The primary author on this article is Dr. Rebekah Rodriguez-Boerwinkle, Yale University.
Why do we hang art on our walls, visit museums, and scroll through digital galleries? Sure, art can be beautiful or moving. But philosophers and psychologists have been arguing that it can do something else, too: teach us.
In a recent talk at Yale University, Dr. Eileen Cardillo, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, presented the latest research providing insights about how this happens.
Bringing Ourselves into the Experience of Art
The first research lesson is that art’s power to inform and enlighten isn’t just about the artwork itself. Instead, the viewer plays an essential role.
To examine what makes art memorable, researchers asked art viewers to reflect on experiences with art and describe aloud what the art they remembered looked like, where they were when they saw it, how they felt, and what else they thought about. From the responses, the team gleaned that memorable art experiences are marked by intense concentration, awareness of a variety of bodily sensations, and people making connections to personal experiences or events from their lives.
In other words, it’s not just what you look at but how you look and how actively you engage with art.
From Feeling to Thinking
The second lesson is about a key ingredient in the process of learning from art: emotion. Emotional engagement is what activates art’s impact on our thinking. It’s when we’re moved, stirred, or even bewildered by a work of art that we’re most likely to reflect, connect, and understand something new about ourselves or our world.
Researchers wanted to understand how art affects people emotionally, so they studied the language people use when they talk about art as a window into emotion. Working with art experts, they created a taxonomy of emotional impacts of art. The roadmap lays out the words people use to describe the many ways art can look and feel.
The taxonomy helps show how widespread and varied emotional responses to art are. We tend to most readily associate art with pleasure (being joyful, inviting, or even seductive), calm (feeling grounded or consoled), and interest (feeling gripped and engaged). In our mind’s eye, we can see paintings by Monet and Renoir, Constable or Corot, perhaps Kandinsky and nod in recognition. But art can be much more.
At the opposite end of pleasure is art that is upsetting (evoking anxiety or discomfort, or is unsettling) and provokes anger (being offended, horrified, or disgusted, or is subversive). Although such feelings don’t come immediately to mind when we think about our reactions to art, they are common reactions to some masterpieces of Titian and Caravaggio and to more contemporary artists, such as Serrano or Maplethorpe.
Art can be challenging and inspire curiosity, it can elicit compassion, and it can make us feel swept away into a world of wonder and awe. Art can make us feel edified and transcendent, uplifted, inspired, and hopeful. And art can spark new insights and a sense of being enlightened.
These emotional responses aren’t just fleeting reactions; they often open the door to deeper understanding. When people feel moved, provoked, or even unsettled by a work of art, they tend to think more deeply about what details in the art are causing them to feel that way, what it means, and why it matters in their lives. In this way, emotion becomes a kind of entry point for reflection and interpretation.
Art Shapes Our Experience of a Place
Finally, researchers explored how our surroundings shape what we learn from art. In a study of public murals in Philadelphia, a city known for its vibrant street art, they asked participants to visit two neighborhoods: Center City, an affluent area, and West Philadelphia, a lower-income area less frequently visited for most of the participants. In each neighborhood, participants viewed either a colorful mural or a blank building wall on the same block. Afterward, they answered questions about how the artwork made them feel and how they perceived the neighborhood: Was it noisy? Dirty? Safe? Would they want to return?
The results showed that murals didn’t just spark emotional responses, they also shaped what people believed about the place itself. In Center City, murals made the neighborhood seem quieter and cleaner. In West Philadelphia, murals made the area feel safer and more inviting.
The study illustrates that the impact of art isn’t only about the image we’re looking at: It’s about where we see it, and what context brings to the experience. In this case, the murals taught viewers something about the neighborhoods themselves, shifting their perceptions in ways that plain walls did not.
One thing is clear: Art’s potential doesn’t end at enjoying beauty. If we’re open to it and actively engage, it might just teach us something that can’t be learned any other way.
