Thread by @tscottphillips

New paper: "The Art Experience".

In which we argue that artworks and art galleries function by exploiting the cognitive mechanisms usually involved in ordinary, day-to-day communication.

link.springer.com/article/10.100…

I love this paper!

A thread.

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From my point-of-view it started life with tweet from @woodennoodles, who was live tweeting the #beyondmeaning17 conference. I wanted to attend but couldn't, so was following the highlights on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/woodennoodles/status/908224768708620288?s=20

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Seeing that tweet I googled the presenters: both PhD students at @artsbrighton. I noticed many points of contact between my own work & theirs, especially Kate McCallum. So I emailed her to ask if she'd written anything on the topic of art and Relevance Theory.

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She sent me a draft. I liked it very much. I'd been thinking, on-and-off, about art and the cognitive science of communication for some time. Kate and Scott were pointing in a similar direction.

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I was due to be in the UK soon, so when I was there I went down to Brighton to meet. We got on well and found many points of contact. We talked about the guru effect, and how the same dynamic influences art interpretation.

dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/upl…

5/

So after meeting I suggested we could together flesh out their early draft, aiming at a journal publication. Happily they reacted warmly. I worked on the manuscript, elaborating some new points and tightening the arguments around Relevance Theory.

It was a happy marriage: I have an expert knowledge of the cognitive science of communication; Kate and Scott of communication & art theory.

Both sides has a working knowledge of the other and wanted to make the links tighter. Lots of back & forth.

6/

So we use Relevance Theory as our starting point. As we explain in the article, it captures very nicely a lot of the graded features of human communication; such as e.g. the ways we strongly implicate some things but only weakly implicate others.

dan.sperber.fr/?p=93

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In my book, Speaking Our Minds, I argue that this type of communication is distinctly human, and that its evolution is critical to understanding the origins of language.

thomscottphillips.com/book/

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Relevance Theory also predicts the guru effect, in which audiences search for high cognitive effects in order to satisfy high expectations of relevance deriving from high prior confidence in the reputability of the source.

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Turns out there's clear links here with institutional theories of art, which emphasise how the authority of the art world affects audience interpretation.

But unlike gurus and charlatans, artists are trying to create artefacts that reward extended contemplation.

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So what we're doing here is explaining how evolved, adaptive features of human cognition interact with institutions, to create what are often highly rewarding psychological experiences.

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Key line: "The work of the artist is to provide something that will reward cognitive effort... constructing artefacts that elicit and accommodate multiple, complex interpretations in the mind of a hardworking creative viewer simply *is* what many artists do".

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The article is an elaboration of this and many related points. We illustrate these points with reference to several 20th & 21st century artworks, like Ai Weiwei's Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn.

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So there it is: a super rewarding collaboration linking the sciences and the humanities – started with a random conference tweet.

Special kudos to Kate, who did a superb job as first author.

Here's the link again. We'd love to get your feedback!

link.springer.com/article/10.100…

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Tagging some people from the art world that we cite/quote in our analysis, or whose art we describe & analyse.

@AndrewGrahamDix @aiww @mlle_elle @johnhiggs @1lubaina @martincreed