In a final experiment, though, Cutting wondered if a more concentrated exposure to random paintings might change that equation. And so, over the course of a year in an introductory perception class—sometimes in the beginning, sometimes in the midst of a lecture—he would show, for about two seconds and without comment, the paintings from the earlier studies. But to this class, he more often showed the images that appeared less in the outside world. And that was what students, in most cases, now preferred. For Cutting, the idea was not so much to question what paintings were in the canon as to wonder about those paintings that were not. Were they actually any less good, or had they simply, through whim or accident or politics, been overlooked and thus “underliked”?
Was that the whole story, though? Was the question of judgments of quality now moot? Did people’s liking of art as strongly depend on having seen it, as Cutting had suggested? Not that quality judgments and familiarity had to be at odds: Perhaps it takes many viewings to realize whether and why something was good (Caillebotte himself was “rediscovered” nearly a century later). But if this repeated exposure was helping people to discover what was good about a painting—rather than compelling them to like it through sheer familiarity—then it should only work for paintings that are actually good. That was the idea of a group of researchers at the University of Leeds as they undertook an exposure study inspired by Cutting’s.
This time, the subject was not a group of all more or less good Impressionist paintings but one painter firmly in the canon, the nineteenth-century English painter John Everett Millais, and a painter who is decidedly not—the American Thomas Kinkade. The “painter of light,” as Kinkade was known to his legion of fans, was, for a time, sold widely—not in mainstream galleries, but in his own shopping mall boutiques. He is, to date, the only artist who ever lent his name to a La-Z-Boy recliner. The work by Millais was lesser-known landscapes, chosen to at least “roughly match Kinkade’s subject matter and palette.”
As in Cutting’s study, students saw brief glimpses of images, incidentally, in lectures. Of sixty images, most were by Kinkade, a dozen by Millais. For the Millais paintings, the results were in line with Cutting: The more they saw them, the more they reported liking them. But for Kinkade, the more they saw it, the less they liked it (as soon as the second exposure). Could it simply be that to English students the work of Millais just looks more like art that belongs in museums and thus art they should like? Whereas Kinkade, say what you will about his style or technique, is simply less reminiscent of what anyone who has been to a museum knows as art. Is there not an air of apples and oranges here?
I put this question to Matthew Kieran, a philosophy professor at Leeds and one of the study’s authors, over coffee at Tate Britain, where a statue of John Millais himself stands outside the entrance. “It actually shouldn’t matter,” he told me. “If you rated the Millais nine, and the Kinkade three, the exposure hypothesis says the liking will go up for both.” He allowed that subjects might be predisposed toward a certain style of painting, which exposure would only intensify.
Lest you think the result was just a matter of Kinkade’s not being as popular to begin with in England, curiously, Kinkade, on first viewing, was liked more than Millais. It could be that viewers were initially hedging their bets: Who knew if this was the best or the worst of each painter I have seen? It could be, per the fluency argument, that where Millais’s subtle work did not precisely blow you away on first glance, over repeated viewings you found new reasons to like it. As Italo Calvino described it for literature, a “classic is a book that has never finished what it wants to say.”
Kinkade’s paintings, however, while first going down as easily as a sugary drink on a hot day—who does not like a candlelit cottage on a snowy lane?—could have come to seem limited in range or execution, perhaps even cloying. In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera defined kitsch as “two tears.” “The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!” As the art historian Alexis Boylan described Kinkade, he does not so much paint things as he paints the “desire to feel,” his glowing windows virtually blinding the viewer with sentiment. That “second tear” might be too much, just as the second viewing of Kinkade was already too much for the Leeds students.
—
What about people who like Kinkade?*6 Is their pleasure not authentic? Were we to put them in a brain scanner, might the neural response be just as strong as it would be for, say, a Raphael? “The meaning of a great work of art,” wrote the critic Kenneth Clark, “must be related to our own life in such a way as to increase our energy of spirit.” Kinkade’s work, to read testimony from Kinkade’s fans, certainly seems to do this. But Clark also insists that “art must do something more than give pleasure.”
