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“He uses the technique”
: Zeki makes this point in more detail in “The Woodhull Lecture: Visual Art and the Visual Brain,” reprinted in
Exploring the Universe: Essays on Science and Technology
, ed. P. Day (London: Oxford University Press, 1997), 37.

What is more interesting
: See Richard P. Taylor et al., “Perceptual and Physiological Responses to Jackson Pollock's Fractals,”
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
, June 22, 2011, 11. It could be, the authors suggest, that we find Pollock's
“high D” fractal work so compelling because our eyes are in essence trying to find the more familiar fractal forms or solving a kind of puzzle. Maybe Pollock himself became so familiar with fractals that he began to gravitate to more complex forms (and as we became more familiar with Pollock, so did we).

But research has shown
: See Connon Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, and Erikka B. Vaughan, “Fortune Favors the Bold (and the Italicized): Effects of Disfluency on Educational Outcomes,”
Cognition
118, no. 1 (Jan. 2011): 111–15. The authors note, “Importantly, disfluency can function as a cue that one may not have mastery over material.” In art, this attempt toward “mastery” might be what keeps you thinking about, what keeps you coming back to, a piece.

“their aesthetic beauty”
: See Hans Richter,
Dada: Art and Anti-art
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), 207–8.

“nothing that meets the eye”
: Arthur Danto,
The Abuse of Beauty
(New York: Open Court, 2003), 17.

You can parse the validity
: See Lea Höfel and Thomas Jacobsen, “Electrophysiologic­al Indices of Processing Aesthetics: Spontaneous or Intentional Processes?,”
International Journal of Psychophysiology
65, no. 1 (July 2007): 20–31. The authors write, “The early frontocentral ERP effect, taken to reflect impression formation in an aesthetic judgment task for the assessment of not beautiful patterns, was not obtained in the present study. It thus appears to require the intention to assess the aesthetic value of the stimuli as well as to decide on an aesthetic judgment. Neither viewing nor contemplating the stimulus material evoked an ERP signature indicating processes that differentiate between beautiful and not beautiful patterns.” Which suggests an interesting idea: That we do not “know” how we feel about something aesthetically until we are actually forced to think about it. This study, it should be noted, used abstract graphic forms, not actual artworks. As Helmut Leder and Pablo Tinio note, “The question of whether cortical structures that respond to artworks are the same as those that respond to everyday objects remains unresolved and open for examination.” See Tinio and Leder, “The Means to Art's End: Styles, Creative Devices, and the Challenge of Art,” in
Neuroscience of Creativity
, ed. Oshin Vartanian, Adam S. Bristol, and James C. Kaufman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), 273–98.

“I just paint things”
: The quotation comes via Victor Bockris,
Warhol: The Biography
(New York: Da Capo Press, 2009), 148.

Art is what the art world
: Arthur Danto,
Journal of Philosophy
61, no. 19 (1964): 571–84. The notion of what makes a piece of conceptual art art is where, Danto wrote, “we enter a domain of conceptual inquiry where native speakers are poor guides:
they
are lost themselves.”

This flip tautology
: In an interesting study held at Switzerland's St. Gallen Fine Arts Museum, a “site specific” intervention—a series of small tagged comments in marker on the museum's pristine walls—by the artist Nedko Solakov was used as the “stimulus” to learn whether visitors considered the art to be, in essence, art. Even after various experimental manipulations that explained the context of the show, its rationale, and so on, only a bare majority considered the work “art.” See Martin Tröndle, Volker Kirchberg, and Wolfgang Tschacher, “Is This Art? An Experimental Study on Visitors' Judgement of Contemporary Art,”
Cultural Sociology
, April 7, 2014,
http://​cus.​sagepub.​com/​content/​early/​2014/​04/​07/​1749975​513507243.​full.​pdf
. On the other hand, a neuroimaging study found
that when subjects viewed images they were told were from a prestigious museum, and other objects that were said to be computer generated, differing brain activations (and higher aesthetic ratings) were noted for the “museum” paintings than for the others. See Ulrich Kirk et al., “Modulation of Aesthetic Value by Semantic Context: An fMRI Study,”
NeuroImage
44 (2009): 1125–32.

