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So is art that moves us sending us into a zoned-out aesthetic reverie? Where are the jagged peaks of neural sublimity? The DMN, it turns out, also whirs into life under conditions that Vessel terms “internally focused cognition”—or thinking about yourself. Seeing this work of art somehow generates a burst of neural activity not dissimilar to thinking about oneself. “I immediately thought of Kant,” Vessel told me, “when he talks about beauty, how when you see an external object, that object is resonating with the shape of your mind.”

Curiously, when one is merely looking, the DMN is normally inactive. At the same time, when we are at rest, visually oriented brain regions are less active. “You're not really letting things in,” as Vessel put it. But when people looked at art that they judged most moving,
both
networks seemed to be active. It could be, he suggested, a “hallmark of what you might call an aesthetic experience”—
“an immersion
so complete,” as John Dewey once described it, “that the qualities of the object and the emotions it arouses have no separate existence.” We are, Vessel suggested, looking outward and inward at the same time, “an aha moment where you can learn something about yourself as well as the world around you.”

Have you ever gone to a museum and fallen in love with some obscure painting in a dark corner and wondered why no one else seemed to notice it? If only more people could see this unknown masterpiece, you surmised, it would become more well-known. The flip side of this, you might have suspected, is that some famous works, the ones that always draw crowds in museums, may not be as good as those more lonely paintings displayed elsewhere.

In the early 1990s, James Cutting, a professor of psychology, began to wonder if artistic canons were a form of mere exposure writ large. As you may recall from chapter 1, the theory goes that the more we encounter something—from a novel cuisine to a new song—the greater the chance that we will like it (perhaps, an evolution of the theory goes, because it becomes easier for us to process and our brains like “fluency”). But as Cutting told me, much of the mere exposure work was done with images with little relevance to people's normal lives: random geometric shapes or Chinese characters (when the subjects did not read Chinese).

Experiments had been done with paintings, but they tended to be with unfamiliar works of nonrepresentational art. But what about the canon—those paintings we were more likely to have been exposed to before, in real life? To do that, you would need to know what art people had actually been exposed to. Simply asking them could be problematic because, as it has been shown, mere exposure seems to work even when we do not
know
we have seen something before.

Cutting seized upon an interesting solution. For his “sample,” he chose the collection of Gustave Caillebotte, the French Impressionist painter whose 1877
Paris Street; Rainy Day
you have probably seen (in reproduction, if not in the original at the Art Institute of Chicago). Caillebotte was an enthusiastic Impressionist collector as well, amassing
a monumental trove of works by Cézanne, Monet, and Renoir. At least it seems monumental today, housed proudly at the Musée d'Orsay. In his day, he had trouble unloading it, as a gift, to the French state.

Cutting chose 66 images from Caillebotte's collection. Then he matched each of those with another painting: by the same artist, in the same style, roughly the same subject and period. The ones, as Cutting suggests, that got away from Caillebotte. To figure out how often each image had actually been seen, Cutting embarked on an almost insanely dogged research quest: Like a character from a Borges story, he (and some tireless graduate students) haunted Cornell's libraries, counting
every
instance in which one of the 132 images had been reproduced among Cornell's considerable corpus of art books.

This seemed as true a measure as any—a visual arts version of Google's Ngram index—of the extent the paintings had rippled through the culture. “I was in pretty bad shape,” Cutting told me, describing the period after his first wife's death. Throwing himself into something so “mechanical” had appeal, and, as he said, “I was tired of all the slipshod research I saw a lot of people doing. I wanted to do something really intensive.”

The data collected, Cutting gathered a group of students and showed them the paired images, asking them which image “they liked best.” Subjects preferred, by a slight but “significant” margin, the paintings that, it turned out, had been reproduced more frequently (even if there was little difference in how much subjects claimed to recognize each image). Cutting found the same result with a group of older subjects. None of this, of course, meant that mere exposure
caused
people's liking. It could be that they were reproduced more because they were better pictures. If there was a feedback loop, it did not mean it was not there for a good reason. The canon, in other words, had done its work of allowing the artistic cream to rise to the top.

In a final experiment, though, Cutting wondered if a more concentrated exposure to random paintings might change that equation. And so, over the course of a year in an introductory perception class—sometimes in the beginning, sometimes in the midst of a lecture—he would show, for about two seconds and without comment, the paintings from the earlier studies. But to this class, he more often showed the images that appeared
less
in the outside world. And that was what students, in most cases, now preferred. For Cutting, the idea was not
so much to question what paintings were in the canon as to wonder about those paintings that were
not
. Were they actually any less good, or had they simply, through whim or accident or politics, been overlooked and thus “underliked”?

Was that the whole story, though? Was the question of judgments of quality now moot? Did people's liking of art as strongly depend on having seen it, as Cutting had suggested? Not that quality judgments and familiarity had to be at odds: Perhaps it takes many viewings to realize whether and why something was good (
Caillebotte himself was “rediscovered” nearly a century later). But if this repeated exposure was helping people to discover what was good about a painting—rather than compelling them to like it through sheer familiarity—then it should only work for paintings that are actually
good
. That was the idea of a group of researchers at the University of Leeds as they undertook an exposure study inspired by Cutting's.

This time, the subject was not a group of all more or less good Impressionist paintings but one painter firmly in the canon, the nineteenth-century English painter John Everett Millais, and a painter who is decidedly not—the American Thomas Kinkade. The “painter of light,” as Kinkade was known to his legion of fans, was, for a time, sold widely—not in mainstream galleries, but in his own shopping mall boutiques. He is, to date, the only artist who ever lent his name to a La-Z-Boy recliner. The work by Millais was lesser-known landscapes, chosen to at least “
roughly match Kinkade's subject matter and palette.”

