[LINK] "A child couldn’t paint that – can people tell abstract art from a child’s or chimp’s work?"

[rfmcdonald]

The answer, Ed Yong notes at Not Exactly Rocket Science, is yes. Abstract art's existence as a category with meaning has been legitimated by psychological research.

[Researchers Angelina Hawley-Dolan and Ellen Winner] wanted to test the assertion that abstract expressionist art is devoid of talent – that it could be done by a mere child, or even an animal. With keyboards and enough time, monkeys could surely duplicate Shakespeare, but with a paintbrush and a few hours, could a monkey produce a Rothko?

To find out, Hawley-Dolan and Winner asked 32 art students and 40 psychology students to compare pairs of paintings. One piece of each pair was the work of a recognised artist, such as Kline, Rothko, Cy Twombly, Gillian Ayre, and more. The other came from the oeuvre of lesser-known painters, including preschool children, elephants, chimps, gorillas and monkeys. The paintings were matched according to colour, line quality, brushstroke and medium; the students had to say which they preferred and which was better.

Both groups of students preferred the professional pieces to the amateur ones, and judged them to be superior. Even the psychology students, who had no background in art education, felt the same way, although as you might expect, their preference for the professional works was slightly weaker.

Throughout the experiments, the students typically picked the professional pieces between 60% and 70% of the time. These aren’t overwhelming majorities, but they were statistically significant. On average, a child could not “paint that”, even if first glances might suggest otherwise. Nor are the qualities of the abstract art only visible to people steeped in the art world – even untrained people responded to the paintings in some way.

Hawley-Dolan and Winner also found that it didn’t matter if the students were duped into thinking that the paintings came from the wrong “artist”. The duo labelled the pairs of paintings on some of the tests (“artist”, “child”, “monkey” or “elephant”) and mislabelled them on others. Even with these tags, the students still preferred the actual professional painting. The labels only swayed the decisions of the psychology students – they were more likely to judge the professional paintings more positively if they were correctly labelled (but not more harshly if the labels were swapped).

This goes against an earlier experiment by Ulrich Kirk, who found that people find paintings to be more aesthetically pleasing when they’re labelled as having come from a gallery, rather than having been generated by computers. Other anecdotes have also painted an unflattering picture of abstract art. The mother of two-year-old toddler Freddie Linsky managed to dupe the art world by selling her son’s work – including a splash of ketchup on a high chair – on Saatchi Online (admittedly, for a paltry £20). A chimp called Congo fared much better, selling off three paintings for £12,000 at Bonhams auction house.

But none of these stories involved paired comparisons. Hawley-Dolan and Winner think that such side-by-side judgments are better ways of telling if people can discriminate between pieces produced by different painters.

The discussion in the comments is quite worthwhile, this commenter pointing out that abstract artists make use of a shared visual vocabulary, with different elements having different meanings and combining to create narratives. There are abstract artists who don't have any coherent message, but that relates to failings in the artist painting in the tradition and much less to the genre itself. Me, I also like commenter Gaebolga's contention.

The problem here (and which is highlighted well by the non-traditional nature of abstract and expressionist art) is the simple fact that the audience is the artist. The audience makes the meaning, finds the connection, feels the emotion (or not). The artisan (painter sculptor, writer, composer, actor, etc.) can, through skill and experience, make it easier for the audience to find meaning in a work and can influence the type of reaction the audience is more likely to have, but in the end, there is no art without an audience.

A person can train herself to be a better artist (audience) by studying the medium in question, but such study doesn’t lend validity to any particular reaction, it merely ensures a higher fidelity to the artisan’s intended meaning; since one assumes that an artisan is working within the context of a medium’s established history, a shared knowledge of that history makes it easier for the artisan to communicate through a work of art. But still, the true artist, the one who actually makes the meaning of a work of art, remains the audience.

So in a sense, it doesn’t actually matter if the artisan of a work is human, animal, or even a natural force (although non-human artisans are obviously not working within a historical artistic context).

Truly, wherever you go, there is art.