阅读理解
Have you ever fallen for a
novel and been amazed not to find it on lists of great books? Or walked around
a sculpture known as a classic, struggling to see why it is famous? If so,
you've probably thought about the question a psychologist, James Cutting, asked
himself: How does a work of art come to be considered great?
The direct answer is that some
works of art are just great: of inner superior quality. The paintings that win
prime spots in galleries, get taught in classes are the ones that have proved
their artistic value over time. If you can't see they're superior, that's your
problem. But some social scientists have been asking questions of it, raising
the possibility that artistic canons(名作目录)are little more than old historical accidents.
Cutting, a professor at Cornell
University, wondered if a psychological pattern known as the "mereexposure effect" played a role in deciding which
paintings rise to the top of the cultural league. Cutting designed an
experiment to test his hunch(直觉). Over a lecture course
he regularly showed undergraduates works of impressionism for two seconds at a
time. Some of the paintings canonical, included in arthistory
books. Others were lesser known but of comparable quality were exposed four
times as often. Afterwards, the students preferred them to the canonical works,
while a control group liked the canonical ones best. Cuttings students had
grown to like those paintings more simply because they had seen them more.
Cutting believes his experiment
casts light on how canons are formed. He reproduced works of impressionism
today bought by five or six wealthy and influential collectors in the late 19th
century. Their preferences given to certain works made them more likely to be
hung in galleries and printed in collections. And the fame passed down the
years. The more people were exposed to, the more they liked it, and the more
they liked it, the more it appeared in books, on posters and in big
exhibitions. Meanwhile, academics and critics added to their popularity. After
all, it's not just the masses who tend to rate what they see more often more
highly. Critics' praise is deeply mixed with publicity. "Scholars",
Cutting argues, "are no different from the public in the effects of mere
exposure."
The process described by
Cutting show a principle that the sociologist Duncan Watts calls "cumulative
advantage": once a thing becomes popular, it will tend to become more
popular still. A few years ago, Watts had a similar experience to Cutting's in
another Paris museum. After queuing to see the "Mona Lisa" at the
Louvre, he came away puzzled: why was it considered so superior to the three
other Leonardos, to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention?
When Watts looked into the
history of "the greatest painting of all time", he discovered that,
for most of its life, the "Mona Lisa" remained in relative
obscurity. In the 1850s, Leonardo da Vinci was considered no match for
giants of Renaissance art like Titian and Raphael, whose works were worth
almost ten times as much as the "Mona Lisa" It was only in the 20th
century that "Mona Lisa rocketed to the numberone spot. What brought it there wasn't a scholarly reevaluation, but a theft. In 1911 a worker at the Louvre walked out
of the museum with the "Mona Lisa" hidden under his coat. Parisians
were shocked at the theft of a painting to which, until then, they had paid
little attention. When the museum reopened, people queued to see it. From then
on, the "Mona Lisa "came to represent Western culture itself.
The intrinsic (本质的) quality of a work of art is starting to seem like
its least important attribute. But perhaps it's more significant than our
social scientists admit. Firstly, a work needs a certain quality to reach the
top of the pile. The "Mona Lisa" may not be a worthy world champion
but it was in the Louvre in the first place, and not by accident. Secondly,
some objects are simply better than others. Read "Hamlet" after
reading even the greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries, and the difference
may strike you as unarguable.
A study suggests that the
exposure effect doesn't work the same way on everything, and points to a
different conclusion about how canons are formed. Great art and mediocrity (平庸)can get confused, even by experts. But that's why we
need to see, and read, as much as we can. The more were exposed to the good and
the bad, the better we are at telling the difference.
