Art

68 cards about Art, with explanations, methods and source links.

Cards about Art

• Why does almost every language name red before it names blue?

  Almost every language has a word for red before it has one for blue, and that holds even between languages with no contact at all. The obvious explanation is the eye, except the eye is the same everywhere. One study measured how speakers of three very different languages describe the same color chips. What came out?

  Source: Gibson et al., PNAS

• Why is a ballet dancer not dizzy after twenty turns?

  Deep in the inner ear sit fluid-filled canals that measure rotation. Stop turning and the fluid keeps moving, so the brain reads motion that is no longer happening, and that reading is dizziness. A dancer comes out of twenty turns steady. Why does the same signal not topple her?

  Source: Nigmatullina et al., Cerebral Cortex

• Can an audience in a hall really hear a Stradivarius?

  A Stradivarius, and its Guarneri rivals, are credited with a rare power to fill a hall, and their prices are set on it. To test that, soloists played old and new instruments from behind a screen while hundreds of listeners rated what they heard, not knowing which was which. What did they choose?

  Source: Fritz et al., PNAS

• How do you read a sealed letter without opening it?

  Before modern envelopes, many letters were folded and locked so that the paper itself served as both envelope and security. Opening one physically destroys exactly that evidence. So how do you read them anyway?

  Source: Dambrogio et al., Nature Communications

• Does a Mozart sonata really reduce epileptic seizures?

  The claim that Mozart’s music, and the sonata K448 in particular, reduces epileptic activity got a wide hearing and made its way into medical advice. To test it, eight studies were pooled and run through many combinations of analysis decisions, a multiverse meta-analysis. What survived?

  Source: Oberleiter & Pietschnig, Scientific Reports

• Why is a wholly predictable song boring, and a wholly surprising one exhausting?

  A wholly predictable song is boring and a wholly surprising one is exhausting, so plainly there is some middle. To find it, a model calculated how predictable each note is given what came before, and people rated how much they liked what they heard. Where was the peak?

  Source: Gold et al., Journal of Neuroscience

• Why does a peacock’s eye change color as you move around it?

  A pigment is a substance that swallows particular wavelengths, so the color it gives does not change with the angle. A peacock’s eye does change as you move around it, which means its color does not come from pigment. Where does it come from?

  Source: Sun, Bhushan & Tong, RSC Advances

• Can a few minutes with a text change how well you read another person?

  A famous claim holds that a few minutes of literary fiction immediately improve the ability to infer what another person is feeling. That is too tempting a claim to leave unchecked, so several teams repeated the comparison against popular fiction. What came out when they were pooled?

  Source: van Kuijk et al., Collabra: Psychology

• What happens when a story makes you forget the room you are in?

  Sinking into a story is called narrative transportation: attention, feeling and imagination converge on the world the text offers. Some fear it bypasses criticism, others see only pleasure in it. Researchers pooled dozens of studies to ask what it actually does. What was found?

  Source: van Laer et al., Journal of Consumer Research

• Do rhyme and rhythm change feeling without changing the words?

  A poem does two things at once: it says something, and it sounds a certain way. The two are hard to separate, so researchers systematically altered the rhyme and the meter of exactly the same stanzas and left the words in place. What changed in the response?

  Source: Obermeier et al., Frontiers in Psychology

• Which persuades more, numbers or one person’s story?

  Numbers describe how common something is, and a story makes one outcome concrete. Asking which persuades more sounds like a single question, but persuasion is not a single thing. What does each of them move?

  Source: Zebregs et al., Health Communication

• Does a spoiler really make a story more enjoyable?

  The claim that a spoiler improves enjoyment sounds surprising, which is why it became famous. The explanation offered was processing fluency: knowing the ending makes it easier for the brain to organize the story. A later experiment gave the information before, in the middle, or not at all. What came out?

  Source: Levine et al., Discourse Processes

• Do two minutes in front of art online change how you feel?

  A museum visit takes time and travel, so it is hard to know what exactly in it does the good. To isolate the art itself, participants were randomly assigned to look at an online exhibition for two minutes only. What changed for them?

