Institute of Psychology, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Lublin, Poland.
Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
PLoS One. 2021 May 28;16(5):e0250924. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0250924. eCollection 2021.
The aim of our research was to investigate the influence of the situational context of presenting contemporary critical artworks (in an art gallery vs in a laboratory setting) and the way in which one is acquainted with contextual information, i.e. a curatorial description (reading it on one's own vs listening to it vs a lack of curatorial information), on the reception of critical art. All experimental stimuli were exemplars of contemporary art which raise current controversial social and political issues. Non-experts in the field of art were asked to rate their emotional reactions on non-verbal scales and estimate their liking and understanding of the artworks. As predicted, the art gallery context increased both the experience of aesthetic emotions-in terms of valence, arousal, subjective significance, and dominance and aesthetic judgements-in terms of liking. Thus, for critical art (i.e. current artworks which critically address serious, up-to-date issues) the situational context of the gallery increased the aesthetic experience-which is in line with previous studies on the gallery (or museum) effect. Curatorial information increased understanding, so non-experts seem to need interpretative guidance in the reception of critical art. Subjective significance was higher in the reading of curatorial information condition than the listening to curatorial information condition or the control condition (a lack of curatorial information). It seems, therefore, that art non-experts have a better understanding of critical art after being exposed to the curatorial description, but this does not result in an increase in liking and aesthetic emotions. Probably this is because the curatorial description allows one to grasp the difficult, often unpleasant issue addressed by critical art.
我们的研究目的是调查呈现当代批判艺术作品的情境语境（在艺术画廊中与在实验室环境中）以及人们熟悉情境信息（即策展描述[自行阅读与听取相比]或缺乏策展信息）的方式对批判艺术的接受的影响。所有实验刺激都是提出当前有争议的社会和政治问题的当代艺术范例。非艺术领域的专家被要求在非言语量表上对他们的情绪反应进行评分，并估计他们对艺术作品的喜爱和理解程度。正如预测的那样，艺术画廊的环境增加了审美情感的体验——就价值、唤醒度、主观意义和支配力而言，以及审美判断——就喜爱而言。因此，对于批判性艺术（即批判性地处理严肃、最新问题的当代艺术作品），画廊的情境语境增加了审美体验——这与之前关于画廊（或博物馆）效应的研究一致。策展信息增加了理解，因此非专家在接受批判性艺术时似乎需要解释性指导。在阅读策展信息的条件下，主观意义高于听取策展信息的条件或控制条件（缺乏策展信息）。因此，艺术非专家在接触策展描述后对批判性艺术有了更好的理解，但这并没有导致喜爱和审美情感的增加。可能是因为策展描述让人能够理解批判性艺术所涉及的困难和不愉快的问题。
