Encouraging artistic interpretation of non-art objects by activating prior knowledge about art

Abstract

It is frequently mentioned that a unique interpretation that is different from daily-life interpretation arises in the cognitive process of art activity. People can interpret not only artworks but non-art objects in an artistic way, and they can often discover some new aspects of daily objects and their own viewpoints through this interpretation process. Bringing new viewpoints to our daily lives through art activity seems to be an essential issue in the art education field, connecting art activity to people's everyday lives. In this study, we investigated this reinterpretation process of a non-art object in detail. We expected that the activation of prior knowledge about art of the participant would influence the interpretation of a non-art object. We conducted a between-subjects experiment to investigate this process. We set two types of conditions to manipulate participants' artistic context. For participants in the experimental group, we assigned the task “to find some objects which you can think of as artwork” to activate participants' prior knowledge about art. For participants in the control group, the task was “to find some objects whose names begin with a given letter.” The results suggest that the activation of prior knowledge about art influenced and facilitated the interpretation process of non-art objects.