Pablo Picasso once said, “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”
If we didn’t buy in to the “lie” of art, there would obviously be no galleries or exhibitions, no art history textbooks or curators; there would not have been cave paintings or Egyptian statues or Picasso himself. Yet, we seem to agree as a species that it’s possible to recognize familiar things in art and that art can be pleasing.
To explain why, look no further than the brain.
The human brain is wired in such a way that we can make sense of lines, colors and patterns on a flat canvas. Artists throughout human history have figured out ways to create illusions such as depth and brightness that aren’t actually there but make works of art seem somehow more real.
And while individual tastes are varied and have cultural influences, the brain also seems to respond especially strongly to certain artistic conventions that mimic what we see in nature.
The article then discusses elements we recognise in art. Examples are included to help explain these points.
Lines
That a line drawing of a face can be recognized as a face is not specific to any culture. Infants and monkeys can do it. Stone Age peoples did line drawings; the Egyptians outlined their figures, too.
It turns out that these outlines tap into the same neural processes as the edges of objects that we observe in the real world. The individual cells in the visual system that pick out light-dark edges also happen to respond to lines, Cavanagh said. We’ll never know who was the first person to create the first “sketch,” but he or she opened the avenue to our entire visual culture.
Faces
This brings us to modern-day emoticons; everyone can agree that this :-) is a sideways happy face, even though it doesn’t look like any particular person and has only the bare minimum of facial features. Our brains have a special affinity for faces and for finding representations of them (some say they see the man in the moon, for instance). Even infants have been shown in several studies to prefer face-like patterns over patterns that don’t resemble anything.
Color vs. luminance
To trick the brain into thinking something looks three-dimensional and lifelike, artists add elements – lightness and shadows – that wouldn’t be present in real life but that tap into our hard-wired visual sensibilities.
Mona Lisa’s smile
The human visual system is organized such that the center of gaze is specialized for small, detailed things, and the peripheral vision has a lower resolution – it’s better at big, blurry things.
That’s why, as your eyes move around the Mona Lisa’s face, her expression appears to change, Livingstone says. The woman was painted such that, looking directly at the mouth, she appears to smile less than when you’re staring into her eyes. When you look away from the mouth, your peripheral visual system picks up shadows from her cheeks that appear to extend the smile.
Shadows and mirrors
From a scientific standpoint, it’s possible to determine exactly how shadows are supposed to look based on the placements of light and how mirror reflections appear at given angles. But the brain doesn’t perform such calculations naturally. […]
Studies have shown that people don’t generally have a good working knowledge of how reflections should appear, or where, in relation to the original object, Cavanagh said. Paintings with people looking into mirrors or birds reflected in ponds have been fooling us for centuries.
Why we like art
There are certain aspects of art that seem universally appealing, regardless of the environment or culture in which you grew up, argues V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego. He discusses these ideas in his recent book “The Tell Tale Brain.”
Symmetry, for instance, is widely considered to be beautiful. There’s an evolutionary reason for that, he says: In the natural world, anything symmetrical is usually alive. Animals, for instance, have symmetrical shapes.
And then there’s what Ramachandran calls the “peak shift principle.” The basic idea is that animals attracted to a particular shape will be even more attracted to an exaggerated version of that form.
[T]he distorted faces of famous artists such as Pablo Picasso and Gustav Klimt may be hyperactivating our neurons and drawing us in, so to speak. Impressionism, with its soft brushstrokes, is another form of distortion of familiar human and natural forms.
Further research: Can we know what is art?
There’s now a whole field called neuroesthetics devoted to the neural basis of why and how people appreciate art and music and what is beauty.
Semir Zeki at University College London is credited with establishing this discipline, and says it’s mushrooming. Many scientists who study emotion are collaborating in this area. Zeki is studying why people tend prefer certain patterns of moving dots to others.
There have been several criticisms about neuroesthetics as a field. Philosopher Alva Noe wrote in The New York Times last year that this branch of science has not produced any interesting or surprising insights, and that perhaps it won’t because of the very nature of art itself – how can anyone ever say definitively what it is?
Zeki said many challenges against his field are based on the false assumption that he and colleagues are trying to explain works of art.
“We’re not trying to explain any work of art,” he said. “We’re trying to use works of art to understand the brain.”