Abstract
The goal of the research was to determine whether artworks said to be created by famous artists were appreciated more than the same artworks attributed to nonfamous artists. Analysis indicated that the works attributed to famous artists were more appreciated than the identical works attributed to nonfamous artists: The works were liked more and judged more interesting and beautiful (all p values < .001). Participants (N = 309), all art nonexperts, also were willing to pay more to see the works if described as created by famous artists (p < .001); importantly, however, no differences were found in ratings of the works’ comprehensibility. This pattern of results suggests that judgmental variations were attributable to participants’ peripheral processing of factors not intrinsic to the work itself. Dual process models of attitudes, popular in social psychology, were invoked to provide a framework for understanding the findings.
Dual process models of persuasion have dominated the social psychological literature of attitudes and attitude change for more than three decades. One of the most popular of these, the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of Petty and Cacioppo (1986), proposed that two routes of attitude change characterize the cognitive processes involved in people’s encounters with persuasive communications. Central route processing involves a thoughtful and intensive elaboration of the presented information. It requires ability and motivation to process the information presented and as such involves greater cognitive expenditure than peripheral route processing, in which judgments are based on a less thorough cognitive elaboration of the communication. Peripheral processing is engaged when the communication is beyond the receiver’s capacity or ability to understand it or is focused on issues that are not viewed as highly vested (Crano & Prislin, 2006). Instead, judgments are based on factors incidental to the content of the persuasive communication (e.g., the perceived expertise or fame of the source, the apparent agreement of others).
Changes in attitudes resulting from central route processing have been found more persistent than those brought about by peripheral processing, because of the thoughtful message elaboration that is the hallmark of central route analysis. The relevance of the dual process orientation to artistic judgments, especially judgments of nonexperts, lies in the fact that the nonexpert may not have the ability to “elaborate” an artwork, that is, to consider the “message” of the work thoughtfully and critically, a necessary feature of central route processing. Such individuals thus may be dependent on peripheral features to make sense of the creation. If so, the processes involved in nonexperts’ artistic judgments may be similar to those encountered in the social psychology of attitudes, for surely an artistic judgment is largely an expression of an attitude regarding a work of art.
Persuasive communication has been studied widely in social psychology, but this orientation is considerably less evident in experimental aesthetics. Most research in this area has been focused on the compositional features of artworks (shapes, colors, symmetry, dynamism, comprehensibility, etc.), the contents conveyed, and the characteristics of the perceiver (Arnheim, 1974; Feist & Brady, 2014; Locher, Krupinski, Mello-Thoms, & Nodine, 2007; Mastandrea & Maricchiolo, 2014; Mastandrea & Umiltà, 2016). These approaches are undoubtedly informative; however, we believe that the communicative perspective adopted in the current research may provide another generative orientation in research on factors that might influence people’s responses to artistic creations.
The aim of the current research is to learn whether the apparent prestige of an artist influences nonexperts’ appreciation of an artwork. Identical works are presented as having been created by either famous or nonfamous artists. The question of the experiment is whether perceivers’ evaluations of artworks differ as a function of the fame of their attributed creators. Based on findings of research developed in the analysis of the ELM, we hypothesize that the prestige of the artist will influence nonexperts’ appreciation of artworks (H1). A related hypothesis is concerned with the amount an individual would be willing to pay to enter a museum exhibiting an artwork that is attributed to a famous or nonfamous painter. Consistent with H1, we hypothesize that works attributed to a famous artist will result in willingness to pay higher museum admission prices than the identical work attributed to an artist that is not famous (H2). A final issue is concerned with the question of whether or not the renown of the artist will affect viewers’ perceptions of the comprehensibility of the work (Feist & Brady, 2004; Smith, Smith, & Tinio, 2017). This research question links a classic aesthetic judgment factor, comprehensibility, with the ELM’s more socially focused concern, source status. If perceivers elaborate artworks through peripheral processes, differences in comprehensibility would not be expected to be related to the fame of their author. The relatively disorganized and unsystematic judgment processes thought to characterize neophytes’ artistic evaluations would not support comprehension differences (H3). However, judges’ relative differences in artistic sophistication may give rise to a positive correlation between sophistication and comprehensibility. A proxy measure of artistic sophistication will be correlated with comprehensibility to test this possibility.
Method
Participants
Potential participants were contacted online, through the student social group of the Roma Tre University’s Department of Education. They were asked to participate in a study of artworks evaluation. They did not receive study credit or financial compensation. Students indicated their consent on an online consent form. After agreeing to participate, students were provided a link that connected them to the experimental script. They were invited as participants to evaluate several artworks created by either famous or nonfamous artists. A total of 309 students, without formal art training, volunteered to serve as participants (261 females). They participated anonymously. Participants’ mean age was 23.8 years (SD = 3.7).