Precisely why, he does not say, but it brings us back to Kant and Hume, whose thoughts still hover over how we think about what we like and, perhaps more important, what we should like. In an age of anxious social mobility and new forms of cultural authority, when judgments over art or literature or fashion were becoming more personal and subjective—more indicative of one’s own character and thus ever more anxiously freighted with meaning—Kant and Hume were trying to rescue disputes over taste from the muddle of sheer relativism and the corruption of petty proclivities.
Kant, whose “notoriously difficult” 1790 work, The Critique of Judgment, has long been the text on how to think about aesthetics, set out a rather austere vision for the ideal way to judge beauty: You had to be “disinterested.” This did not mean uninterested, but rather that you could not have any personal stake or desire in the thing under consideration. You needed to be engaged in an act of “mere contemplation.” For something to be beautiful, it needed “free beauty”; it could not be tied to any concept, label, purpose, preconception. Something of Kant arguably lurks in neuroaesthetics, the idea that one might be able to find “innate” responses to aesthetic objects, like Pollock’s fractals—as long as you did not know it was Pollock!
This studied disinterestedness, of course, pretty much runs counter to how we actually do judge beauty. Kant argues that things like flowers and seashells are free beauties, but it would seemingly take an alien who had just descended from an unknown planet (lacking flowers or seashells) to appreciate them according to the Kantian ideal. As the philosopher Denis Dutton describes it, you find a shell, and you admire it for certain reasons. Then you find another—ooh, even nicer still! Maybe you get a book on shells and learn the names, see how yours rate. “All of this activity—this seeking out, identifying, comparing, admiring,” wrote Dutton, “involves concepts.” Even knowing it was a shell is a concept.
Perhaps realizing the near impossibility of clearing this high aesthetic bar, Kant allowed for the “merely agreeable,” those things that were tainted by our taste. Just because we liked them—in fact, because we liked them—we should not expect anyone else to; that was our “private” taste speaking. The paintings of Kinkade, I suspect, would fall under Kant’s instructions that “a pure judgment of taste is one that is not influenced by charm or emotion”; not that beauty could not have charm or emotion, but it could not be determined by them.
After dwelling in Kant’s shadow for a few centuries when it came to taste, David Hume, in the last few decades, has been rising steadily on the aesthetic charts. Whereas he was once “underrated,” philosophy journals have noted a “surge” of interest in Hume. This may be because we are living in an age when absolute aesthetic judgments seem passé or perhaps because his theories seem to more capably account for the realities of being human.
Although he was said to have had questionable taste himself, Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste” seems strikingly relevant today. Ever the empiricist, he dwells more on how things are than on how things should be; human beings cannot seem to help being Humean. “The great variety of taste,” he notes,
“is too obvious not to fall under everyone’s observation.” It is not simply a matter of one’s class, as Bourdieu would later try to document. “Men of the most confined knowledge,” Hume wrote, “are able to remark a difference of taste in the narrow circle of their acquaintance, even where persons have been educated under the same government, and have early imbibed the same prejudices.” Hume sensed that when we said “there’s no accounting for taste,” what we really meant was that there was no accounting for other people’s taste.
—
But Hume was okay with this and thought you should be too. “It is almost impossible not to feel a predilection for that which suits our particular turn and disposition.” Of course you liked Van Halen when you were a teenager, he said (to update his Ovid and Tacitus references a touch), and the Pixies when you were twenty-three, and you now favor Leonard Cohen at fifty. We are not here to judge you personally. But we do need, he implied, to judge. In spite—or because—of this multiplicity of opinions, “we seek in vain for a standard, by which we reconcile the contrary sentiments.”
