Visual Art Mesmerizes Us. Music Inspires Stronger Emotions?

Ellen Winner's research on the psychology of art raises some questions

Hello again, subscribers. A warm welcome to anyone just dropping in for this post.

A sweet dividend of my Hard Truths for Poor Artists series are the topics I find to explore along the way. The rabbit holes. The frontage roads. Some of my longstanding resistance to discussing art and money derived from a fear that a socioeconomic lens would blur art’s aesthetics. Not so. Focusing on artists’ economic lives keeps taking me deeper into truth and beauty, which is what we art lovers care about most, right? In classic essay form, I’ll share some recent research on the psychology of art not to land on conclusions but to raise questions. Finally, I’ll ask you to share your experiences in the comments.

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The first draft of my earlier post on artists moving to smaller, more affordable cities included a tip to take artistic genre into account. It’s a solid practical consideration. Writers and visual artists can work alone, so we have flexibility in where we make our home. Performing artists, on the other hand, need other performing artists to realize their work. Unless performing artists tour regularly enough to meet up with collaborators out on the road, they’re better off living in or near a place where they can gather simpatico people to work and perform with them.

A decent, unobjectionable point. But I didn’t stop there, friends. Unfortunately, I went on:

Smaller art scenes may be more open to established visual artists than performing and literary artists. We live in a visually-dominated world. Whatever complex layers of signification painting, sculpture, or photography may hold, people can see this work and respond to its surface alone. Seeing isn’t necessarily believing, but people tend to have some confidence in their visual art tastes and are generally more willing to entertain experiments that they can see.

The editor in me objected. What mess of half-baked notions was I concocting? I cut this section altogether and sent it to my Substack Limbo folder, a kind of shelter for unhoused or unhinged ideas.

Then I remembered the work of Ellen Winner, a major scholar in the psychology of art and experimental aesthetics. Winner has used psychology to research many arts questions that previously were left to philosophers. An intellectually courageous soul, she’s bucked conventional wisdom on the arts again and again. Maybe Winner’s research could help clarify my thoughts on audience responses to various artistic genres.

Ellen Winner’s 2018 book, How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration, was based on many years of research at Harvard and Boston College

I first discovered Winner’s work back when news stories galore were touting art’s impact on quality of life. Music lessons could raise children’s math test scores, we kept hearing. Winner investigated these claims and found no real support for them. She then shifted the conversation away from justifying arts education with test scores and toward the broad habits of mind art does engender in kids: looking closely, thinking critically, and reflecting broadly. Beautiful ways of being. Intrinsic rather than instrumental benefits.

Winner also brought some healthy skepticism to the popular idea that reading fiction or experiencing narrative creates empathy. For Winner, the question is what happens when we close the book or exit the theater. She often quotes psychologist William James, brother of novelist Henry, on sentimentality that doesn’t extend beyond art: “the weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside.”

Winner, by the way, is married to Howard Gardner, author of the multiple intelligences theory and the most cited educational scholar in the U.S. Look out, Taylor and Travis. Winner and Gardner may be the ultimate power couple.

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Feelings, nothing more than feelings

In my 20s, I’d sometimes crusade for experimental music, especially of the improvised variety. Once, I worked at an internet startup with a supervisor who loved to discuss the latest experimental fiction and film with me.

“If you’re into avant-garde stuff, you should come out to hear some improvised music sometime,” I said.

Her eyes widened and she went pale. “Jazz makes my heart beat too fast,” she said. “It gives me too many feelings. I can’t handle it.”

“You don’t have to listen to jazz,” I assured her. “And we can still be friends.”

My supervisor’s tastes were not uncommon. Many urban sophisticates, I’d noticed, rejected the popular and embraced the experimental in all art forms except music, where maybe adding a mellow cello to four-chord pop was about as challenging as they wanted things to get. Why did people seem to approach music differently than other art forms?

