How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration

321 Pages·2018·22.89 MB·English

by  Ellen Winner

How Art Works

How Art Works
A Psychological Exploration
EllEn WinnEr
1
1
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© Ellen Winner 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Winner, Ellen, author.
Title: How art works : a psychological exploration / Ellen Winner.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018010721 | ISBN 9780190863357
Subjects: LCSH: Art—Psychology.
Classification: LCC N71 .W535 2018 | DDC 700.1/9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010721
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For my grandchildren, Oscar, Agnes, Olivia, and Faye

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
PART ONE | Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Perennial Questions 3
CHAPTER 2 Can This Be Art? 6
PART TWO | Art and Emotion
CHAPTER 3 Wordless Sounds: Hearing Emotion in Music 31
CHAPTER 4 Feeling From Music: Emotions in the Music
Listener 43
CHAPTER 5 Color and Form: Emotional Connotations of
Visual Art 60
CHAPTER 6 Emotions in the Art Museum: Why Don’t We Feel
Like Crying? 77
CHAPTER 7 Drawn to Pain: The Paradoxical Enjoyment of
Negative Emotion in Art 88
PART THREE | Art and Judgment
CHAPTER 8 Is It Good? Or Just Familiar? 103
CHAPTER 9 Too Easy to Be Good? The Effort Bias 125
CHAPTER 10 Identical! What’s Wrong with a Perfect Fake? 136
CHAPTER 11 “But My Kid Could Have Done That!” 151
PART FOUR | What Art Does— and Does Not—Do for Us
CHAPTER 12 Silver Bullets: Does Art Make Us Smarter? 167
CHAPTER 13 The Lives of Others: Fiction and Empathy 189
CHAPTER 14 Does Making Art Improve Well- Being? 211
PART FIVE | Making Art
CHAPTER 15 Who Makes Art and Why? 219
PART SIX | Conclusion
CHAPTER 16 How Art Works 237
Notes 247
References 265
Index 295
viii | Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It hank my husband Howard Gardner first and always— for inspiring me
to write this book, for encouraging me along the way, for discussing these
ideas with me on our morning walks, and for the toughest and most valuable
comments on drafts ever.
I also want to express my deep gratitude to my philosophically oriented
lab manager, Nat Rabb, who played a key role in designing studies coming
out of the Arts and Mind Lab, and who provided extensive and excellent
comments on every chapter.
Numerous others have helped me in this enterprise. To begin with, I thank
the research group Harvard Project Zero, founded by philosopher Nelson
Goodman in 1967. I joined this research group in 1973, and Project Zero
has had a lasting and deep influence on my thinking. I also thank my lab at
Boston College, the Arts and Mind Lab, whose members— undergraduates,
doctoral students, and lab managers—h ave helped me carry out so many of
the studies reported in this book. Other current and former lab members
read either the entire manuscript or numerous chapters and gave me val-
uable comments: my former doctoral students, now assistant professors,
Jennifer E. Drake and Thalia Goldstein; my current doctoral students Mahsa
Ershadi, Jill Hogan, and Maria Eugenia Panero; and my former lab man-
ager Jenny Nissel. I received excellent comments from my long- time philos-
ophy friends Marcia Homiak and Naomi Scheman: Marcia commented on
the book’s introduction and Naomi commented on a number of chapters.
Eric Blumenson, a close friend and a lawyer steeped in philosophy, provided
cogent comments about the issue of objectivity of aesthetic judgments.
Psychology colleagues Aniruddh Patel and Isabelle Peretz commented on