As in Cutting's study, students saw brief glimpses of images, incidentally, in lectures. Of sixty images, most were by Kinkade, a dozen by Millais. For the Millais paintings, the results were in line with Cutting: The more they saw them, the more they reported liking them. But for Kinkade, the more they saw it, the less they liked it (as soon as the second exposure). Could it simply be that to English students the work of Millais just
looks
more like art that belongs in museums and thus art they should like? Whereas Kinkade, say what you will about his style or technique, is simply less reminiscent of what anyone who has been to a museum knows as art. Is there not an air of apples and oranges here?

I put this question to Matthew Kieran, a philosophy professor at Leeds and one of the study's authors, over coffee at Tate Britain, where a statue of John Millais himself stands outside the entrance. “It actually shouldn't matter,” he told me. “If you rated the Millais nine, and the
Kinkade three, the exposure hypothesis says the liking will go up for both.” He allowed that subjects might be predisposed toward a certain style of painting, which exposure would only intensify.

Lest you think the result was just a matter of Kinkade's not being as popular to begin with in England, curiously, Kinkade, on first viewing, was liked
more
than Millais. It could be that viewers were initially hedging their bets: Who knew if this was the best or the worst of each painter I have seen? It could be, per the fluency argument, that where Millais's subtle work did not precisely blow you away on first glance, over repeated viewings you found new reasons to like it. As Italo Calvino described it for literature, a “
classic is a book that has never finished what it wants to say.”

Kinkade's paintings, however, while first going down as easily as a sugary drink on a hot day—who does not like a candlelit cottage on a snowy lane?—could have come to seem limited in range or execution, perhaps even cloying. In his novel
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
, Milan Kundera defined kitsch as “two tears.” “The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!” As the art historian Alexis Boylan described Kinkade, he does not so much paint things as he paints the “
desire to feel,”
his glowing windows virtually blinding the viewer with sentiment. That “second tear” might be too much, just as the second viewing of Kinkade was already too much for the Leeds students.

What about people who like Kinkade?
*
⁶
Is their pleasure not authentic? Were we to put them in a brain scanner, might the neural response be just as strong as it would be for, say, a Raphael? “
The meaning of a great work of art,” wrote the critic Kenneth Clark, “must be related to our own life in such a way as to increase our energy of spirit.” Kinkade's work, to read testimony from Kinkade's fans, certainly seems to do this. But Clark also insists that “art must do something more than give pleasure.”

Precisely
why
, he does not say, but it brings us back to Kant and Hume, whose thoughts still hover over how we think about what we like and, perhaps more important, what we
should
like.
In an age of anxious social mobility and new forms of cultural authority, when judgments over art or literature or fashion were becoming more personal and subjective—
more indicative of one's own character and thus ever more anxiously freighted with meaning—Kant and Hume were trying to rescue disputes over taste from the muddle of sheer relativism and the corruption of petty proclivities.

Kant, whose “
notoriously difficult” 1790 work,
The Critique of Judgment
, has long been
the
text on how to think about aesthetics, set out a rather austere vision for the ideal way to judge beauty: You had to be “disinterested.” This did not mean
uninterested
, but rather that you could not have any personal stake or desire in the thing under consideration. You needed to be engaged in an act of “mere contemplation.” For something to be beautiful, it needed “free beauty”; it could not be tied to any concept, label, purpose, preconception. Something of Kant arguably lurks in neuroaesthetics, the idea that one might be able to find “innate” responses to aesthetic objects, like Pollock's fractals—as long as you did not know it was Pollock!

This studied disinterestedness, of course, pretty much runs counter to how we actually do judge beauty.
Kant argues that things like flowers and seashells are free beauties, but it would seemingly take an alien who had just descended from an unknown planet (lacking flowers or seashells) to appreciate them according to the Kantian ideal. As the philosopher Denis Dutton describes it, you find a shell, and you admire it for certain reasons. Then you find another—
ooh, even nicer still!
Maybe you get a book on shells and learn the names, see how yours rate. “
All of this activity—this seeking out, identifying, comparing, admiring,” wrote Dutton, “involves concepts.”
Even knowing it was a shell is a concept.

Perhaps realizing the near impossibility of clearing this high aesthetic bar, Kant allowed for the “merely agreeable,” those things that were tainted by our taste. Just because we liked them—in fact,
because
we liked them—we should not expect anyone else to; that was our “private” taste speaking. The paintings of Kinkade, I suspect, would fall under Kant's instructions that “
a pure judgment of taste is one that is
not influenced by charm or emotion”; not that beauty could not have charm or emotion, but it could not be
determined
by them.

After dwelling in Kant's shadow for a few centuries when it came to taste, David Hume, in the last few decades, has been rising steadily on the aesthetic charts.
Whereas he was once “underrated,” philosophy journals have noted a “surge” of interest in Hume. This may be because we are living in an age when absolute aesthetic judgments seem passé or perhaps because his theories seem to more capably account for the realities of being human.

Although he was said to have had questionable taste himself, Hume's essay “Of the Standard of Taste” seems strikingly relevant today. Ever the empiricist, he dwells more on how things are than on how things should be; human beings cannot seem to help being Humean. “
The great variety of taste,” he notes, “is too obvious not to fall under everyone's observation.” It is not simply a matter of one's class, as Bourdieu would later try to document. “
Men of the most confined knowledge,” Hume wrote, “are able to remark a difference of taste in the narrow circle of their acquaintance, even where persons have been educated under the same government, and have early imbibed the same prejudices.” Hume sensed that when we said “there's no accounting for taste,” what we really meant was that there was no accounting for other people's taste.