21 January 2008 | Theory
Nicolas Slonimsky asserted in his 1953 Lexicon of Musical Invective that the human instinct toward “Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar” is usually to blame when critics assail a work of genius. Interestingly, there is a body of empirical work supporting the converse idea, that we tend to like what we’ve seen a lot of. See, for example, this forthcoming article (pdf) by psychologist James E. Cutting, “The Mere Exposure Effect and Aesthetic Preference,” in which he reports on a study he performed. He believes he can show that people prefer the more frequently reproduced Impressionist works over the less frequently reproduced ones, not because the former are better but simply because people have seen them more often in the past. In his conclusion, he writes that
Artistic canons are promoted and maintained by a diffuse but continual broadcast of images to the public by museums, authors and publishers. The repeated presentation of images to the public without direct awareness or memory makes mere exposure a prime vehicle for canon maintenance. Tacitly and incrementally over time, it teaches the public to like the images, to prefer them, eventually to recognize them as part of the canon, and to want to see them again … I do not think this is necessarily a subversive trend, nor one to be denigrated. I claim it is part of the same force that binds a culture. It is part of our human nature, built on an evolutionary substrate that makes very good sense. It helps ensure steadiness in culture more generally, and relative constancy in artistic canons more particularly.