Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol 17(4), Aug 2023, 428-450; doi:10.1037/aca0000569
Art is often thought to reflect the culture from which it comes. We tested the hypotheses that viewers’ aesthetic experiences of art are modulated by cultural labels as expressed by artist names and by sociocultural content depicted in the artwork. We predicted that people would prefer artworks from their own culture compared to another—an ingroup bias. Across three preregistered experiments, we explored Northern American and Indian participants’ aesthetic judgments and preferences for abstract and representational artworks. Contrary to our predictions, no evidence was found for an ingroup bias in Experiment 1 when American abstract artworks were assigned with fictional American, Indian, Chinese, or Turkish artist names. Aesthetic ratings for artworks were similar across Indian and American participants, irrespective of the cultural label they were assigned. Similarly, no differences in preferences across Indian and American participants were found in Experiment 2 when participants had to make a forced choice between two artworks attributed to Indian and American artists. We found slightly higher shared preferences for Indian artworks among Indian participants compared to American artworks and participants. An ingroup preference for Indian and American/European representational artworks was found in Experiment 3—participants preferred artworks depicting content from their own culture compared to another. Effects across all experiments persisted when controlling for participants’ age, education, art experience, and openness to experience. The modulation of art perception and appreciation by contextual information may be flexible and more influenced by cultural content depicted in artworks than simple cultural framing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)