So a liking for abstract art can't be explained by peer pressure. Yet Hawley-Dolan's experiment didn't explain how we detect the hand of the human artist, nor the reason why the paintings appeal to us. With a realistic picture, we might relate to the expression on a person's face, or we might find symbolism in a still life. But how does the artist hold our attention with an image that bears no likeness to anything in the real world?
Of course, each artist's unique style will speak to us in a different way, so there can be no single answer. Nevertheless, a few studies have tackled the issue from various angles. Robert Pepperell, an artist based at Cardiff University, UK, for instance, has worked with Alumit Ishai of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, to understand the way we process ambiguous figures. They may look familiar, but "don't add up to something immediately recognisable", Pepperell says. Like the work of Wassily Kandinsky or certain pieces by Gerhard Richter, Pepperell's paintings, which sometimes take the composition of older masterpieces (see images here and here), are not entirely abstract but neither can they be readily interpreted like a representational painting.
In one study, Pepperell and Ishai asked volunteers to decide whether they saw anything familiar in the piece. In a quarter of the cases they claimed to recognise something real, even when there was nothing definite to pick out. They also had to judge how "powerful" they considered the artwork to be. It turned out that the longer they took to answer these questions, the more highly they rated the piece under scrutiny. And this delay seems to be filled with widespread neural activity, as revealed by later fMRI scans. From these results, you could conclude that the brain sees these images as a puzzle - it struggles to "solve" the image, and the harder it is to decipher the meaning, the more rewarding we find that moment of recognition (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol 5, p 1).
This doesn't necessarily tell us much about the more abstract work of Rothko, Pollock or Mondrian, since these artists do not offer even the merest glimpse of a recognisable object for the brain to latch on to. But they may instead catch our attention through particularly well-balanced compositions that appeal to the brain's visual system.
Consider the art of Mondrian, whose work consists exclusively of horizontal and vertical lines encasing blocks of colour. (His conviction in this principle was so strong that fellow artist Theo van Doesburg's decision to use diagonal lines ended their friendship.) Mondrian's art is deceptively simple, but eye-tracking studies confirm that the patterns are meticulously composed, and that simply rotating a piece radically changes the way we view it. In the originals, the volunteers' eyes tended to linger for longer on certain places in the image, but in the rotated versions they would flit across the piece more rapidly. As a result, they considered the altered images less pleasurable when they later rated the work (Journal of Vision, vol 7, p 1445). Changing Mondrian's colours has a similar effect: in one example, a large square of red in one corner is offset by a small dark blue square on the opposite side, which contrasts more strongly with the surrounding white. When the researchers swapped these colours, it threw off the balance, leading the volunteers to take less enjoyable journeys around the piece (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol 5, p 98).
The same is probably true of many other works. Oshin Vartanian at the University of Toronto, Canada, for example, recently asked volunteers to compare a series of original paintings to a set in which the composition had been altered by moving objects around within the frame. He found that almost everyone preferred the original, whether it was a still-life painting by Vincent van Gogh or Joan Miró's abstract Bleu I.
What's more, Vartanian found that manipulating the objects reduced activation in areas of the brain linked with meaning and interpretation (NeuroReport, vol 15, p 893). The results suggest that our mind notes the careful arrangements and senses the intention behind the paintings, even if we are not consciously aware of the fact. It is unlikely, to say the least, that the chimps or children would ever hit upon such carefully considered structures. That may explain why the volunteers in Hawley-Dolan's study tended to prefer the work of the experienced artists.
Besides the balance of the composition, we may also be drawn in by pieces that hit a sweet spot in the brain's ability to process complex scenes, says Alex Forsythe, a psychologist at the University of Liverpool, UK. She used a compression algorithm to judge the visual complexity of different pieces of art. The program tries to find shortcuts to store an image in the smallest number of bits - the more complex the piece, the longer the string of digits used to store the painting on the hard drive, offering a more objective measure that human judgement. The results suggested that many artists - from Edouard Manet to Pollock - used a certain level of detail to please the brain. Too little and the work is boring, but "too much complexity results in a kind of perceptual overload", says Forsythe.
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