voi Cesthat a bond has to be formed between words and images in order for there to be art;
third, they do not demand that interpretational and material novelty are causally or
hierarchically connected; and fourth, they provide a ground for thinking about how
art rethinks itself and in rethinking itself knows itself anew. Rancière provides a clear
and creative potential for the art critic in envisioning the future of the image, but has
little to say about the role of material novelty in the change process. nevertheless, it
has been claimed above that painting can change painting, so how might the material
creativity of the artist contribute to change in art?
Surprise and cognitive transformationKagan writes in the introduction to his book Surprise, Uncertainty and Mental Structures
(2002: 4) that, ‘events that are transformations of an agent’s psychological forms are
significant incentives for brain activity and its psychological consequences [...] events
that are discrepant from schemata create a state one might call surprise.’ surprise occurs
when one’s expectations do not fit the situation. meyer, et al. (1997) have proposed
a staged model of cognitive surprise in which a cognized event is appraised utilizing
a mechanism that computes the degree of discrepancy between the cognized event
and existing beliefs, and then tests this value against an unexpectedness threshold.
Crossing the unexpectedness threshold is accompanied by the experience (emotion)
of surprise, followed by the interruption of ongoing information processing and the
reallocation of processing resources to the analysis and evaluation of the unexpected
event and its resolution, namely the updating and revision of existing schemas or beliefs
(meyer et al. 1997; Reisenzein 2001). The surprise mechanism functions to enable, by
interrupting and refocusing attention and cognitive resources, and to provide an initial
motivational impetus for immediate adaptation to the surprising event and cognitive
change enabling future occurrences of similar events to be handled. Thus surprise
generates curiosity by informing the conscious self about the occurrence of a schema
discrepancy. since this information concerns one’s belief system it involves a meta-
cognitive process: cognition about cognition or knowing about knowing. surprise,
then, provides an impetus for meta- cognition and the exploration and explanation of
the unexpected event (Reisenzein et al. 1996). hence, one way that an art work can be
instrumental in changing understanding of art is by engendering surprise.
There is nothing new in coupling surprise and art:^5 there are many texts that
document encounters with surprising art. one significant example is louis leroy’s
article in Le Charivari reporting on the 1874 exhibition of contemporary art held in the
salon of the photographer nadar, in which leroy, satirizing the artists’ work, coined the
term ‘impressionism’. This article, written as an encounter at the exhibition between
the author and a fictional, academically- trained artist, clearly reveals how leroy’s
expectations are so confounded by the exhibited works as to lead him to question their
very status as art.^6 however, what we are attending to here is the fact that the coupling
of surprise and art is the coupling of cognition and art, and that this coupling can lead
to an altered or expanded understanding of art. To illustrate this point, let us consider
the passages below, extracted from letters to his wife, dated 1907, of the poet Rainer
maria Rilke in which he recalls his encounters with the art of paul Cézanne: