Questions About Art and the Arts

There is no end of talk and of wondering about art and the arts. This book examines a number of questions about the arts (broadly defined to include all of the arts). Some of these questions come from philosophy. Examples include:

• What makes something art?
• Can anything be art?
• Do we experience "real" emotions from the arts?
• Why do we seek out and even cherish sorrow and fear from art when we go out of our way to avoid these very emotions in real life?
• How do we decide what is good art? Do aesthetic judgments have any objective truth value?
• Why do we devalue fakes even if we — indeed, even the experts — can't tell them apart from originals?
• Does fiction enhance our empathy and understanding of others? Is art-making therapeutic?

Others are "common sense" questions that laypersons wonder about. Examples include:

• Does learning to play music raise a child's IQ?
• Is modern art something my kid could do?
• Is talent a matter of nature or nurture?

This book examines puzzles about the arts wherever their provenance — as long as there is empirical research using the methods of social science (interviews, experimentation, data collection, statistical analysis) — can shed light on these questions. The examined research reveals how ordinary people think about these questions, and why they think the way they do — an inquiry referred to as intuitive aesthetics. The book shows how psychological research on the arts has shed light on and often offered surprising answers to such questions.