Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades, a group of European scholars set out to explore the question “Is it Art?” as it pertains to ambiguity and aesthetics.
The Dada trailblazer challenged long-standing assumptions about what art should be, and how it should be made. Eschewing representation of objects in painting, Duchamp began presenting mass-produced objects as art and giving them titles.
“An ordinary object [could be] elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist,” Duchamp said.
Building on the artist’s experiment, the scholars specifically asked “do the perceptions of the viewers differ if they assume that they are looking at a piece of art instead of a non-artistic image?”
Frank Papenmeier (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen), Gerald Dagit and Christoph Wagner (Universität Regensburg), and Stephan Schwan (Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen, Germany) presented viewers a set of ambiguous abstract paintings and similar looking scientific images and declared them to be either artworks or pictures from scientific publications, seeking to determine the impact on the viewers’ gaze, behavior, and aesthetic judgments.
