Art experience means the rich experience of artistic objects that are mostly embedded in situational, social, and cultural contexts: for instance when encountering art in art galleries or museums. Art experience lets us reflect on the content, the style, and the artist behind the artwork—moreover, it lets us reflect about the percept, perception, the world, ultimately: about us. Current works in the field of empirical aesthetics unfortunately often ignore context factors that are so important for such deep and far-reaching experiences. Here I intend to refer to the different paths of measuring art experience by a) testing within the ecological valid context of art galleries via field studies, b) by simulating certain contextual and perceptual factors in a lab-oriented study design and c) by testing art-related material in labs without paying attention to such factors. The way we research art experience drastically changes the quality of the output, especially if we ignore certain essential factors which are typically involved when encountering art galleries in real life via path #c—mainly because participants do not show the typical motivation, interest and effort which they would typically face in art galleries. Furthermore, because the depiction quality of artworks, the context and the social situation in which they are inspected is fundamentally different in the lab, the respective impression is also very different. As most research ignores such factors, we might often be misled by the results of such studies; especially when the extraordinary and unique cultural status that makes artworks so different to ordinary objects is ignored.
Art experience is per definition a dynamic way of processing: While perceiving the artistic object, the film, the music play, we undergo complex affective as well as cognitive experiences interactively changing the entire processing. Elaboration, understanding, aesthetic aha-insights etc. change the view on the to-be-processed entity—psychologically interpreted, the entity becomes a part of ourselves. Most methods of measuring art experience are not able to reflect on these dynamics; most of them are just object-based, e.g. correlative approaches of bringing statically assumed object-properties together with simple ratings on these "objects". Here, I will demonstrate the limitations of such approaches, accompanied by the introduction of some simple principles to be followed when art experience is the focus of research. I will then introduce some methods which can assist in unfolding the process character of art experience without interfering too much with the experience as such: For instance, by using posturography, the Continuous Evaluation Procedure (CEP) or automatic facial expression routines. When these techniques are employed with clear rationales in mind, and by deriving concrete hypotheses from a well-grounded theoretical approach, we can come much closer to the rich experience people have when encountering and elaborating art. This will assist us in our human-history-encompassing endeavor of deciphering what and how art is processed and appreciated.