Lydie Salvayre et Kamel Daoud : « Ma nuit au musée ». S’identifier au miroir de l’art

"Both Lydie Salvayre and Kamel Daoud, writers foreign by their social and geographical origins to the Parisian art sphere, relate a similar experience: a night spent alone in the museum amid works by Giacometti and Picasso. This confrontation, through unsimilar inner journeys, reveals their skewed, complex and changing identity as socially (split), intimate (traumatized) and artistic (marginal) being. Their identity is revealed through the encounter with the images of paintings and sculptures."

The Contributions of Emotion and Reward to Aesthetic Judgment of Visual Art

It has long been assumed that emotions play an important role in our interactions with artworks. Similarly, how rewarding we find an artwork could also be an important driver of our aesthetic preference for it. Vartanian and Goel (2004) tested this idea by presenting participants with images of paintings in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, recording brain activation as they viewed and rated them on aesthetic preference. Their results demonstrated that activation in brain regions that encode reward and emotions—including the caudate nucleus, cingulate sulcus, and the visual cortex—covaried with preference ratings assigned to the paintings. This study represented an early example of how brain imaging could be used to test theoretically derived predictions from empirical aesthetics. Indeed, data from that study and several others since have accumulated to demonstrate that emotions and rewards are a cornerstone of our aesthetic experiences in relation to artworks and other classes of stimuli.

Magazines for All

A major source of information and entertainment was the illustrated magazine, of which The Graphic and the Illustrated London News were the most popular. The first was the least innovative, with rigid layout and brief captions barely related to its illustrations. The Illustrated London News had a wider scope, in its Christmas 1930 number including colour images of paintings, and illustrated fiction, yet its presentation was still moderately rigid. Picture Post, begun in 1938 brought words and images together through skilful layout and imaginative photography, attracting readers with a greater variety of social, political and artistic articles. Its use of images without borders gave energy lacking in the earlier magazines. It used these features to satirise some ministers and praise others, and attacked Government policies, including unemployment and early-war censorship. Yet many of its visual techniques were adopted by Government in its publications of the war years.

Test Position Effects on Hit and False Alarm Rates in Recognition Memory for Paintings and Words

When old/new recognition memory is tested with equal numbers of studied and non-studied items and no rewards or instructions that favour one response over the other, there is no obvious reason for response bias. In line with this, Canadian undergraduates have shown, on average, a neutral response bias when we tested them on recognition of common English words. By contrast, most subjects we have tested on recognition of richly detailed images have shown a conservative bias: they more often erred by missing a studied image than by judging a non-studied image as studied. Here, in an effort to better understand these materials-based bias effects (MBBEs), we examined changes in hit and false alarm (FA) rates (and in sensitivity and bias) from the first to fourth quartile of a recognition memory test in eight experiments in which undergraduates studied words and/or images of paintings. Response bias for images tended to increase across quartiles, whereas bias for words showed no consistent pattern across quartiles. This pattern could be described as an increase in the MBBE over the course of the test, but the underlying patterns for hits and FAs are not easily reconciled with this interpretation. Hit rates decreased over the course of the test for both materials types, with that decline tending to be steeper for images than words. For words, FA rates tended to increase across quartiles, whereas for paintings FA rates did not increase across quartiles. We discuss implications of these findings for theoretical accounts of the MBBE.

Familiarity and Novelty in Aesthetic Preference: The Effects of the Properties of the Artwork and the Beholder

Familiarity and novelty are fundamental yet competing factors influencing aesthetic preference. However, whether people prefer familiar paintings or novel paintings has not been clear. Using both behavioral and eye-tracking measures, the present study aimed to investigate whether the effect of familiarity-novelty on aesthetic preference is independent or dependent on artwork properties (painting content, visual complexity) and viewer characteristics (experience in art). Participants were presented with two images of paintings, one of which was repeatedly presented but was always paired with a new painting in a randomized lateral arrangement. They were asked to indicate which of the two images they preferred with the degree of their preference. Behavioral results demonstrated an interactive influence of painting content and complexity on familiarity-novelty preference, especially alongside the distinction between representational and abstract paintings. Also, the familiarity-novelty preference was modulated by the degree of art experience, for abstract paintings in particular. Gaze results showed the differential effects of painting content, complexity, and art experience echoing the behavioral results. Taken together, the convergent results derived from behavioral and eye-tracking measures imply that novelty is an important feature of aesthetic appreciation, but its influence is modulated by properties of both the artwork and the beholder.

HOW DO CHILDREN RESPOND TO DIFFERENT ARTISTIC GENRES?

