ArtsZipper

Presented by Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum - Washington University in St. Louis
Visual Arts
General Audiences

The past decade has seen an explosion of interest in the bearing of cognitive science on the arts. New brain imaging technologies and sophisticated psychological measures have provided insights into the artist’s creative process and the perceiver’s response to art. What goes on in the minds of artists and audiences depends on perception, memory, and thought generally—capacities we ascribe to the brain. This investigation of art elucidates the mind and its relation to the brain; the mind-brain, as it might be called. This research has also led to the development of neuroaesthetics, a new field which addresses questions about beauty, artistic expression, and style in neurological terms.

The Teaching Gallery exhibition Art and the Mind-Brain presents works from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection that give rise to a rich variety of aesthetic experiences, which can be explained in terms of a number of theories in cognitive science, revealing important aspects of how we see and think.