My supervisor’s “too many feelings” at jazz shows may be the key. Ellen Winner finds that people report powerful and even transcendent emotional experiences with music, more so than with visual art:

“Of course, we do respond emotionally to both music and visual art, but people report stronger emotional responses to music. I have asked my students to look at a painting for one uninterrupted hour and write down everything they are seeing and thinking . . . The students wrote about all of the things they started to notice, but strikingly absent was any mention of emotions. They reported being mesmerized by the experience but no one talked about being close to tears, something people often report with music.

There seem to be several reasons for music eliciting stronger emotional reactions than the visual arts. The experience of music unrolls over time, and often quite a long time. A work of visual art can be perceived at a glance and people typically spend very little time with each work of art they encounter in a museum. We can turn away from a painting, but we can’t turn away from music, and so a painting doesn’t envelop us in the same way music does.”

This tracks for me. How often do we see someone moved to tears during a concert? Far more often than we see someone weeping in response to a painting. One theory for music’s emotional effect is that it mimics the human voice, which also uses tempo and pitch to express meaning and feeling. Music hits us in the same place our parents’ voices did in infancy. As Winner often mentions, music is also immersive. It envelops us and feels more inside our head than a painting. If visual art challenges our perceptions, we can look away. We cannot turn off our ears to music.

A museum visitor views Untitled (left; 1954) and Yellow Band (1956), two oil on canvas paintings by Mark Rothko during the 2016 “Abstract Expressionism” exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photo: Nils Jorgensen, REX/Shutterstock.com

Winner is quick to acknowledge that our emotional response to visual art depends on how we experience it.

“The painter Mark Rothko said that his paintings were meant to convey and elicit powerful emotions in the viewer, but this is not what most people report. This lack of emotional reaction to visual art is not necessarily because of the art museum; it's because of how people behave in art museums. People often go in groups and talk to one another as they look, diluting their focus. The galleries are often crowded, and people typically spend just a few seconds with each work of art — as if they are just trying to check off each artwork. In contrast, when we listen to music, we cannot "skim," because music extends over time. If people looked at a few visual artworks for extended periods of time, they might report stronger emotional experiences. Ideally, museums should guide people to experience a few works deeply rather than many superficially. Less is more.”

Creating a more contemplative environment is the focus of newish museums like Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland, where visitors walk tree-lined paths for long stretches between installations. I dug my experience there last summer, for sure. Many museums and galleries now curate more immersive time-based art, or artworks that have duration as a dimension.

Winner often cites James Turrell’s architectural spaces as offering more enveloping and emotional experiences. For Father's Day a couple of years ago, my family left home at 4 am, drove a few miles to the hamlet of Green Mountain Falls, and wandered up a dark trail with some doubt until we finally found the town’s newly opened Turrell Skyspace. The structure’s ceiling had an oculus or rectangular opening to the sky’s dawning light and slowly passing clouds, around which changing colors were projected. We lay back on benches for about 45 minutes to contemplate light, color, clouds, and our place in the universe as the sun rose.

The image in the oculus above me could seem as much like a painting as the real sky. That illusion, the uncertainty of our pitch-black walk to the place, and my sustained attention all combined to produce more emotion than I usually feel from visual art. Still, my experience at the Turrell Skyspace was one of easy absorption and peacefulness. Nothing like the symphony, for example, where I close my eyes and ride out a 20-minute storm of aesthetic emotion, returning to the hall afterward as if from a trip to the underworld.

If people do have stronger emotional responses to music than to other arts, it raises a host of questions.

• Does music’s emotional power incline us toward more familiar song forms because familiarity steadies and reassures us in the face of so much emotion?

• Does music’s enveloping nature give it a capacity for greater joy but also stronger repugnance?

• Is visual art somehow easier to like but harder to love because we don’t feel as much in response to it?

• What does all of this say about lovers of more challenging music, those of us for whom too much emotion is just enough?

I’ll turn it over to you. Which art forms tend to elicit the strongest emotional response in you? Why do you think this might be the case?