Artists' Statements Can Influence Perceptions of Artwork

A total of 98 undergraduates participated in two experiments designed to investigate the effects of providing different artist's statements on ratings of representational and non-objective artworks. Results from Experiment 1 indicated that reading an artist's statement appeared to increase viewers' ratings of the representational but not the non-objective artwork in terms of how much they liked and were interested in the artwork. In Experiment 2, similar effects were seen when the artist's statement that initially accompanied the representational work was switched so that it accompanied the non-objective artwork. Taken together, these findings indicate that the effects of an artist's statement appear to be related to certain salient features of an artist's statement and to be independent of the nature of the artwork.