'Brains and Beauty' exhibit explores how the mind processes art and aesthetic experiences

Transcript

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William Brangham: Experiencing art is a highly subjective experience. What draws one person to a given work may completely turn off someone else.

There’s a new exhibit called Brains and Beauty: At the Intersection of Art and Neuroscience, and it explores just how our brains process these aesthetic experiences.

Stephanie Sy reports from Scottsdale, Arizona for our ongoing look at the intersection of health and arts, which is part of our Canvas coverage.

Stephanie Sy: On a recent evening in Scottsdale, a neuroscientist and a museum educator led a tour of an art exhibit exploring the intersection of beauty and the brain.

Anjan Chatterjee, with the University of Pennsylvania, is a leader in the field of neuroaesthetics, which examines how the brain experiences and responds to beauty.

Anjan Chatterjee, Director, Penn Center For Neuroaesthetics: Within the things our mind does, aesthetic experiences is one of the more important things. We react to people based on how they look. We react to our environment.

So, to me, this is a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human and something deeply mysterious.

Stephanie Sy: The exhibit is a visual exploration of the field of neuroaesthetics and asks some meta question: What is our brain doing when we look at art?

Anjan Chatterjee: One of the things we’re trying to do is to give people some tools with which to look at art that is informed by our research. And so this is where this idea of the aesthetic triad comes.

Stephanie Sy: The aesthetic triad, he says, is a system for engaging with an artwork.

Laura Hales, Curator, Brains and Beauty: At the Intersection of Art and Neuroscience Sensory motor is the first, emotion valuation is the next, and knowledge meaning is the third. Now, typically, when you have an aesthetic experience, you’re activating all three at the same time.

I broke it up into those three categories and chose artwork that strongly — I thought strongly represented something that I’m trying to show in one of those triads.

Stephanie Sy: Laura Hales,who curated the exhibit at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art with Chatterjee, had always been curious about what draws people to certain pieces.

Laura Hales: So I found out that, in neuroaesthetics, science is asking the same questions as we have been asking for a while in art education and art theory. Science is finding hard data that support what art education has known for years.

Stephanie Sy: The exhibit contains pieces that may be more objectively pleasing to the eye. There are also paintings which might elicit a varied aesthetic experience depending on the audience.

Chris Rush’s portrait shown here challenged conventional notions of beauty. And then there are discordant objects in the show, which might cause one to question what the aesthetic is at all. In this, the beauty, Hales says, lies in the idea behind the artwork.

Laura Hales: I wanted to bring a piece in that, unless you know something about the context of this work, you’re probably just going to be really confused, right?

Stephanie Sy: Yes.

Laura Hales: That you need to kind of know something about this to have an aesthetic experience. So don’t feel bad.

Stephanie Sy: Arizona-based artist Monica Aissa Martinez’s painting Thought Patterns might be more accessible to the average viewer. It’s a rendition of the brain and the artist hopes a visually appealing one.

Monica Aissa Martinez, Artist: The brain is actually my husband’s brain, and it’s him in profile. When you see those bright metallic inks, that’s going to give you some area of the — where the default mode network sits.

It’s kind of deep, deep in the front end of the center of your brain on the back end and the maybe some areas in here.

Stephanie Sy: The default mode network is an area of the brain that shows increased activity when a person is resting or engaged in personal reflection. It’s a state Martinez was in herself at times during the creation of this piece.

Monica Aissa Martinez: So I just would like people to challenge their way of looking at the brain, experiencing it, understanding it, and then talking about it, communicating, sharing. That’s how we learn. That’s how we grow.

Stephanie Sy: Beyond the art world, Anjan Chatterjee’s work explores what’s at stake when we think about beauty in society.

Anjan Chatterjee: We can tell faces from houses, houses from cars. We discriminate things pretty well. Our ability to assign values and discriminate values is not as sharp.

And so what this means is that we find with some consistency that people will conflate aesthetic and moral values.

Stephanie Sy: That’s a problem.

Anjan Chatterjee: It is a problem. It is called the beauty is good stereotype. And the social science evidence of this is quite clear. People who are attractive get higher pay, they get higher more easily. When they commit infractions, they’re given less in the way of punishments.

Stephanie Sy: He’s hoping that exhibit visitors will come away with tools to engage with art and further use those tools to engage more deeply with the world.

You have an aesthetic experience. It’s not just about what you see.

Anjan Chatterjee: Yes.

Stephanie Sy: It is about meaning. It is about, how does that person make you feel?

Anjan Chatterjee: Yes.

Stephanie Sy: It is deeper.

Anjan Chatterjee: Yes.

Stephanie Sy: Is that the goal?

Anjan Chatterjee: That is the goal. And getting back to art, we want — we think this is a vehicle for self-discovery, so that it is not that you need to get the right answer. What do you think, right? And what is it telling you about yourself that you’re having this reaction, right?

So, we think this also — art then becomes a vehicle for people to query themselves.

Stephanie Sy: Brains and Beauty runs through mid-January.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Stephanie Sy in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Credits:

Mirror 4, Collection of Carl & Marilynn Thoma, Copyright: Daniel Rozin
Machine Hallucinations, Study 1, Collection of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, Copyright: Refik Anadol
Quantum Memories Nature Studies, Collection of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, Copyright: Refik Anadol
Mirror No 12, Collection of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, Copyright: Chando Ao
Bouquet 1, Collection of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, Copyright: Jennifer Steinkamp