Are you put off by unrecognizable imagery in art? Are you the “what-is-it” type when faced with abstract art? Not to worry. Help is on the way. Kenneth Eskine, a research psychologist at Loyola University, New Orleans, led a team of researchers and found the answer to your problem:
Be afraid. Be very, very afraid. Your nerves need to quiver. Your muscles need to tighten. Your adrenaline level needs to rise. To make sense out of, say, Mark Rothko’s floating rectangles with blurred edges, or the abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky who believed that “art causes vibrations in the soul,” try watching some horror flick like “Scream 4” or whatever terrorizes you. The idea is to scare yourself silly.
Researchers concluded this by investigating the state of mind that would produce a positive reaction to abstract art and it was fear. They asked 85 Brooklyn College students to watch both happy and scary videos before viewing abstract art and it was the scary videos that sensitized them to pictures that don’t look like anything.
This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, according to Eskine:
“At its core, fear is an emotional mechanism that increases survival chances by motivating fight, flight, or freezing responses to threatening situations,” they write. “Fear seizes one’s attention, halts current plans, and increases vigilance. The capacity of a work of art to grab our interest and attention, to remove us from daily life, may stem from its ability to trigger our evolved mechanisms for coping with danger.”
This study prompts memory of a University of Rome study published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts last year. Museum goers in that study were asked for their reaction to two different museum collections in Rome: The Braschi’s display of art from the Renaissance through the 17th century (tagged “ancient art” in the study), and the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art’s display of art from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century - the time when abstract art prevailed.
To hear the sampling of museum visitors tell it, art in the modern museum stirred their hearts while art in the “ancient art” museum was only an intellectual exercise.
Given the Loyola University study, does the University of Rome study mean that its next study should check museum visitors for sweaty palms and rapid heart rates? After all, abstract are isn’t about the seeable world. It’s about our inner world, which can be pretty scary.
All of which recalls something Salvador Dali said: “One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.”
Making his point is his “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln-- Homage to Rothko” in the Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg.
Probably it’s best to see this and other of Dali’s maddening “dreams” after a second look at a flick like “Psycho.”
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