Art as Communication

Positive aesthetic experiences plausibly involve viewers’ ability to construct meaning by regarding art as a communicative process. Here we develop and analyze results of a survey extending the Gricean communication framework from language to visual art. Operationalizing the 4 Gricean maxims and an index of intent, we assessed their predictive power for artists’ and nonartists’ aesthetic liking of paintings varying in level of abstraction. Results showed that perceived maxim fulfillment was positively related to increased aesthetic liking and that most maxims maintained consistent predictive power across raters. Comparisons of artists’ and nonartists’ ratings on highly abstract versus representational paintings showed a consistent strong effect for painting type, with representational paintings receiving generally higher ratings on each maxim, intent, and liking by both groups. The Gricean framework is a fruitful means of capturing perceived artistic communication and aesthetic liking, and we discuss ways of developing this model, for instance, in distinguishing maxim fulfillment from understanding nonfulfillment as intentional.