Life or art? A model of street art experience.

Psychological research on street art experience has predominantly assumed a focused aesthetic engagement, often overlooking the typical, distracted, and pragmatic ways people encounter street art in daily life. This paper introduces a novel dual-mode psychological model that distinguishes between the default "life mode", characterized by everyday pragmatic functioning, and the exceptional "art mode", involving deliberate aesthetic appreciation. Drawing on existing literature and empirical findings, the model addresses the limitations of prior theories of aesthetic experience, which have provided valuable insights but may not fully capture non-aesthetic modes of street art experience. We provide a psychological conceptualization of street art experience and discuss the contextual complexity of street environments, as well as the varied nature of street art, including both visual and performing arts. The model offers a comprehensive framework for understanding the psychological distinctions between these modes, along with their implications for perception, cognition, and psychological outcomes associated with street art. By advancing theoretical understanding and suggesting new research directions, this model aims to enrich the study of street art experience. Recognizing the duality of street art experience broadens the scope of empirical aesthetics and fosters interdisciplinary dialogues with cultural and urban studies.