As Edward Vessel
: Edward Vessel, Irving Biederman, and Mark Cohen, “How Opiate Activity May Determine Spontaneous Visual Selection” (paper presented at the Third Annual Vision Sciences Society meeting, Sarasota, Fla., 2003).

In one study
: In the tricky world of art, of course, people may prefer an Ed Ruscha picture of a parking lot to a landscape painting.

“universal language”
: See Hannah Brinkmann et al., “Abstract Art as a Universal Language?,”
Leonardo
47, no. 3 (June 2014): 256–57.

People seem to prefer things
: When viewers in one study were shown abstract artworks, their liking for the works increased with a title that seemed semantically related (liking declined when the title did not seem to correspond to the painting). See Benno Belke et al., “Cognitive Fluency: High-Level Processing Dynamics in Art Appreciation,”
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts
4, no. 4 (Nov. 2010): 214–22. See also Helmut Leder et al., “Entitling Art: Influence of Title Information on Understanding and Appreciation of Paintings,”
Acta Psychologia
121, no. 2 (2006): 176–98.

After people are shown photographs
: A. S. Cowen, M. M. Chun, and B. A. Kuhl, “Neural Portraits of Perception: Reconstructing Face Images from Evoked Brain Activity,”
NeuroImage
, July 1, 2014, 12–22. See also Kerri Smith, “Brain Decoding: Reading Minds,”
Nature
, Oct. 23, 2013; and Larry Greenemeier, “Decoding the Brain,”
Scientific American
, Nov./Dec. 2014.

“an immersion so complete”
: Dewey,
Art as Experience
, 288.

In the early 1990s
: See James E. Cutting, “Gustave Caillebotte, French Impressionism, and Mere Exposure,”
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
10, no. 2 (2003): 319–43.

In a final experiment
: See ibid.

Caillebotte himself was “rediscovered”
: Wrote one art historian, “It is almost as if we had to wait a century to perceive properly the mysteries of the humdrum recorded by Caillebotte.” Morton Shackleford,
Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter's Eye
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 19.

“roughly match Kinkade's subject matter”
: Aaron Meskin et al., “Mere Exposure to Bad Art,”
British Journal of Aesthetics
53, no. 2 (2013): 139–64.

“classic is a book”
: See Robert McCrum, “The 100 Best Novels: An Introduction,”
Guardian
, Sept. 22, 2013,
http://​www.​theguardian.​com/​books/​2013/​sep/​22/​100-​best-​novels-​robert-​mccrum
.

“desire to feel”
: Alexis Boylan, in Alexis Boylan, ed.,
Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 13.

his glowing windows
: Kinkade once said, “I paint glowing windows because glowing windows say home to me.” And, per Kundera's formulation, they must say home to you and the rest of the world as well. The quotation comes from Michael Clapper, “Thomas Kinkade's Romantic Landscape,”
American Art
20, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 76–99.

“The meaning of a great work”
: Clark,
Looking at Pictures
, 15.

In an age of anxious social mobility
: For an excellent study of the period, see
Jeremy Black,
Culture in Eighteenth-Century England: A Subject for Taste
(London: Bloomsbury, 2006).

more indicative of one's own character
: As David Marshall notes, “As the criteria for judging works of art shifted from conformity to classical rules to the power of art to shape the subjective experience of readers and beholders, unprecedented demands were placed on the experience of art.” See Marshall,
The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 6.

“notoriously difficult”
: A not infrequent characterization, but this one in particular comes from George Dickie.