Art is as beautiful as sunshine and as important as nourishment to our body. Though art is a stimulating aspect, art appreciation is regarded as a highly subjective phenomenon. Art education and art appreciation is known to enrich the lives of children. Various factors including one’s experience, knowledge, and exposure to arts as well as processing fluency are known to influence one’s aesthetic appreciation. The objective of the present study is to examine children’s expressions of art appreciation. The quantitative study examines how children respond to artworks from different artistic genres. The participants in this study are sixty grade IX children in the age group of 13-15 years, from rural and urban backgrounds from the state of Telangana. The study employed equal number of boys and girls. Images of nine famous artworks depicting landscapes are used as stimuli. The images of artworks belonged to three artistic genres: representational, semi-representational, and abstract artworks. The artworks are selected from Western, Middle Eastern and Oriental paintings. Images of paintings are shown randomly to children to elicit their responses. The results of analysis of children’s descriptions of paintings indicate that children appreciated representational artworks more than semi-representational artworks and their appreciation of abstract artworks is minimum. Children’s appreciation of artworks according to the type of paintings indicate differences in appreciation among western, middle eastern and oriental paintings. The statistical analysis of overall appreciation of three genres of artworks depending on the type of paintings reveal that there exists a statistically significant difference in the appreciation of three types of artworks depending on the genre of artworks. The findings of this study can be used to enlighten the development of art education curricula. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0748/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Seeing and Tagging Things in Pictures

Despite modernist precepts, digital projects that use crowdsourcing to annotate large collections of images of paintings and book illustrations with “tags” have encouraged viewers to see things in pictures and to say what they see. Both personal image tagging (ekphrastic in function) and automatic image tagging challenge in different ways the proposition that a painting as such will elide recognizable content.

Image-based information: paintings in Wikipedia

PurposeThis study aimed at understanding the use of paintings outside of an art-related context, in the English version of Wikipedia.Design/methodology/approachFor this investigation, the authors identified 8,104 paintings used in 10,008 articles of the English Wikipedia edition. The authors manually coded the topic of the article in question, documented the number of monthly average views and identified the originating museum. They analysed the use of images based on frequency of use, frequency of view, associated topics and location. Early in the analysis three distinct perspectives emerged: the readers of the online encyclopaedia, the editors of the articles and the museum organisations providing the painting images (directly or indirectly).FindingsWikipedia is a widely used online information resource where images of paintings serve as visual reference to illustrate articles, notably also beyond an art-related topic and where no alternative image is available – as in the case of historic portraits. Editors used paintings as illustration of the work itself or art-related movement, but also as illustration of past events, as alternative to photographs, as well as to represent a concept or technique. Images have been used to illustrate up to 76 articles, evidencing the polysemic nature of paintings. The authors conclude that images of paintings are highly valuable information sources, also beyond an art-related context. They also find that Wikipedia is an important dissemination channel for museum collections. While art-related articles contain greater number of paintings, these receive less views than non-art-related articles containing fewer paintings. Readers of all topics, predominantly history, science and geographic articles, viewed art pieces outside of an art context. Painting images in Wikipedia receive a much larger online audience than the physical painting does when compared to the number of museum onsite visitors. The authors’ results confirm the presence of a strong long-tail pattern in the frequency of image use (only 3% of painting images are used in a Wikipedia article), image view and museums represented, characteristic of network dynamics of the Internet.Research limitations/implicationsWhile this is the first analysis of the complete collection of paintings in the English Wikipedia, the authors’ results are conservative as many paintings are not identified as such in Wikidata, used for automatic harvesting. Tools to analyse image view specifically are not yet available and user privacy is highly protected, limiting the disaggregation of user data. This study serves to document a lack of diversity in image availability for global online consumption, favouring well-known Western objects. At the same time, the study evidences the need to diversify the use of images to reflect a more global perspective, particularly where paintings are used to represent concepts of techniques.Practical implicationsMuseums wanting to increase visibility can target the reuse of their collections in non-art-related articles, which received 88% of all views in the authors’ sample. Given the few museums collaborating with the Wikimedia Foundation and the apparent inefficiency resulting from leaving the use of paintings as illustration to the crowd, as only 3% of painting images are used, suggests further collaborative efforts to reposition museum content may be beneficial.Social implicationsThis paper highlights the reach of Wikipedia as information source, where museum content can be positioned to reach a greater user group beyond the usual museum visitor, in turn increasing visual and digital literacy.Originality/valueThis is the first study that documents the frequency of use and views, the topical use and the originating institution of “all the paintings” in the English Wikipedia edition.