Art Appreciation is a Gender Issue?

Famous Paintings Reviewed

Art Appreciation is a Gender Issue?

Posted by Susan Benford

An art history blog post from Famous Paintings Reviewed.

There's a title that grabs the attention (and not only because I live in Boston and remember the 2005 incident in which Larry Summers, then President of Harvard, suggested that innate gender differences might explain why fewer women have been successful in math and science careers).

Professor Francisco Ayala and colleagues at the University of California in Irvine conducted an experiment in which 10 women and 10 men assessed the beauty of landscape photographs and paintings. Concurrently, the electrical activity in the brains of these participants was measured. Results showed that the parietal lobe, the part of the brain fired for spatial awareness, was differently activated -- men used only one parietal lobe, while women used both.

The researchers concluded that these differences have an evolutionary context. Men, as the traditional hunter-gatherers, required a "co-ordinating ability" to hunt moving animals and have thus learned to focus on overall images more than women have. Women, conversely, were searching for fruit, roots and the like, and are evolutionarily more attuned to the details around them and their context. "Women tend to be more aware than men of objects around them, including those that seem irrelevant to the current task, whereas men out-perform women in navigation tasks". They further suggest that these different ways of viewing the world affect, more currently, the perception of beauty.

It's been years since I studied statistics in graduate school, but the small sample size (20 participants in total) jumps out here -- especially when such sweeping conclusions are suggested. Reassurance comes from Professor Friederman Pulvermuller, an expert in brain studies and not a researcher of this study, who commented that "... we would need more work before we could make any firm conclusions" about this study.

Whew. I was starting to wonder about men in the history of painting who'd made highly detailed work (Hieronymus Bosch and his triptych Garden of Earthly Delights comes to mind), and women who'd created enormous paintings involving 'navigational ability' (think Rosa Bonheur's The Horse Fair, a hefty 8' x 17') -- both in defiance of their gender-based appreciation of art. I vote that we focus less on gender roles... and more on art appreciation itself!

To read a synopsis of the article from the BBC, click here

Tags: gender in art appreciation

Comments

these are very rare pictures

Posted @ Friday, July 10, 2009 3:34 AM by abhishek rawat

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Art Appreciation is a Gender Issue?

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