Together in the Dark?: Investigating the Understanding and Feeling of Intended Emotions Between Viewers and Professional Artists at the Venice Biennale

We present a unique opportunity to test the ability of artists to systematically evoke emotions in an audience via art and, transversely, for viewers to pick out intentions of the artist. This follows a recent article which had shown this connection using installation artworks by MFA student-artists. However, this earlier article had left open questions regarding whether similar relationships might be found with professional artists and contemporary art-putting at odds earlier expressive theories that art should transmit emotion versus 20-21st century arguments that art-making might be more for its "own sake" and thus with art, artists, and/or contemporary viewers perhaps not producing similar results. With works from the Italian pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale, we matched viewers' (N = 113) reported subjectively felt emotions, and their identification of emotions that they thought the artist wanted them to feel, to the actual artists' intentions (as communicated via an accompanying curator's text). Replicating the previous article, viewers identified intended emotions well above chance and reported feeling intended emotions more than non-intended emotions, with two of three artworks. At the same time, what individuals subjectively felt better predicted how they interpreted artist intentions with an effect size twice that of actual intentions. Feeling that one understood intention, regardless of actually being correct, and feeling more emotion, in general, also better predicted positively rating the art. Similar results were found in a reanalysis of the previous article's data, raising intriguing implications for the role of objective and subjective understanding, empathy, and appraisal in art experience.