Dataset: The aesthetic experience of critical art: The effects of the context of an art gallery and the way of providing curatorial information

The aim of our research was to investigate the influence of the physical context of presenting contemporary artworks (in an art gallery vs apart from an art gallery – in a laboratory setting) and the way of on acquaintance with curatorial description (reading on their own vs listening to vs the lack of curatorial information – control condition) on the reception of critical art. All experimental stimuli were the exemplar of the contemporary art raising current controversial social and political issues. Non-expert participants assessed their aesthetic emotional experience on non-verbal scales and made aesthetic judgments (of liking and understanding). Also, we tested the amount of information remembered from provided curatorial descriptions. As we predicted, the art gallery context increased both the experiencing of aesthetic emotions – in terms of valence and origin (respectively, mostly for artworks evoked positive and reflective emotional reactions), arousal, subjective significance, and dominance (in particular in conditions of lack of contextual information and listening to it) and aesthetic liking (especially in the condition of listening to the curatorial description). Thus, for critical art, as for other areas of the visual arts, the physical context of the gallery increases the aesthetic experience. Curatorial information increased understanding , so non-experts seem to need interpretative guidance in the reception of critical art. Moreover, obtained results suggest that the cognitive effort needed to acquaint oneself with contextual information might shape the aesthetic emotions.