Conceptual art made simple for neuroaesthetics

Citation: Kranjec A (2015) Conceptual art made simple for neuroaesthetics. Cognitive neuroscience and conceptual art share some interesting common ground. Both are concerned with very basic questions about meaning and objecthood. By focusing on reductionist and contrastive aspects of conceptual art, perhaps neuroscience methods can be applied to the investigation of such questions using everyday objects. Cognitive neuroscience seeks to understand basic categories of human behavior, thought, and experience through summary descriptions of neural activity. Like other fields that use empirical methods for investigating the mind, these descriptions can ultimately take verbal or mathematical form. However, explanations in cognitive neuroscience are made using abstract visualizations with a frequency and diversity that surpasses other fields aimed at similar questions. This owes much to the central role that brain imaging methods play in cognitive neuroscience. While fields like psychology and philosophy may be equally engaged in " thinking about thinking, " cognitive neuroscience explicitly seeks to ground the mind in the brain. This is one way of understanding why cognitive neuroscience pushes visualization techniques forward in a way that other empirical investigations of the mind do not. Cognitive neuroscience's main purpose is to understand thought physically using methods that explain it visually. Although notoriously difficult to define, conceptual art (understood here as a kind of art with some identifiable characteristics, rather than a particular work of art connected to a formal historical movement) might seem like the inverse of cognitive neuroscience with respect to its relationship with the physical world. Whereas " art " is by default understood as material in kind, conceptual art is often characterized as an art of ideas. Conceptual art is difficult to pin down. Goldie and Schellekens (2013) provide a set of criteria to distinguish conceptual art from more traditional art forms. Generally, they understand conceptual art to be self-reflective and ironic, against medium and beauty, and relatively " dematerialized. " That is, conceptual art frequently interrogates traditional ideas of what art is by playfully challenging standards of beauty and medium to the point that much of what constitutes a work of conceptual art is the idea itself. While it should come as no surprise that " ideas " play a critical role in a movement called conceptual art, the characterization of such art as fundamentally dematerialized may be misleading. At least, it might distract from that which cognitive neuroscience and conceptual art have in common. Both …