  Source: Trupp et al., Frontiers in Psychology

• What does the brain do differently when writing a poem and when editing one?

  Creative writing demands both flow and criticism, and those are two things that are hard to do at once. Experienced and novice poets wrote and revised poetry inside a brain scanner, so the two stages could be separated. What happened in each?

  Source: Liu et al., Human Brain Mapping

• Do the same songs move us differently when the musicians are in the room?

  It is easy to say a live show is more moving, and hard to know whether that is the song or the hall. To separate them, one audience heard new songs performed live and another heard exactly the same recordings, with sensors on the heads of both. What told them apart?

  Source: Swarbrick et al., Frontiers in Psychology

• Do the hearts of a concert audience beat together?

  An audience at a concert hears the same music at the same moment, and each person experiences it alone in their own head. To find out whether the body responds together, heart rate, breathing, skin response and movement were recorded in a hundred and thirty-two listeners. What synchronized?

  Source: Tschacher et al., Scientific Reports

• Why does a chill arrive just before the peak of a song, and not at it?

  Dopamine is a substance the brain releases around things it marks as rewarding, such as food or a win. Scans of people listening to music that moves them show the reward system lighting up at two separate times rather than one, and a chill arrives at one of them. When exactly?

  Source: Zatorre & Salimpoor, PNAS

• How did a blue stone in a nun’s teeth change what we knew about manuscripts?

  Ultramarine is an intense blue extracted from lapis lazuli, which at the time was mined in Afghanistan alone and cost as much as gold. Its use was reserved for the most luxurious manuscripts. And then grains of it were found in the calculus on a woman’s teeth. How did they get there?

  Source: Radini et al., Science Advances

• Why is Van Gogh’s yellow turning brown, and why can it not be brought back?

  The yellow Van Gogh loved is called chrome yellow, a compound of lead and chromium invented in the 19th century that was cheap and brilliant. Today some of those areas look greenish brown. What is happening to the material, and why can it not be reversed?

  Source: Monico et al., Analytical Chemistry

• Can a museum visit improve how you feel, or is it just an outing?

  A museum can be a place of curiosity, and it can also be crowded, confusing and exhausting. So “a museum visit does you good” cannot always be true. A review examined what in the experience decides. What separated a restorative visit from the other kind?

  Source: Šveb Dragija & Jelinčić, Behavioral Sciences

• Does reading literary fiction make us more empathic?

  Empathy is not one ability: you can understand what another person thinks, and you can feel with them, and those are two different things. To find out what literature does, researchers randomly assigned hundreds of people to read literary fiction, science fiction or non-fiction, and measured both sides separately. What changed?

  Source: Pino & Mazza, PLOS ONE

• Does a story on an e-reader land less well than one on paper?

  A common claim is that a screen makes us skim literature. To test it, hundreds of people were divided to read the opening of exactly the same novel, some on an e-reader and some in a printed book, and then comprehension, speed and experience were examined. What separated them?

  Source: Schwabe et al., Journal of Research in Reading

• What does an explanation beside a painting do to the way we look?

  Beside a painting in a museum you can put a name and a date alone, or you can add an explanation of what appears in it. The assumption is that the explanation enriches. Researchers measured eye movements, pupils and skin conductance against the two kinds of label. What actually changed?

  Source: Castellotti et al., PLOS ONE

• Is watching dance live, in a room full of people, different from watching a recording?

  Watching a performance live and in a crowd feels unlike watching the same thing at home. It is hard to say whether it truly is different, or whether that is only a story we tell about it. At three dance performances, up to 23 audience members wore mobile EEG caps at the same time. What did the recordings show?

  Source: iScience

• Does seeing the pianist change the heart rate of the audience?

  An audience hearing the same music does not have to feel the same thing, and the body may still answer the same moments at the same time. At piano concerts, researchers compared pieces the audience only heard against pieces it also watched, and recorded every heartbeat in the room. What changed?

