Or should they let you interpret it yourself?

I’m so excited to get my second The Creative Questioner blog post to you! (If you’re looking to read the previous post, or to discover what this blog is about, click here.)

I started selling my linocut print art recently, and a question has hounded me: Should I tell potential buyers what each work is “about”? Or should I let them create their own interpretations?

Therefore, I was thrilled when I discovered a study titled “I Just Don’t Get It: Perceived Artists’ Intentions Affect Art Evaluations” (Empirical Studies of the Arts, 2014), written by researchers at the University of Oxford.

Here are the three main conclusions:

1: An artist’s intentions matter when it comes to people deciding whether an item is artwork or not. (Think about Marcel Duchamp’s urinal—he stated it was art, and eventually it was accepted as such.)

2: Accompanying information, like titles, helps viewers understand artworks and like them more!

3: If viewers think a piece of artwork took more effort and skill, they like it better than if they thought it was easier to do.

Now, my artwork is easily classified as artwork—there’s no mistaking what my print is for (decoration and emotional connection), so conclusion #1 doesn’t rock my world. But I love the explanation for this finding: Humans intrinsically want to understand; from infancy, we’re wired to figure out what things are for. However—unlike, say, a fork—a work of art doesn’t have a so-called functional purpose. So, to be able to slot a piece of art into our meaning of the world, we feel compelled to speculate about what the artist was intending to do or achieve.

#2 demonstrates this in action. Here, participants were shown abstract and semi-abstract paintings with a range of titles. For example, one of the artworks was given variations like “trail of black paint,” “wholeness,” or “branch in Japanese style.” The last title helped viewers understand the artist’s intentions best, which helped them relate to the piece, and they ended up liking the artwork more. Thanks to the precise description, they were able to meet that inborn need to understand.

But what about longer descriptions and explanations? This particular study stuck with titles only, but previous ones have taken into account artists’ statements and interpretive texts, and found that appreciation rose thanks to these, too.

So that’s a YES when it comes to explaining the meaning behind your art. (Which I already do, to a certain degree. Select any of the artworks on my portfolio page and you’ll be able to read its brief story.)

My last lesson learned thanks to this study is that I should stop speeding up my Instagram reels unnecessarily, plus show more works in process, even (especially?) the tedious aspects of creating a work from start to finish. (Although I must balance this with not boring viewers and with satisfying algorithms.) If I’m demonstrating that a work took thought, effort and time, people will theoretically like it better.

As a bonus, the more I show of the creation process, the more people will have faith that I’m a skin-and-blood, breathing person and not AI!

What do you think?

What’s your opinion on providing the story behind a work of art? Let me know! Email me at art@galadrielwatson.com or find me on Instagram.