Doing art brings different emotions

The argument

Art has the ability to evoke emotions in perceivers. Looking or contemplating a painting for example may lead to various emotions like joy and pleasure or more negative feelings like fear, anger, or disgust. Emotions due to art take effect on many different levels including subjective and bodily levels which influence people's evaluation of the art (liking it or not), so the emotional response is not a commentary added after the fact but part of how the work is registered in the first place. There is evidence that the effect reaches the body and not only the viewer's report of it. Researchers found that people show more positive facial expressions like slightly smiling in front of artwork that has emotionally positive content. Artwork with more negative content led to more negative facial expressions like frowning. The face responds to the content before any judgement about the work has been formed or offered. These emotions can be more complex than happiness or discomfort. A painting may evoke many emotions at a time that the brain integrates to produce one whole feeling. This feeling can be widely different in different people, since each viewer brings a different history to the same image, and that variability does not undermine the process — it is what makes the encounter personal rather than uniform. All of this is the material the artist is working with. The artist's purpose in making art is to share and induce different emotions in the perceivers. Artists use different colors, represent different scenes, and communicate symbols that work on a subconscious level to convey a message or an emotion as the artist sees it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Emotions in art are not as simple and straightforward as people thought they are. Paintings are usually abstract representations or representations of things that do not have real bases in the world. It is unclear how and why would humans produce an emotional response to visuals they know are unreal. Researchers think that in order to experience an emotion towards something, people need to believe the thing is real. Similarly, why and how would sound vibrations created by strings of musical instruments produce emotions is not well understood. Art may induce emotions in people but the picture of emotions as it relates to art is much more complicated and is not well understood.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That art evokes emotion is common ground across every position in this question — the communication position depends on it too. A premise all sides accept cannot select between them. [Rejecting P2] The facial-expression finding shows that people respond to emotional content in images, which is equally true of photographs, faces and news footage. Nothing in it is specific to art, and no source is given for the research. [Rejecting P3] The step from "evokes emotion" to "serves entertainment and self-improvement" is the argument's key move and it is simply asserted. Fear, anger and disgust — the argument's own examples — are not obviously entertaining or improving. The body's closing sentence also says the artist's purpose is to share and induce emotions in others, which states the sibling communication position rather than this one.