  Source: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

• How many different feelings can music raise without saying a word?

  Musical emotion is usually described on two axes, pleasant against unpleasant and calm against stirring. To see whether two are enough, listeners in the United States and in China rated what each of 2,168 music excerpts made them feel, which is a direct comparison across cultures. How many dimensions does it actually take?

  Source: Cowen et al., PNAS

• Can a wristband reading your pulse change what you remember from a museum?

  A wristband logging your heart rate in a gallery can feel like intrusive monitoring, and it also turns your attention toward what you are feeling. To see which effect wins, a randomized trial had some visitors to a temporary art exhibition wear one, and then checked their emotions and their memory of the works. What came out?

  Source: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications

• The wings are blue, and there is almost no blue in them. How?

  Ordinary color comes from pigment, a substance that swallows some wavelengths and returns the rest. A Morpho wing holds almost no blue pigment and is among the bluest things in nature. Researchers compared the wing scales of 16 species under a microscope and a spectrometer. Where does the color come from?

  Source: Giraldo et al., Journal of Experimental Biology

• What changes when a story says "I" instead of "he"?

  The same literary events can be told in the first person or the third, with nothing in the plot altered. It sounds like a grammatical decision. Researchers swapped the pronouns in real literary stories, recorded skin conductance while people read, and asked them afterwards how the reading felt. What does the swap do to a reader?

  Source: Hartung et al., PLOS ONE

• Does a spoiler really ruin every story before you get to it?

  A famous set of experiments found the opposite of the cultural rule about a spoiler. Told the ending in advance, readers enjoyed short stories as much as or more than unspoiled ones. Later work suggested that result might depend on who the reader is. A new pair of experiments spoiled short stories in one and television episodes in the other. What separated them?

  Source: Daniel and Katz, Psychological Reports

• How does a story change a mind without presenting a single argument?

  A persuasive argument is built from a claim, evidence and a conclusion, which is what everybody was taught. A story does none of that and changes attitudes anyway. A meta-analysis pooled two decades of research on the phenomenon in which a reader mentally enters the world a story evokes. Through what does it work?

  Source: van Laer et al., Journal of Consumer Research

• What is actually fading The Scream?

  The 1910 version of Munch’s painting in Oslo is losing its cadmium yellow, and a museum’s first instinct with a fading picture is to cut the light. The chemistry of why these paints break down was still poorly understood. So what is doing the damage?

  Source: Monico et al., Science Advances

• What did Leonardo put down before he painted the Mona Lisa?

  Under the paint of any panel painting sits a ground layer, the preparation that covers the wood. For the Mona Lisa that layer had never been analyzed, because getting a sample from it is not something anybody does lightly. One exceptional microsample went to a synchrotron.

  Source: Gonzalez et al., Journal of the American Chemical Society

• Can a lock of hair answer what Beethoven died of?

  Beethoven’s career was shaped by progressive hearing loss, recurring gastrointestinal complaints and liver disease, and in 1802 he asked that after his death his disease be described and made public. Medical biographers have proposed many hypotheses since, several of them substantially heritable. His hair survives.

  Source: Begg et al., Current Biology

• What was painted on a Han dynasty tomb wall?

  Mural paintings in a tomb at Luoyang, dated to the Western Han dynasty between 206 BC and 8 AD, carry barium copper silicate pigments that do not occur as minerals. Their artificial nature was never in doubt. One crystal in the samples was another matter.

  Source: Zhang, Ma and Berke, Heritage Science

• Is the Mona Lisa’s expression really ambiguous?

  The fascination with the painting has always been credited to the emotional ambiguity of her face. Ambiguity is a claim about viewers, which makes it testable. So the mouth curvature was manipulated into a range of happier and sadder variants, and people were asked what they saw.

  Source: Liaci et al., Scientific Reports

• How do you find paint that is no longer there?

  Ancient sculpture was painted, and what survives on the marble is often invisible to the naked eye. Luminescence imaging finds those traces, and the two pigments that matter most, Egyptian blue and rose madder lake, each needed a different technique, a different lamp and a different setup. That is the problem addressed here.