Stimuli and Procedure
Stimuli consisted of four pairs of artwork reproductions associated with an artistic style, a total of eight artworks. Each pair was attributed, according to style, to one of the four artists. As shown in Figure 1, pictures A1 and A2 were attributed to Monet, B1 and B2 to Van Gogh, C1 and C2 to Kandinsky, and D1 and D2 to Picasso. In fact, none of the pictures was created by these artists. 1
Pictures used in the experiment. Pictures A1 and A2 were attributed to Monet, B1 and B2 to Van Gogh, C1 and C2 to Kandinsky, and D1 and D2 to Picasso. In fact, none of the pictures was created by these artists.
The images were high-quality colored digital reproductions, scanned from books and acquired from the web (Figure 1). The proportions of the stimuli were in accord with the original format of each painting. The picture sizes and resolution in the display were between 8.9 cm and 16.1 cm in height and between 11.9 cm and 18.7 cm in width, with 36 dots per cm.
Participants were told that they would be presented with eight artworks, half created by famous artists such as Monet, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, and Picasso, half by nonfamous artists. Before presenting each picture, participants were told that the picture was created by the famous artist, for example, Monet, or by a nonfamous artist, who was not named. The presentation of pictures attributed as famous or nonfamous was counterbalanced to offset differences due to the ordering of the famous or nonfamous pictures.
Measures
On each picture, participants rated the presentation on four items: how much they liked it, and how interesting, beautiful, and comprehensible it was. They used 5-point Likert-type scales whose response options ranged from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very much). A quasi-behavioral question was included to ascertain how much participants were willing to pay (4, 8, 12, 16, or 20€) to visit a museum where the work was exhibited. At the end of the survey, participants were asked two questions: if they knew the artists (Monet, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, and Picasso) and if they had ever seen the pictures used in the study. It was important that participants were familiar with the names of the famous artists but did not recall ever having seen the pictures, because perceptions of familiarity with the pictures could have affected their responses. In addition, subjects also listed their age and sex, and prior education in art, a proxy for greater or lesser sophistication in art.
Results
The study was designed to determine whether subjects’ evaluations were affected by the artworks’ attribution to famous or nonfamous artists and to investigate the role of comprehensibility in their judgments. To develop dependent measures, each of the three evaluative items (liking, interesting, and beautiful) were averaged across the four pictures attributed to the famous and the nonfamous artists, resulting in two scores for each participant. Cronbach’s test indicated high internal consistency reliability of ratings across the pictures described as “famous” (α = .95) and “nonfamous” (α = .94). All participants stated that they knew the names of the famous artists, but no one had ever seen the pictures presented.
As a second test of the internal consistency of the items to be used as dependent variables, the evaluative items (liking, interesting, and beautiful) were correlated within the famous and the nonfamous judgment presentations and were entered into two principal component factor analyses with varimax rotation. For ratings of the “famous” artworks, the first factor had an eigenvalue of 2.73 and accounted for 91% of the extracted variance, suggesting that a one-factor solution was adequate to investigate the structure of participants’ judgments of famous artworks. Analysis of the three critical items in ratings of nonfamous artworks produced similar results. The principal component factor analysis with varimax rotation on the relations among the three evaluation items had an eigenvalue of 2.80 and accounted for 90% of extracted variance.
Both the reliability and the factor analyses indicated that the three items used to assess subjects’ evaluations of both sets of artworks could be combined into internally consistent evaluative scores for famous and for nonfamous works. Two scores were created for each subject. The order of presentation was used as a control feature to ensure that the particular ordering of ratings (famous first vs. nonfamous first) did not affect subjects’ judgments.
The effect of author fame was analyzed in a paired samples t test that compared the mean evaluative ratings of artworks attributed to famous (M = 3.06, SD = .62) and nonfamous artists (M = 2.88, SD = .59). The mean evaluation revealed the difference in evaluations of famous and nonfamous artworks was statistically significant, t(308) = 4.80, p < .001, confirming H1. Similar results, at the same level of statistically significance, were found when ratings of each of the evaluative items (liking, interesting, and beautiful) were analyzed individually. Figure 2 presents the famous versus nonfamous comparisons for each of the evaluative items. There were no differences attributable to sex or age of participants.
Overall means for each variable in function of famous versus nonfamous (error bars indicate standard error of the mean; ***p ≤ .001).
The results on the measure of subjects’ willingness to pay to see the art of famous versus nonfamous artists were consistent with their evaluative ratings. A paired samples t test revealed that participants were willing to pay more to see paintings attributed to famous (M = 9.06€, SD = 3.74) than nonfamous (M = 7.36€, SD = 2.97) artists, t(308) = 10.54, p < .001, confirming H2.
A statistically significant difference did not emerge in a comparison of the comprehensibility of artworks attributed to famous (M = 2.83, SD = .47) or nonfamous artists (M = 2.82, SD =.46), t(308), p = 0.59, ns, confirming H3. However, a correlational analysis disclosed a weak but statistically significant association between prior art education and comprehensibility of artworks attributed to famous (r = 0.22, p < .001) but not nonfamous artists (r = 0.08, ns). The difference between these correlations was statistically significant (z = 2.50, p < .05).
