Drawing a Context

Journal entry for 20 Sep 2010 | Link

Trial by Taste

Several alert readers sent in an item by Jonah Lehrer about two psychologists who ran a taste test for jam, first on pure taste:

When it comes to judging jam, we are all natural experts. We can automatically pick out the products that provide us with the most pleasure.

...then on taste, accompanied by written explanations thereof.

...this time they asked them to explain why they preferred one brand over another. As the undergrads tasted the jams, the students filled out written questionnaires, which forced them to analyze their first impressions, to consciously explain their impulsive preferences. All this extra analysis seriously warped their jam judgment. ... The correlation plummeted to .11, which means that there was virtually no relationship between the rankings of the experts and the opinions of these introspective students.

It was interesting to see this not long after alert reader Ryan McCourt sent in another study:

In a finding sure to evoke concern and curiosity among curators, newly published research suggests presenting contextual information alongside a work of modern art may be counterproductive in terms of eliciting enjoyment or appreciation.

Writing in the journal Empirical Studies of the Arts, psychologist Kenneth Bordens of Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne, describes a study in which undergraduates evaluated artworks representing various styles. The 172 participating students had little or no knowledge about art.

Bordens hypothesized that providing contextual information about an artwork "should increase the ability of a viewer to extract meaning" from it and therefore make the encounter more significant and pleasurable. "This should be especially important for abstract works or nonconventional works," he writes.

Read the article for the details of the experiment. The conclusion rather damned the hypothesis.

"Providing contextual information led to participants perceiving examples of the various styles of art as matching less well with their internal standards than when no contextual information was presented," Bordens writes. In other words, they were more likely to feel a piece conformed to their personal ideas about art—and thus more likely to enjoy or appreciate it—when it was presented without interpretation.

However:

"Duchamp's Nude on a Staircase was rated as more closely matching one's internal definition of art, and liked more, when presented after the other Dada works than before," Bordens reports. "After seeing the other Dada works, participants did have a context that affected their ratings."

So it appears context does matter—when it is provided via visual imagery rather than words.

Coming back to Lehrer:

The larger moral is that our metaphors for reasoning are all wrong. We like to believe that the gift of human reason lets us think like scientists, so that our conscious thoughts lead us closer to the truth. But here’s the paradox: all that reasoning and confabulation can often lead us astray, so that we end up knowing less about what jams/cars/jelly beans we actually prefer. So here’s my new metaphor for human reason: our rational faculty isn’t a scientist – it’s a talk radio host. That voice in your head spewing out eloquent reasons to do this or do that doesn’t actually know what’s going on, and it’s not particularly adept at getting you nearer to reality. Instead, it only cares about finding reasons that sound good, even if the reasons are actually irrelevant or false.

This is the wrong conclusion, as is evidenced by the other article. Reason is your best friend, unless you apply it to decisions about phenomena that are not the products of reason. You don't reason your way to a conclusion about which jam tastes better. And as Bordens shows, you don't reason your way to a conclusion about whether art looks good to you or not. You get there by sensory comparisons.

As I said not long ago in a private exchange with one reader, much of what passes for taste in contemporary art is the substitution of a social phenomenon for a perceptual one. More and more I talk about people having an eye, because the folks on the inside of the velvet rope just hate that. And yet it's the only thing that matters. You develop that eye by using it on many thousands of works of art, doing your best not to put your thinking mind in the way of your initial reaction to each one. You cannot reason your way there. There is a whole class of art, aimed at the professionalized art world, which you can navigate by reason. It was made for that very purpose. But in some sense this work and this kind of looking remains fake, consistent as it is with its universe. It bears too little relation to the rest of lived experience, the life of the pleasures considered as a whole, to have any reality outside of its narrow context.

Draw Along with the Times

Alert reader Necee sent in the first installment of a series in the New York Times by James McMullan.

The first few columns of this series on drawing that I'm initiating this week will offer a primer on the basic elements of line-making, perspective, structure and proportion, which I hope will begin to rekindle the love of drawing for those readers who left it behind in the 4th grade. Achieving some confidence in drawing objects will get you started in the pleasure of this activity, and give you the basis for moving on to drawing figures.

I also hope, in later installments, to provide insight into the vitality and sensuousness of great drawing so that your next visit to the museum will be both more gratifying and a chance to amaze your companions with your new-found aestheticism.

Hundreds of people have expressed gratitude in the comments.

Though there are many sources for this type of instruction it is so very important to see it in this setting (a newspaper!) emphasizing drawing as a valued process accessible and important to everyone, just like music and performance. As someone who progressed from high school through graduate school as an art major, I know how easy it is to become distanced from the sheer pleasure of concentrated drawing. As someone who only recently rediscovered this, someone no longer afraid to make a beautiful line, I look forward to your future articles.

Some of us were not just art geeks who simply doodled cartoons, but who actually took 1/2 day from our regular high school to attend a special advanced art school that challenged us beyond Calculus, French, and Literature, and later went on to art school where problem-solving and critical thinking were key to our development. I was fortunate that the adults during my youth respected my drawing skills, and am really pleased that you've started this column which will no doubt bring readers back to the important basics. Thank you.

My eyes lit up when I saw the title for this article. As much as I enjoyed the article and entire premise of the planned how-to series, I've enjoyed reading through every comment posted above. It's amazing how we all feel so connected and excited by a skill that (typically) gets left to rot as we mature. When I was little, I would spend hours and hours in my room just drawing away. ... Without a doubt, drawing was my number one love as a child and today, I'm an architect. In fact, I'm now back in graduate school and having both time and need to work in my studio sketchbook, I'm reminded how amazingly simple and effective drawing becomes as a tool for communication. Thanks so much for doing this series; what an incredible and inspiring idea.

I am convinced that there is a way to connect with people artistically over this widely shared impulse to draw, a way that is not being explored by art's officialdom. I feel that I am close to a way of doing so, just outside of my mental reach, but once I find it, I will have solved a personally and professionally crucial problem. I am open to suggestions.