But who would make the judgment? For this, we needed good critics. These were rare: “Few are qualified to give judgment on any work of art, or establish their own sentiment as the standard of beauty.” A good critic needed many things, including a “delicacy of taste,” for which Hume invoked not just the eye but the palate, for it was only recently that “taste” as a sensory act and as a synonym for refined discernment more generally had been separated.
The good critic also needed time, to avoid the “flutter or hurry of thought” that “confounds the genuine sentiment of beauty.” In a comment that seems to explain the Kinkade study, Hume noted that good critics needed to take another look. “There is a species of beauty,” he wrote, “which, as it is florid and superficial, pleases at first; but being found incompatible with a just expression either of reason or passion, soon palls upon the taste, and is then rejected with disdain, at least rated at a much lower value.”
By now, you might have raised some of the questions that modern philosophers have of Hume. Did he, in saying that the standard of good art would be decided by good critics, merely punt the ball down the field? What if two critics, judged of equally good sense, still came to violent disagreement over a work? Hume insisted that critics preserve their minds “free from all prejudice” yet said a critic judging the work of another time or culture needs to allow for “the peculiar views or prejudices” of that time or culture. Was Hume, as the professor of philosophy Michelle Mason wondered, simply asking judges to “abandon their own prejudices in preparation for taking up others”?
Hume anticipated what an immemorial swamp he was wandering into. He was raising “embarrassing” questions that might circle back to the same despond of “uncertainty” from which he was trying to extricate himself. A contemporary critic of Hume’s complained that “instead of fixing and ascertaining the standard of taste, as we expected, our author leaves us in the same uncertainty as he found us.”
Centuries on, however, the essay seems fascinating and alive, if only because we seem no closer to any answers ourselves (and perhaps, as with the Bible, there is so much room for interpretation). As the professor of philosophy James Shelley suggested, Hume speaks so strongly to us because, whether we can ever achieve a standard, we want to believe we can. The best Hume hoped for was that the judgments of those who were judged the best judges would be paid attention to; the results of those “joint” decisions would then prove justified by the test of time. “Authority or prejudice may give a temporary vogue to a bad poet or orator,” Hume wrote, “but his reputation will never be durable.” Exposure, in other words, could never be enough. Kinkade may be in one in twenty American homes now, but the work of Maxfield Parrish was once said to be in one in five homes. Good luck finding him there today.
—
“When you are in the grip of what you might think of as the cultural atmosphere,” Matthew Kieran told me, “it’s much harder to distinguish between something that’s really good or just a quite good version of that thing which is really popular.” Curiously, I only later realized we were standing in a gallery whose exhibit was titled Forgotten Faces. It featured works such as Charles Wellington Furse’s Diana of the Uplands, a portrait that was, the wall text noted, once as popular as John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (the work that one informal survey found people looked at longest at Tate). These paintings, the museum noted, were once “stars” of the collection, but they had “fallen out of fashion.” Hume had it that the best work endures, that “the same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and at London.” But without “exposure,” how would anyone know a particular work was good or come to like it? What if changes in fashion swept away the good with the bad? But something else haunts the edges of Hume’s inquiry: Why, exactly, did tastes change?
This question will be examined in the next chapter. But there is one unresolved complication of Hume’s theory that deserves a deeper look. In his essay, appreciation and liking are more or less intertwined: It is assumed that what you (or ideal critics, anyway) like is what is good. But what about when things are a bit more mixed up?
IT’S NOT WHAT YOU LIKE; IT’S HOW YOU LIKE
When researchers want to investigate how people respond to art that they judge favorably—and the stuff they hate—they face a problem: How do you find art that most people are reliably going to think is bad? A number of scholars have solved this problem by heading to the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA), a decades-old institution near Boston that collects cultural castoffs under the mantra “Art too bad to be ignored.” Typically, they will gather a portfolio of paintings and then show them to subjects, contrasted with work from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Usually—but not always—the MoMA trumps the MOBA.
