What Can Happen When We Look at Art?: An Exploratory Network Model and Latent Profile Analysis of Affective/Cognitive Aspects Underlying Shared, Supraordinate Responses to Museum Visual Art

Art-viewing is a defining component of society and culture, in part because the experience involves a wide-range and nuanced configuration of emotional and cognitive responses. Precisely because of this complexity, however, questions of the actual nature, scope, and variety of art experience remain largely unanswered: what kinds of patterns do we exhibit, how do various components go together, and can these be distilled into some number of shared experiential outcomes? We introduce a preliminary, exploratory study based on 345 individuals’ unique experiences with artworks from three exhibitions. Experiences were assessed via 46 affective/cognitive items based on a recent model, with individuals reporting to what degree they felt each during their encounter. Network/latent profile analyses revealed five patterns, aligning to a Harmonious, Facile, Transformative, and two Negative outcomes. These largely supported model hypotheses, connected to specific appraisals, and could be found, although with varying probability, across individual viewers and artworks.