It has recently been suggested that research in neuroscience of art has failed to bring art into focus
in the laboratory. Two general arguments are brought to bear in the regard. The common
perceptual mechanisms argument observes that neuroscientists working within this field develop
models to explain art relative to the ways that artworks are fine-tuned to the operations of perceptual
systems. However, these perceptual explanations apply equally to how viewers come to
recognize and understand a…
Read moreIt has recently been suggested that research in neuroscience of art has failed to bring art into focus
in the laboratory. Two general arguments are brought to bear in the regard. The common
perceptual mechanisms argument observes that neuroscientists working within this field develop
models to explain art relative to the ways that artworks are fine-tuned to the operations of perceptual
systems. However, these perceptual explanations apply equally to how viewers come to
recognize and understand art and nonart objects and events. Therefore these explanations fail to
disambiguate artworks from other things. They fail to locate art. This observation points to a
deeper problem. What interests us in art is how what we perceive has been used to show us what
the work represents. Our understanding of art is governed by a range of productive and evaluative
normative conventions that govern how we ought to look at a work and evaluate how it was
made. The normative dimension of appreciation argument suggests that these aspects of our
engagement with artworks lie outside the scope of neuroscientific explanations of art. This
chapter provides a sketch of a diagnostic recognition framework for engaging art that resolves
both problems and helps explains how artworks function within the social institution of the
artworld to facilitate a communicative exchange between artists and consumers.