Our default minds, so focused on independence and competitive advantage, are not well suited to making sense of the vast. So guided are we by prior knowledge and our need for certainty that we avoid or explain away the mysteries of life. Visual art, though, offers us hints at understanding the vast and mysterious.
There is no better guide to this idea than philosopher Edmund Burke, born in Dublin in 1729. His thin book from 1757,
Burke’s thin volume opened eighteenth-century eyes to everyday awe. In those pages, he details how we can experience awe in all manner of perceptual experiences—thunder, shadows, patterns of light on a road, and even the sight of bulls (but not the more beautiful, affectionate cow!). The book has oddities, no doubt: Burke prioritizes the visual and auditory; according to him, scent cannot make us feel awe. (This notion offended, rightfully so, a Frenchwoman I met hiking who worked in the perfume industry.) Most critically, Burke offers ideas about how our experiences of the beautiful and the sublime differ.
For Burke, feelings of beauty arise out of a sense of familiarity and affection; awe, by contrast, arises in our recognition of what is powerful, obscure, and dreadful. Current studies in the science of aesthetics align with this distinction. Our default expectations about size, space, time, objects, other people, and causality streamline our efforts to make sense of the world. When what we encounter readily aligns with our mind’s default expectations, we feel comfort and pleasure. This has been found in studies of faces, scents, images of furniture, and everyday scenes.
In visual art, we like and prefer scenes that reflect familiar, statistical regularities of the world—the visual expectations of our default self. We like placements that seem familiar, such as putting objects in the center of a scene. We find it pleasing when things that belong in the sky, such as birds, are high up as opposed to close to the ground. We prefer horizon lines that are typical of how we look at the world, and we find horizon lines that are unusually high or low unpleasant. Visual art that captures how we typically perceive the world brings us comfort, and its companion in the realm of aesthetic emotion, the feeling of beauty.
For visual art to stir awe, Burke continues, it must suggest vast mystery. One pathway is to hint at expansive causal forces. Perceived profusion—carvings on the facade of a church, a long line of trees in a garden, gravestones in a military cemetery—hints at the deep forces that organize our social and natural lives. As one example, Camille Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre buzzes with a profusion of pedestrians, streetlights, and cafés, hinting at the transformative cultural energy of Paris in the late nineteenth century.
Simple repetition, Burke observes, is suggestive of vast causal forces that manifest in repeating forms. Images of waves, or mountains, for example, hint at large, unifying forces—the tides of the ocean or the geological evolution of the Earth. Swedish filmmaker Mikel Cee Karlsson relies on extended repetitions of everyday acts—brushing teeth, stroking a partner’s hair, leg jiggles, nervous tics—to emphasize the conventions that organize the patterns of our social lives.
For Burke, patterns of light and movement can focus our minds. When scenes in art are unified by light (as in Rembrandt’s paintings), sensed motion (Monet’s flags in
And visual art can stir awe through subverting our default expectations about time, as in the use of slow motion in film (think Martin Scorsese’s
As Iris Murdoch suggested, visual art helps us transcend the status quo expectations and ordinary way of perceiving our lives through the lens of the default self. Instead, through hints at vastness and mystery, art enables us to see the deeper structures to life around us, and grounds us within these interconnected patterns
Direct Perception
