Giving Meaning to ‘Art’

Featured on nytimes.com

The psychologist George E. Newman of the Yale School of Management studies how people use “quasi-magical thinking” to intuitively determine the value of certain objects. By analyzing celebrity auctions of John F. Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe’s personal effects, he has shown that the price of a piece of memorabilia is connected to how often it was thought to be used or touched by a famous person — as if there’s a kind of real-world value placed on a celebrity’s “essence.”

Recently, Mr. Newman has switched his attention to the art world. In his latest paper, published last month in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science and co-authored by Daniel M. Bartels and Rosanna K. Smith, he staged a pair of experiments that show how flimsy or essential the term “art” can be.

Mr. Newman asked a group of Yale undergraduates to read a scenario about a plastic object, which a college student had made with a wax mold. In half the scenarios, the object was referred to as a tool; in the other half, it was called a sculpture. The students were told that the object was destroyed in a fire, but an exact duplicate of the original object was made using the same mold. Then they were asked whether they believed the copy was essentially the same object. Overwhelmingly, those who were told the object was a tool thought the duplicate was the same object, while those who were told it was a sculpture thought it wasn’t.

“Just labeling something as ‘art’ really changed people’s intuitions,” Mr. Newman said.

In a second experiment, the researchers showed the students an image of an original painting and said that, because of damage, a duplicate painting was commissioned, identical in every way. The researchers then manipulated facts about the original painting: that the artist had painted it himself and thought it was among his very best works, or that he thought of it as “sell-out piece,” got the idea for the design from another painter, and had an assistant execute the painting.

The level of “contagion” — the artist’s personal involvement with the original painting — influenced opinions about the duplicate. In the cases where the artist did not paint the work with his own hand or think highly of it, the participants thought there wasn’t much difference between the copy and the original. In the cases where the artist was personally invested in the original work, the copy was seen as lesser than the other. “It is a copy,” one participant said. “It has no soul.”

“It’s interesting that people have pretty detailed and sophisticated theories about the things that are contributing to art’s value,” Mr. Newman said. “And moreover that those ideas have not that much to do with what the artwork actually looks like.”