willing to help the experimenter pick up accidentally dropped pens. But note that picking up dropped pens is very low-cost helping, and we have no idea how long such an inclination to help lasts.
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