Exploring The Aesthetic Consensus During The Appreciation Of Traditional Chinese Painting

Does aesthetics exist realistically or only exist in people's mind? This involves the question of whether there is a uniform standard in aesthetics.The relativism holds that the objective standards of aesthetics do exist,but the aesthetic standards are diverse and cannot be applied to all circumstances.Therefore,whether aesthetic standards could form a consensus,making people's aesthetic activities more consistent remained unconfirmed.Study 1 compared groups with expertise(experts)and those without aesthetic knowledge(novices)to explore the impact of expertise on the consistency of aesthetic activities and their neural mechanisms.The study selected Chinese painting as the aesthetic material(divided into good-looking and not good-looking ones),allowing the subjects to perform two aesthetic judgment tasks after the appreciation of each Chinese painting(beauty ratings and liking ratings).The results showed that on the good-looking Chinese paintings,the consistency of the beauty ratings of the experts were higher than those of the novices,indicating a relatively consistent standard from the experts for the beauty rating of good-looking Chinese paintings.However,the comparison between the brains showed little inter-brain consistency of the experts,compared with that of the novices,which might be caused by the higher neurological efficiency of the former.Based on their positions,the significant inter-brain consistency found only in novices might involve both cognitive and affective components of aesthetics.Therefore,we split the two tasks as time-separated blocks to further explore the pattern of consistency of aesthetical behavior and brain activities.Significant consistency was found for ratings from both tasks,but without between-task difference.On the other hand,between-task difference was found from the inter-brain consistency.The inter-brain consistency during liking task was more related with affective component of aesthetics and that during beauty task more related with cognitive component.Significant higher inter-brain consistency was found in right temporal lobe for the beauty task compared with liking task,which might come from the task-specified cognitive aesthetic component,such as semantic memorization and information integration.The experiment finally came to the following conclusions:(1)Expertise will provide a unified standard for the appreciator,which causes a consistent aesthetic cognitive judgment;Expertise also makes the neural activity of the viewer's aesthetic activities more inconsistent.(2)Both aesthetic judgment tasks have aesthetic consistency and can be distinguished from the neural mechanism.