How artists experience their own art.

Abstract

Humanity has always admired and created art, but the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying artistic experience remain elusive. Professional artists and their intimate relationship with their artworks provide a unique opportunity to study the nature of the art experience, given their expertise in both art-making and art appreciation. During two fMRI tasks, professional artists (N = 20) made aesthetic judgments on their own and other artists' paintings (aesthetic judgment task); they also mentally reconstructed the moments when they conceived their artworks or, as a control condition, when they visited for the first time now-familiar places (reconstruction by imagery task). During aesthetic judgments of their own (as compared to other artists') paintings, participants showed stronger recruitment of bilateral posterior parietal cortices, the left lateral occipitotemporal cortex, and the dorso-central sector of the right insula, that is, action-related brain regions also involved in encoding the emotional components of movements. The reconstruction of their own artistic creation (compared with episodic memory retrieval connected with places) involved the left fronto-parietal network associated with motor cognition, providing evidence that the sensorimotor dimension may be intrinsically entailed in the creative process. Moreover, the aesthetic judgments attributed to one's own artworks positively covaried with activity in the right dorsal premotor cortex during creative reconstruction, suggesting that aesthetic value may be linked to the reactivation of sensorimotor components associated with the creative gesture. Altogether, these results hint that the mental representations of the actions involved in creating art are integral to the overall artistic experience of painters, from conception to appreciation, supporting an embodied view of the artists' experience of art.