Discussion
The aesthetic appreciation of an artwork is mainly attributed to its structural features (lines, shapes, colors, textures, and material) and its compositional characteristics (balance, symmetry, depth, and dynamism) (Arnheim, 1974). Previous knowledge about the historical context and the biography of the author can help in understanding the content and the meaning expressed by the art pieces (Cupchik & Gebotys, 1988; Locher, Krupinski, Mello-Thoms, & Nodine, 2007; Mastandrea, 2015). Other contextual properties, more related to our research, such as the verbal labeling of the paintings, can affect art appreciation. Some studies have shown that the title influences the aesthetic appraisal of the pictures observed. Millis (2001) found that a metaphorical title congruent with the content of the painting led to greater aesthetic appreciation, compared to the condition with no title or with only a descriptive title. Titles can offer information that enriches comprehension of the artwork. Leder, Carbon, and Ripsas (2006) showed that for short presentations (1 second), descriptive titles increased understanding of the paintings more than elaborative titles, though for longer presentations (10 seconds), more elaborate titles resulted in increased comprehension. In addition, judgment that a painting is “liked” is often faster than the judgment that it is “understood,” because liking is often based on a rapid affective assessment of features such as symmetry and color, while understanding often requires considerable interpretation of many features such as content and meaning (Leder et al., 2006; Mastandrea & Maricchiolo, 2014; Smith et al., 2017). Manipulating the artwork title by intensifying the words related to the movement depicted in the painting also has an effect on liking (Mastandrea & Umiltà, 2016).
In this study, another contextual factor, the manipulation of the attributed fame of the artists of identical artworks significantly affected their evaluation. If the structural, compositional features and the meaning of the piece of art were the only relevant aspect in the appreciation of the artworks, we would not have found differences, but this was not the case. Findings from the current investigation show that artworks attributed to famous artists were liked more and were viewed as more interesting and more beautiful than the identical paintings attributed to nonfamous artists. This makes sense, especially among those who are far from sophisticated art critics. A person asked to evaluate a Monet painting, for instance, might evaluate a work positively because of the artist’s fame and the near unanimous consensus of his preeminence. That is, the logical consequence of Monet’s considerable fame is that he must have produced beautiful paintings and therefore one should appreciate his work. This peripheral process, in the language of the ELM, allows an evaluation of a work without strong elaboration, which for many of the subjects in the study might have proven impossible, owing to a lack of appropriate training. This is not to dismiss peripheral processing as capricious, insofar as evaluations of “famous” paintings were (psycho-)logically associated with an expressed willingness to pay more to visit a museum that exhibits them than museums with identical paintings by nonfamous artists. For nonexperts, it was not necessary to delve deeply into the analysis of the artworks’ visual messages because of the contextual, peripheral characteristics with which they were associated.
Over all subjects, we did not find significant differences in the evaluation of the comprehensibility of artworks attributed to famous and nonfamous artists. To understand an artwork, it is necessary to concentrate more deeply on the structural features and the content of the work (i.e., the artist’s message). Aesthetic evaluations involving terms such as liking, beautiful, and interesting are based presumably on affective processing, which is permanently available at all stages of the picture analysis (Leder, Belke, Oeberst, & Augustin, 2004), and can be fast and automatic (Chirumbolo, Brizi, Mastandrea, & Mannetti, 2014; Makin, Pecchinenda, & Bertamini, 2012; Mastandrea, Bartoli, & Carrus, 2011; Mastandrea & Maricchiolo, 2014). Understanding is based more on cognitively explicit processes because it refers to interpretation and is grounded on previously acquired knowledge. Understanding therefore requires skills and deeper processing by the perceiver, and this should be the reason of the shift from peripheral to central processing according to Petty and Cacioppo’s (1986) ELM. Support for their model is also found in the weak but statistically significant correlation relating prior education in art with greater expressed comprehensibility of the works attributed to famous artists. If prior art experience resulted in some subjects elaborating a work more intensively, as might occur if its source were famous, then the works might have been more comprehensible by dint of the augmented effort expended by the more sophisticated raters. A link between prior art education experience and comprehension may be inferred by the positive correlation between these factors on famous artworks, and the significant difference between the correlations involving paintings of famous and nonfamous artists. Those without prior training (i.e., lacking ability to elaborate the work) were less likely to show a relation between prior art education and comprehension of the works, but this result should be interpreted with caution, as it was not predicted and is presented for purposes of stimulating further research.
Conclusion
The pattern of results uncovered in this research suggests that judgmental variations were attributable to participants’ peripheral processing of factors not intrinsic to the work itself. The visual messages (the artworks) attributed to famous sources proved more compelling than those deriving from unnamed but nonfamous artists and clearly appear to have been advantaged by peripheral judgment processes. Practically speaking, an exhibit advertised as involving a famous artist, even if the paintings attributed to him were very few in number, would have a greater probability of attracting a larger number of visitors, and at higher ticket rates, than the same exhibit that did not appeal to the artist’s fame, a practice not lost on some of the world’s most successful impresarios.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was funded by the Department of Education, Roma Tre University.