TED Talks

[Tony DCG]

I heard a very interesting TED talk in art. What make art of value and how the human mind works. Here is some of the transscipt but if you have time I suggest a listen. Fasinating stuff

Anybody remotely interested in art or marketing should listen to this NPR interview and TED talk by Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom, author of the book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. He tells great stories about Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren conning a Nazi, violinist Joshua Bell performing in a subway station, and how the paintings of toddler painter Marla Olmstead dropped in value after a 60 Minutes profile.

But it’s what he had to say about forgeries that really grabbed me:


[O]ur response to forgeries is a huge puzzle. You might think that the pleasure you get from a painting depends on its color and its shape and its pattern, what it looks like. And if that’s right, then it shouldn’t matter whether it’s an original or a forgery, shouldn’t matter at all who created it. But the mind doesn’t work that way. It matters to all of us.

In my own work I find, even for young children, it matters where the painting came from, who made it. And I think that tells us something interesting about what we like. I think it suggests that when it comes to a pleasure like the pleasure we get from paintings, we’re exquisitely sensitive to their origin, to who made it, to how it was made…

[W]hen shown an object, or given a food, or shown a face, people’s assessment of it - how much they like it, how valuable it is - is deeply affected by what you tell them about it.1

Now, my response to this is to feel very skeptical of the storytelling around objects — to not look at the captions in museums, but to try to look at the object or the painting itself for what it is, regardless of its origins. Bloom has a response to this:


Many sociologists like Veblen and Wolfe would argue that the reason why we take origins so seriously is because we’re snobs, because we’re focused on status… I don’t doubt that that plays some role, but what I want to convince you of today is that there’s something else going on. I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don’t just respond to things as we see them, or feel them, or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they’re made of, what their hidden nature is.

Based on his research, Bloom has this life advice:


People sometimes ask, how do you get more pleasure out of life? And my answer is extremely pedantic. It’s study more. Anything that you don’t understand, unless it’s a sugar doughnut, is really going to be - sort of say, I don’t get it. So that the key to enjoying wine isn’t just to guzzle out a real expensive wine. It’s to learn about wine. Music, learn about music, and so on… Art history is basically a mechanism for enhancing artistic pleasure. The more you know about it, the more you’ll like.

The flip side of that is: if you want people to value what it is that you do, you have to educate them or convince them of its value. (There was a professor at my college who collected toy ray guns and wrote a book about them called Ray Gun — he later sold his collection to David Copperfield for a very hefty sum of money.)