The question of just how works of art are experienced is, of course,
at the heart of research on art and cognition. How are works of visual
art, music, dance, and literature perceived and understood? And how do
they affect the emotions? Does the perception of art differ in important
respects from other perceptual experience? Why does the perception of
a work of art, although distinctly apart from one’s “real life,” often elicit
an intense emotional response? These are some of the questions that
researchers increasingly seek scientifically informed answers to.
Growing interest in the relationship between art and cognition has been
a natural outgrowth of the “cognitive revolution” (a paradigm shift away
from behaviorism’s focus on stimulus-response mechanisms as the key to
understanding how the mind works)—which began in academic psychol-
ogy in the early 1960s and continues to expand our understanding of men-
tal processes. Philosophers of art are recognizing that the new knowledge
gained should influence their own discipline. Accordingly, in the summer
of 2002, several prominent aestheticians—among them, Jerrold Levinson
(then president of the American Society for Aesthetics)—organized an aca-
demic institute entitled “Art, Mind, and Cognitive Science,” funded by the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), to help scholars of the
arts take account of both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind in
their undergraduate courses. As one might expect, the burgeoning interest
in this subject is also reflected in numerous scholarly journals. Among oth-
ers, the interdisciplinary Journal of Consciousness Studies(JCS) has
devoted three special issues to the relationship between art and the brain or
mind. That journal’s founding editor, the late Joseph Goguen (a prominent
computer scientist), is quoted in the epigraph to this essay. In 2003, the
philosophical journal The Monistpublished an issue entitled “Art and the
Mind.” Tellingly, The Monist’s call for papers defined works of art as “cog-
nitive devices aimed at the production of rich cognitive effects”—a defini-
tion that I will more than once return to in relation to purported avant-garde
innovations in the arts.^3
Finally, efforts to understand how cognitive processes are involved in
the creation and perception of works of art have not been confined to
higher education. Individuals concerned with teaching elementary and
high school students have also been keenly pursuing this line of inquiry.
Annual meetings of the National Art Education Association, for exam-
ple, abound in sessions devoted to cognitivist approaches to the teaching
of art. And a book entitled Art and Cognition—by Arthur Efland, pro-
fessor emeritus of art education at Ohio State University—not only
emphasized the cognitive content of art works but also argued that visual
art can contribute to the overall development of the mind.^438 Michelle Marder Kamhi