  Source: Dyer and Sotiropoulou, Heritage Science

• Why do so few scales get used out of all the possible ones?

  Humans can distinguish about 240 different pitches across an octave in the middle of the hearing range, so the number of possible tone collections is enormous. Western classical, folk and popular music, along with many other traditions, keep returning to a handful of scales of five to seven tones. Nobody knew why.

  Source: Gill and Purves, PLOS ONE

• Does singing together release the bonding hormone?

  Salivary oxytocin is increasingly used to track the hormone’s release, and both positive social contact and stress are known to trigger it, which makes the two hard to separate. Choir singing lifts mood and creates social closeness, so it looks like the ideal test. The result went the other way.

  Source: Schladt et al., Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

• Does making something with your hands lower a stress hormone?

  Art therapy rests on the assumption that making things does something measurable to a person, and self-reports agree it feels good. A hormone in saliva would be harder to argue with. The question is whether the effect depends on being any good at art.

  Source: Kaimal et al., Art Therapy

• Does music before a workout change what your body can do?

  Music during exercise is well studied, and most gyms run on the assumption. Music before it is a different claim: the headphones come off before the effort starts, so anything left is carried in the body rather than in the beat. Thirty controlled studies have tested it.

  Source: Delleli et al., Frontiers in Psychology

• Does following the text help while you listen to a book?

  Audiobooks let language learners read and listen to the same text at once, and the effects of that bimodal input on comprehension have been inconsistent. So the conditions under which audiobooks help are not well understood. Reading speed and text complexity are the obvious candidates for what decides it.

  Source: Hui, The Modern Language Journal

• Why would reading novels make somebody better with people?

  Readers of novels are said to end up better at reading people, a claim readers enjoy and skeptics distrust. Reading and social cognition do both recruit the default network, which is the kind of overlap that could explain it. A shared network is a mechanism worth testing rather than a finding on its own.

  Source: Tamir et al., Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

• What does a rhyme do to the line you read four lines ago?

  Alliterative phrases reach below the level of the word and pull back earlier lines that share their sound, which is why alliteration has long served as a powerful device for studying implicit memory. Poets claim rhyme does something similar. Whether any other surface form reaches back the same way stayed open.

  Source: Lea et al., Memory & Cognition

• Does the same painting feel different in a museum than on a screen?

  Almost everything known about how people respond to art comes from laboratories, where images can be timed and controlled. Whether those findings describe a gallery visit is assumed rather than tested. So two groups viewed the same art exhibition, one in the museum and one in the laboratory, both wearing mobile eye trackers, and then rated every work on liking, interest, understanding and ambiguity. Did the setting matter?

  Source: Brieber et al., PLOS ONE

• Does music move you because of the sound, or because you know it?

  Pleasure from music tracks emotional arousal closely, and that has been shown with electrodermal activity, an objective measure, while people listen to music they already know. Knowing the piece brings expectation and prediction with it, so the correlation might depend on memory rather than on sound. Testing that needs music nobody has heard. So 33 listeners were given 70 entirely unfamiliar excerpts.

  Source: van den Bosch et al., Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

• Why was blue the last color to arrive in painting?

  Painting is more than 30,000 years old, and what painters could use has always been set by what was available. Yellow and red ochre came out of surface minerals and black out of charcoal, so cave painters had them. The blue of sky and water is not a surface mineral anywhere convenient. A review traces the two blues that carried painting from Ancient Egypt to the seventeenth century.

  Source: Fabbrizzi, ChemTexts

• Why do you still talk about one particular meal on holiday years later?

  Culinary tourism is marketed almost entirely on authenticity: eat what the locals eat, where they eat it. That is a claim about what produces a memorable experience, and it is testable by asking people. So more than 1,000 respondents across four countries were asked to describe their single most memorable food or drink travel experience, and the descriptions were analyzed qualitatively. What was actually in them?

  Source: Stone et al., Journal of Travel Research

• Are contracts impenetrable because of the law, or because of the prose?