Kant argues that things
: Zeki, for instance, ran an experiment to determine whether people found certain mathematical equations more beautiful. But how could you ever find someone who had never seen a single mathematical formula? See Semir Zeki et al., “The Experience of Mathematical Beauty and Its Neural Correlates,”
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
, Feb. 13, 2014, 1–12,
http://​journal.​frontiersin.​org/​Journal/​10.​3389/​fhhum.​2014.​00068/​full
. Zeki raises the interesting point that even if people who did not understand the equations per se, but still found them beautiful (more so than others): “It leads to the capital question of whether beauty, even in so abstract an area as mathematics, is a pointer to what is true in nature, both within our nature and in the world in which we have evolved.” One imagines an experiment, for example, in which laypeople were given true and false mathematical equations; if the ones they thought were more beautiful turned out to be the true ones, there might be something to the idea of beauty and truth. Expert mathematicians, of course, would already be able to tell if they were true or false, and that would confound their aesthetic judgment.

“All of this activity”
: See Denis Dutton, “The Experience of Art Is Paradise Regained: Kant on Free and Dependent Beauty,”
British Journal of Aesthetics
34, no. 3 (1994): 226–39.

Even knowing it was a shell
: In Kant's view, we could look at a picture of a never-before-seen cluster of objects in space, have no preconception of it, nothing to even refer it to—and find beauty in it. In the real world, astronomers enhance the images with “false color” and other techniques to make the images look more like our concept of what beautiful objects in space should look like. See Lisa K. Smith et al., “Aesthetics and Astronomy: Studying the Public's Perception and Understanding of Imagery from Space,”
Science Communication
33, no. 2 (June 2011): 201–38. See also Anya Ventura, “Pretty Pictures: The Use of False Color in Images of Deep Space,” in
Invisible Culture
, issue 19, Oct. 29, 2013,
http://​ivc.​lib.​rochester.​edu/​portfolio/​pretty-​pictures-​the-​use-​of-​false-​color-​in-​images-​of-​deep-​space/
. As the author notes, “Although the public is encouraged to interpret these images as landscapes—photographic dispatches from the outer limits—we have no referent by which to judge the authenticity of these topographies, no physical mirror of understanding.”

“a pure judgment of taste”
: Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Judgment
, in
The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics
, ed. Joseph J. Tanke and Colin McQuilian (London: A. C. Black, 2012), 256.

Whereas he was once “underrated”
: See Peter Jones, “Hume's Aesthetics Reassessed,”
Philosophical Quarterly
26, no. 102 (1976): 56.

Although he was said to have
: For example, Hume's “judgment of poets and play-wrights
was notably bad.” See Timothy M. Costelloe, “Hume's Aesthetics: The Literature and Directions for Research,”
Hume Studies
30, no. 1 (April 2004): 88.

“The great variety of taste”
: See David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in
Selected Essays
, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 133.

“Men of the most confined knowledge”
: As one study noted, rather despairingly, “The literature concerning visual arts preferences is often contradictory and confusing…the findings of one study frequently contradict another, and none have concerned themselves with why two apparently similar children (age, sex, socioeconomic status) respond differently to the same artwork.” Pauline J. Ahmad, “Visual Art Preference Studies: A Review of Contradictions,”
Visual Arts Research
11, no. 2 (Fall 1985): 104.

for it was only recently
: In some ways, they were still not separated: Hume himself, as a member of a trade society, had overseen the judging of a “discourse on Taste” that featured not only “the belles lettres and the sciences” but “porter” and “strong ale.” See Ernest Campbell Mossner,
The Life of David Hume
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 283. The winner of the competition was Alexander Gerard's “Essay on Taste.”

“confounds the genuine sentiment”
: Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 144.

Did he, in saying
: As the philosopher Peter Kivy notes, the question of whether something was a good piece of art was now replaced with whether someone was a good critic, and who was to decide that? How did you know if you yourself had sufficient capacity for appreciation, and if you did not, how could you tell
who
had it? See Kivy, “Hume's Standard of Taste: Breaking the Circle,”
British Journal of Aesthetics
7, no. 1 (1967): 57–66. There is also a problem of metacognition. As George Dickie notes, “The problem with Hume's view here is that a person who lacks delicate taste cannot easily come to know that another person has it.” See Dickie,
The Century of Taste
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 134.