Real and virtual worlds

Many art lovers, including me, take it as self-evident that art is best viewed in person and in front of an original work (Locher et al., 1999; Pelowski et al., 2017). Surely, a digital rendition of a Van Gogh painting of sunflowers cannot capture the original’s vibrancy and texture, features that stir the aesthetic imagination. A potential problem with this commonly held view is that self-evident intuitions do not constitute actual evidence. What was true 50 years ago might not be true anymore, with the proliferation of and easy access to high-resolution digital art images.

Asking the question of how going to a museum and viewing art in person compares to viewing the same art on a computer screen requires having a way to measure the impacts of that art. As part of a programmatic line of research, we developed a taxonomy of words that captures the range of potential cognitive and affective aesthetic impacts. The logic underpinning this taxonomy is that having a nuanced vocabulary helps characterize complex experiences (Christensen et al., 2023).

Applying an aesthetic impact vocabulary to art viewing is akin to the more familiar idea that having a sommelier offer descriptors like “hints of berry” or “an oak finish” helps a taster identify different elements of the wine they are sipping. Our taxonomy is comprised of 69 terms, which cluster into 11 dimensions: pleasure, calm, compassionate, angry, upset, challenged, interested, inspired, enraptured, enlightened, and edified. These 11 dimensions can be further reduced statistically to four coarse categories: positive affect, negative affect, interest/immersion, and the possibility of transformation.

With this measurement tool at our disposal, we can return to our original question and go beyond simply asking people if they like the art more or find it more beautiful in one context than another to probing the affective and cognitive impacts art has on them. The approach allows us to also ask if there are different routes to liking. For example, two people might rate their liking of a painting similarly, but one does so because it mostly makes them feel calm, while the other does so because it inspires them.

The study

We conducted the in-person part of the study in two well-known art institutions in Philadelphia, the Barnes Foundation and the Penn Museum of Archeology and Anthropology. Eight paintings at the Barnes Foundation and eight artifacts at the Penn Museum were chosen initially. Participants recorded their liking, judgments of beauty, and whether they felt that they gained understanding from the sessions, in addition to the various impacts of each artwork. Another group did the same in the laboratory on a computer (Darda et al., 2025).

Our results surprised us. For our core question, we did not find measurable differences in people’s liking and beauty judgments depending on whether they viewed the art in person or digitally. Similarly, these ways of engaging with art did not substantially differ in their impacts on viewers. We did find that people thought they gained more understanding when the art was viewed in the informationally rich context of the museum than on a computer in the lab.

A closer look at the characteristics of our participants suggests our failure to find a difference between viewing contexts is unlikely to be because our measure lacks the sensitivity to detect it. As is often found in empirical aesthetics studies, we found that people with more prior experience with art and people who are more “open to experience” (a personality trait) found the art more beautiful and were impacted more by it. Further, our taxonomy was sensitive to nuanced aspects of their aesthetic experiences: We found that people with more art experience felt more enlightened and inspired when viewing the art; people who are more open to experience felt more challenged, interested, inspired, and pleasure; and older viewers felt more edified, enlightened, and inspired.

Finally, even though liking ratings were similar across both conditions, the routes to liking differed. Feeling interested was positively correlated, and feeling challenged was negatively correlated, with liking in the museum. Feeling upset and experiencing compassion was negatively correlated with liking in the laboratory setting.

Answers and questions

It is a truism in experimental science that the absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence. However, finding negative results in two museums with two different types of art objects does shift the burden of proof to demonstrating that the museum experience of seeing art in person has a special impact on the casual viewer. These findings raise new questions. Our participants were young adults. How we encounter art may matter more to older generations.

Perhaps younger people are iconoclasts and less subject to past cultural norms and pressures. Maybe museums and galleries—bastions of elite culture with their Roman pillars and hushed lighting—alienate a public increasingly conscious of issues like accessibility. Maybe a younger generation who have grown up in a digital universe is less likely to romanticize life in the “real” world. Maybe, in the aftershock of the COVID pandemic, many find that getting out of their homes, whether to offices, movies, or museums, is an unnecessary hassle when our devices do the job.

Whatever the reasons for our findings, and however counterintuitive they may be to many museum-goers and art lovers, it is worth remembering that deeply held intuitions do not always survive the scrutiny of science.

Acknowledgment: This work was supported by the Templeton Religion Trust.