  Contracts govern everyday life and remain famously unreadable to the people signing them. Legal theory has an explanation ready: law is a system built on expert knowledge of technical concepts, so difficulty is the price of precision. That predicts the trouble lies in the ideas. The alternative is that it lies in the sentences. So the authors measured a corpus of roughly 10 million words, and then tested readers.

  Source: Martínez et al., Cognition

• Who was wearing royal purple at a desert copper mine?

  Purple from murex sea snails was the most expensive dye of the ancient Mediterranean, and its importance goes back to the early second millennium BCE. Dyed textiles almost never survive, so the evidence is mostly written. Then three samples of prestigious fiber turned up in the textile collection from Timna Valley, an Iron Age copper smelting site in the Israeli desert. What was in the dye?

  Source: Sukenik et al., PLOS ONE

• Why would anybody put on music they know will make them sad?

  Sadness is normally something people arrange their lives to avoid, and then they queue up music that reliably produces it. An online survey of 772 participants from Western and Eastern backgrounds asked what the rewards actually are, which listener characteristics predict appreciating sad music, and by what route the music produces the feeling at all. The most frequent emotion reported is not the one in the question.

  Source: Taruffi and Koelsch, PLOS ONE

• When did people start painting a story rather than a thing?

  Dating rock art is hard, and the usual method dissolves a sample of the calcite crust that formed over a painting to measure uranium decay. That averages across whatever the sample happened to contain. A new application of the same chemistry images the crust instead, at much finer spatial accuracy, and it was turned on the limestone caves of Maros-Pangkep in South Sulawesi. What did the better resolution do to the dates?

  Source: Oktaviana et al., Nature

• How do you find the paint on a sculpture that looks like bare stone?

  Classical sculpture reads as white because the paint is gone, and traces of it survive in quantities too small for the eye. Luminescence imaging finds them: shine the right light and certain pigments glow, revealing where decoration used to be. Two pigments have been pivotal for Hellenistic material, and mapping them has required two separate techniques with two different light sources. Can one setup do both?

  Source: Dyer and Sotiropoulou, Heritage Science

• Can you tell who made a prehistoric hand stencil from the hand?

  Hand stencils are direct impressions of an artist’s hand, dating back more than forty thousand years, which makes them look like the best available evidence about who was painting. Reading a biological profile off them has proved very hard. Geometric morphometrics works well on shapes in other disciplines, so the obvious question is whether it transfers. The complication is that archaeological hands are splayed differently.

  Source: Fernández Navarro et al., Scientific Reports

• Why is one Patagonian cave wall covered in hundreds of hands?

  Cueva de las Manos in Argentina takes its name from the stencilled outlines of human hands that screen its entrance. A single hand is a signature; a wall of them is something else. The site also holds guanacos and hunting scenes, and the art was not made in one visit. UNESCO’s World Heritage listing describes what the accumulation actually looks like, and how long it took.

  Source: UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Cueva de las Manos

• How do you prove a painting dated 1866 was made after 1950?

  Date the paint, not the canvas. Hendriks and colleagues took two microsamples from a painting carrying the date 1866: a canvas fiber and a paint chip under two hundred micrograms. The canvas came back consistent with the nineteenth century. The paint came back post-1950. That mismatch is the forger’s method made visible.

  Source: Hendriks et al., PNAS

• Can you authenticate a Pollock by measuring its fractals?

  No. The claim that fractal analysis could unambiguously characterize drip paintings became urgent when a cache of disputed Pollocks turned up. Jones-Smith, Mathur and Krauss analyzed paintings by Pollock and by others and concluded, in their own words, definitively: fractal criteria provide no information about artistic authenticity.

  Source: Jones-Smith et al., Physical Review E

• Who was looking at photographic images before photography existed?

  Artists, for centuries, through a box. The camera obscura was a small wooden box with a lens at one end. It projected the scene in front of it onto frosted glass at the back, where an artist could trace the outlines on thin paper. The image was already there. What nobody could do was make it stay.

  Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

• Does going to the theatre lower your risk of depression?

  Fancourt and Tymoszuk followed two thousand one hundred and forty-eight older adults in England who were free of depression at the start, and tracked them for ten years. Those who went to museums, theatre or cinema every few months had a 32 percent lower risk of developing depression. For those going monthly or more, the figure was 48 percent.

  Source: Fancourt and Tymoszuk, The British Journal of Psychiatry

• Does speaking Cantonese give you a musician’s ear?

  Something close to it. Bidelman, Hutka and Moreno compared musicians, Cantonese speakers and English-speaking nonmusicians on pitch acuity, music perception and general cognitive measures. Musicians did better than the nonmusicians on every auditory measure. So did the Cantonese speakers, by a comparable margin, without any musical training at all.

  Source: Bidelman et al., PLOS ONE

• Do spoilers really make a story more enjoyable?

  The famous result did not hold up here. Earlier work found that telling readers the ending first increased their enjoyment, possibly by making the story easier to process. Levine, Betzner and Autry replicated the method closely with different stories and found the opposite: spoilers given before a story reduced enjoyment. Given mid-story, they made no discernible difference.

  Source: Levine et al., Discourse Processes

• Why did a Renaissance silver stag drive itself across the table?

  To decide who drank next. Diana and the Stag, made by Joachim Friess in Augsburg around 1620, is a clockwork table ornament that ran across a tabletop under its own power. The stag’s body is hollow and holds the drink. These automata were used in drinking games at princely festivities, and the machine, not the host, chose the victim.

  Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

• How do you fit a sequence of portraits onto a single plate?

  With a sliding plateholder, patented by one of the photographers. Southworth and Hawes of Boston used it around 1850 to take eight sequential exposures on one silvered copper plate, producing a medallion portrait of an unidentified woman. Each daguerreotype plate is unique and cannot be reprinted, which is what makes a repeated sitter on one plate so difficult.

  Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

• Is there a shape a melody has to have to get stuck?

  Yes, and it is a slightly odd shape. Jakubowski and colleagues took the tunes three thousand survey participants named most often as earworms, matched a hundred of them against a hundred tunes nobody named, and compared the two groups on eighty-three melodic features. Earworms had more common overall contours and less common gradients between their turning points.

  Source: Jakubowski et al., Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts

• Can one concert hall be the best-sounding one?

  Not on this evidence. Lokki and colleagues note that studies often treat a hall’s acoustics as a single entity, then show that they are not. The acoustics vary between seats, and the choice of music changes what listeners perceive. Twenty-eight assessors compared six unoccupied halls, and they did not agree with each other either.

  Source: Lokki et al., Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

• Is an upside-down hanging chain really the ideal arch?

  Only under an assumption no real arch satisfies. Lewis derives the shapes of rigid, two-pin, moment-less arches of constant cross-section, and recovers both classical answers, the parabola and the catenary, as special cases. Each depends on an unrealistic load condition: the catenary assumes no load besides arch self weight, and the parabola assumes no arch weight at all. The span to rise ratio then fixes which shape a real design lands on.

  Source: Lewis, Proceedings of the Royal Society A

• Can anyone still read the notation on ancient Greek music?

  Enough of it to reconstruct how the melodies modulate. Lynch brings together evidence preserved by Aristoxenus, Aristides Quintilianus, Ptolemy, Porphyry and the Greek musical handbooks in a single framework. A reconstruction of the Classical modulation system, she shows, is confirmed by the melodies recorded in the surviving musical documents.

  Source: Lynch, Greek and Roman Musical Studies

• What happened when someone played Tutankhamun’s trumpets?

  They were broadcast worldwide, and then blamed for a war. Among the things found in the tomb were two trumpets, the only ones conveyed to us from Egyptian antiquity. After material damage and subsequent restorations, they were played in a performance for the BBC in 1939, to record what sounds could have graced Pharaonic ears.

  Source: Lebée, Playing and operating: functionality in museum objects and instruments

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