Art enhances meaning by stimulating integrative complexity and aesthetic interest.

Menninghaus et al. portrayed meaning in art as a vehicle for transforming negative emotions into pleasure. Although it is intuitively appealing that meaningful experiences should feel good, meaningfulness does not necessarily entail pleasure or positive emotions. Whereas easily comprehended art may elicit pleasure, meaningfulness is more closely tied to challenge and interest than to pleasure.

Turning art into mere illustration: concretizing art renders its influence context dependent.

Broadly speaking, artworks are accorded a special significance and are recognized as powerful communication tools. In the current research, the authors posit that the "specialness" of artworks may be diminished simply by emphasizing that which is depicted in them. This emphasis results in the artwork being viewed as a mere illustration rather than a work of art. Specifically, the influence of an "artwork as art" is context independent, but the influence of an "artwork as illustration" is context dependent. The authors demonstrate this phenomenon in two experiments, in the context of products associated with artworks. In a third experiment, they further demonstrate that an abstract (concrete) mind-set aligns with the influence of an artwork as art (illustration).

Art for reward's sake: visual art recruits the ventral striatum.

A recent study showed that people evaluate products more positively when they are physically associated with art images than similar non-art images. Neuroimaging studies of visual art have investigated artistic style and esthetic preference but not brain responses attributable specifically to the artistic status of images. Here we tested the hypothesis that the artistic status of images engages reward circuitry, using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during viewing of art and non-art images matched for content. Subjects made animacy judgments in response to each image. Relative to non-art images, art images activated, on both subject- and item-wise analyses, reward-related regions: the ventral striatum, hypothalamus and orbitofrontal cortex. Neither response times nor ratings of familiarity or esthetic preference for art images correlated significantly with activity that was selective for art images, suggesting that these variables were not responsible for the art-selective activations. Investigation of effective connectivity, using time-varying, wavelet-based, correlation-purged Granger causality analyses, further showed that the ventral striatum was driven by visual cortical regions when viewing art images but not non-art images, and was not driven by regions that correlated with esthetic preference for either art or non-art images. These findings are consistent with our hypothesis, leading us to propose that the appeal of visual art involves activation of reward circuitry based on artistic status alone and independently of its hedonic value.