The tenor of the collection is perhaps best summed up by a transcript of my conversation with Michael Frank, the MOBA’s curator, as he tried to steer me, over the phone, to an image on the museum’s Web site. “Have you gone past the Liza Minnelli with jazz hands? Do you see the eye with the tongue through it? The penis with teeth?” Finally, the object of our search swims into view: Swamp Picnic, by Ted Cate Jr., which depicts a couple wearing what look like chartreuse Lilly Pulitzer versions of the bodysuits worn in George Lucas’s dystopian parable THX 1138 and lounging in the eponymous swamp. It is a curious hybrid, as if two characters from a pulp sci-fi paperback cover had been airlifted from the future and settled into a hotel lobby landscape painting. “Whoever painted that had some technique,” Frank told me. “But the image is kind of—you scratch your head and say, ‘What was this person thinking?’ ”
This is one of the most striking things about the MOBA: not that it unabashedly uses the word “bad”—quality judgments being a bit taboo these days—but that it has a set of discriminating, if eclectic, standards about what is to be so dubbed. Nonrepresentational art tends to not make the MOBA because, as Frank told me, it is “hard to judge.” The MOBA accepts only about half of what is donated; the rest is, presumably, too bad to be bad. “We don’t collect kitsch,” Frank told me. No velvet Elvis, no Bob Ross. What he looks for is someone who has tried to make an “artistic statement” but who, either in technique or in subject matter, has gone wrong. And yet, despite that failure—or precisely because of it—there is something about the image that captures the eye or the imagination.
Looking through the collection, occasionally, lurking beneath the knowing laugh, one feels the same gnawing anxiety one might feel in the auction house or at any showing of contemporary art: Is this good or bad? Hume had described how our first hurried glance at a work might cloud our true sentiment. As he put it, “perfections and dislikes” might together be “wrapped up in a species of confusion.”
What is less important than how you first feel about a work of art is that you feel—a spark that keeps you coming back. Art critics often talk about how they first “resented” some of the works t
hey have come to love the most. As the critic Linda Nochlin put it, “You can hate something, but maybe that powerful feeling unconsciously is igniting the flames of love somewhere.”
—
Semir Zeki, in a study looking at the “neural correlates of hate,” found that when people looked at photographs of people they hated, the brain networks that fired included several regions “that are almost identical to the ones activated by passionate, romantic love.” It is something like the way a word such as “terrific” contains two strong, but contradictory, meanings. It means both “very bad” and “unusually fine.” The context decides the meaning.
In his book Love, Stendhal noted how “even little facial blemishes” in a person might begin to “touch the heart” of someone in love. “Ugliness,” he wrote, “even begins to be loved and given preference, because in this case it has become beauty.” But there is a moment where judgment hangs in the balance, where flaws become charming or harden into indictments.
This happens as much in our feelings about art as in our feelings toward people. If you develop a “love” for, say, science fiction films, you no longer see them as you do other films; it becomes difficult to consider them outside your own love for the larger genre. A friend asks, “Should I see this sci-fi film?” You say, “Well, if you like science fiction films you will like it, otherwise…” When our love is too great, our taste blinds us. The designer Jason Kottke once described on his popular Web site a new viral video as “so perfectly in the kottke.org wheelhouse that I can’t even tell if it’s any good or not.”
The point is that what you think about something as affects how you feel about it. Just as our liking for a scent varies wildly if we are told it is good cheese versus dirty socks, our aesthetic and liking judgments are influenced by the category under which something has been placed. As the art historian Kendall Walton observed, when we first encounter a Cubist painting or Chinese music (for those of us who are not Chinese), we might find it “formless, incoherent, or disturbing” because, he suggested, we are not perceiving the work by those categories. What animates a new art form, or really any new cultural trend, is being able to categorize it, to have a way to think about it. There is a bit of a causal loop here: While knowing the category of something can help us to like it, research suggests that when we like something, we want to categorize it.
You May Also Like Page 18