History and Intentions in the Experience of Artworks

The role of personal background knowledge—in particular knowledge about the context of production of an artwork—has been only marginally taken into account in cognitive approaches to art. Addressing this issue is crucial to enhancing these approaches’ explanatory power and framing their collaboration with the humanities (Bullot and Reber, in press). This paper sketches a model of the experience of artworks based on the mechanisms of intention attribution, and shows how this model makes it possible to address the issue of personal background knowledge empirically. I claim that the role of intention attribution in art experience has been incorrectly accounted in the literature because of an overly narrow definition of “intention.” I suggest that the observer can recover not only the artist’s abstract projects, but any kind of mental states that have played a causal role during the production of the work. In addition, I suggest that this recovery occurs in large part unconsciously and/or implicitly. I provide support for these claims by distinguishing three families of psychological mechanisms of intention attribution that are activated by artworks: one involved in the cognition of artifacts, one devoted to communication, and one involved in action perception. 1. Cognitive approaches and history Until now, cognitive approaches to art have mainly searched for “artistic universals”— that is, for properties of artworks that mark them as having an intrinsic artistic value (positive or negative) independent of the work’s context of production. For instance, Ramachandran and Hirstein (1999) claimed that the elicitation of a peak-shift effect is an artistic universal. A peak-shift effect happens when a feature used by recognition processes is exaggerated and produces an unusually strong response in the underlying neural circuits. Ramachandran and Hirstein give the example of some Hindu statuettes that allegedly hyperactivate mechanisms for recognizing the female body by exaggerating the features that recognition processes use to ijn _0 07 50 95 2, v er si on 1 12 N ov 2 01 2 Author manuscript, published in "Topoi (2012) 1-10" DOI : 10.1007/s11245-012-9145-8