(February 28, 2019 at 6:38 am)zainab Wrote:(February 28, 2019 at 4:52 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: What were your previous views and how did the article speak to them directly enough to change them?
My previous view was .. that it is all subjective!
That beauty is entirely relative!
I read the article. It's embarrassingly shallow. Please don't take it seriously.
There is a tendency in the popular science press to make all kinds of claims which are overblown and not really justified by the careful science that has been done.
The real science behind the article is that we are hard-wired for responses to certain visual stimuli. It seems not to take into account the fact that art, on the other hand, is more than simple visual stimulus. The fact that we find a Monet painting beautiful is wrapped up in all kinds of cultural issues about how we feel about nature, what we want from a painting, what pre-training we have about what art ought to be doing etc. Many many people who were experienced in art found Monet's paintings ugly when they were first exhibited. Were they lacking in some kind of neurotypical response?
If a scientist did find some automatic trigger response in humans, in which we find certain visual stimuli appealing, you can be confident that artists could completely ignore that response, or intentionally do the opposite, and make art which appeals for other reasons.
