Department of Psychology, Boston College, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2011 Apr;22(4):435-41. doi: 10.1177/0956797611400915. Epub 2011 Mar 3.
Museumgoers often scoff that costly abstract expressionist paintings could have been made by a child and have mistaken paintings by chimpanzees for professional art. To test whether people really conflate paintings by professionals with paintings by children and animals, we showed art and nonart students paired images, one by an abstract expressionist and one by a child or animal, and asked which they liked more and which they judged as better. The first set of pairs was presented without labels; the second set had labels (e.g., "artist," "child") that were either correct or reversed. Participants preferred professional paintings and judged them as better than the nonprofessional paintings even when the labels were reversed. Art students preferred professional works more often than did nonart students, but the two groups' judgments did not differ. Participants in both groups were more likely to justify their selections of professional than of nonprofessional works in terms of artists' intentions. The world of abstract art is more accessible than people realize.
博物馆参观者常常嘲笑那些昂贵的抽象表现主义画作可能是孩子画的，并将黑猩猩的画作误认为是专业艺术品。为了测试人们是否真的将专业画家的画作与儿童和动物的画作混淆，我们向艺术和非艺术专业的学生展示了成对的图像，一幅是抽象表现主义画作，一幅是儿童或动物的画作，并询问他们更喜欢哪一幅，以及他们认为哪一幅更好。第一组对图像没有标签；第二组有标签（例如，“艺术家”、“孩子”），这些标签要么是正确的，要么是颠倒的。即使标签颠倒了，参与者也更喜欢专业画作，并认为它们比非专业画作更好。艺术专业的学生比非艺术专业的学生更常喜欢专业作品，但两组的判断没有差异。两组参与者都更倾向于根据艺术家的意图来证明他们选择专业作品而不是非专业作品的合理性。抽象艺术的世界比人们想象的更容易接近。
