Empirical aesthetics is an emerging interdisciplinary field. Although originating from the very early days of experimental psychology—a field founded by Gustav Theodor Fechner and others back in the 1860s [1]—it was put in the back seat for a very long time. In recent years, empirical aesthetics underwent a kind of renaissance, specifically focusing on the aspects of art perception and art experience. In the present paper, we will mainly be interested in art experience, as this concept provides an interesting opportunity to integrate multisensory channels [2], to learn about the relationship between cognition and emotion [3, 4], and to understand art experience as a complex and highly dynamic psychological process [5].

Research in empirical aesthetics mostly follows three different paths of gaining knowledge on art epiphanizing (see Figure 1): Path #1 the ecological path of testing in the art gallery or museum; Path #2 the path where gallery qualities are simulated to provide contextual embedment; and Path #3 the context-free lab-oriented path.

The ecological path might seem to be the golden way of getting insights into the deep art experience process, as the context of the art gallery is not only simulated or partly mapped, but fully present: Testing in a natural setting actually happens while perceiving and epiphanizing artworks there. The potential data are indeed very rich and ecologically valid [32], but the proper measurement of them is rather hard to achieve; mostly impossible. At the moment when you start asking the museum visitor about her experience, she will artificially rationalize, will alter the typical processing and will potentially detach from affective processing. Path #1 in sum is promising in allowing the development of true art experiences, but the situation is not controllable, the variables cannot be varied and the beholders’ experiences can hardly be assessed at all. One typical example of such promising but also hard-to-control empirical work is a recent aesthetic study conducted in an art gallery: [33] compared aesthetic experiences within a real art exhibition in an art gallery with the same material experienced in lab conditions. Although the study was quite revealing in showing heightened appreciation of artistic installations, the expectations beholders had beforehand were also different. This can easily be explained by the mere fact that gallery visitors indeed expect semantic instability [34], high degrees of novelty and a good portion of arousal, but gallery visitors are also per se different persons than people approaching our laboratory—whereas gallery attendees are intrinsically interested, sophisticated and committed to art in general, typical lab participants might be particularly interested in taking part in a specific study, e.g., to fulfill course requirements. The latter approach and so the typical commitment, involvement and interest in artistic material is mostly different to people who are tested by Path #1 strategies. Thus, Path #3 characterizes a fundamentally different approach, representing most of the research conducted in empirical aesthetics: Here, all research is executed in a laboratory without the aim of simulating or emulating the art gallery context or the typical viewing conditions plus the affective and cognitive parameters that can typically be observed with real-life art visits. Clearly, this approach offers opportunities with low ecological validity, but shows great possibilities of varying, systematically different experimental parameters. Material which might not depend too much on context factors and on personality variables might be adequately tested within such an internally very valid experimental setting. It is important to note that there is also an empirical study which do not show differences in the evaluation of artworks when the factors gallery context vs. lab and genuine vs. reproduction were varied [35]—further research has to be executed to qualify this unexpected finding which was not found before when both investigated factors were (inherently) confounded. Path #2 tries to combine the advantages of Path #1 and Path #3 while excluding their more problematic aspects. The main aim is to simulate typical conditions in and with which artworks are epiphanized, while preserving the power and possibilities of an experimental approach. To achieve this aim, the experimenter has to know relevant details on typical viewing conditions, exploration modes, environmental factors and the social discourse about artworks in general (and sometimes even about very specific artworks). This calls for an extensive review of the literature—particularly important are framework or functional process models (e.g., [3, 11, 12, 14, 36]; see for an overview of several models [37])—and for conducting pilot studies on several side aspects and parameters of specific settings. Furthermore, information on typical effect sizes of several factors is needed to balance the employment of different aspects due to their relevance to the targeted effects—with the general problem, of course, that interactive effects between small main effects might lead to very large effects and therefore such interactive effects have to be considered, too. Within Path #2 approaches, we might lose the full width of phenomena regarding art epiphanizing, because the employment of an experimental study strategy reduces the number of variables, but this helps to capture at least these focused variables in an ecologically valid way. It is important to stress that it is in the end not about the number of involved variables but the quality of the variables which we should keep in mind. If we want to address the phenomenon of art epiphanizing and, thus, a process (e.g., how liking and interest dynamically change over time while inspecting an artwork) and not a mere state (e.g., the final liking of an artwork), we particularly need variables that are able to capture such a process as suggested, for instance, by the “stream of experience” concept propagated by [14]. Path #3 seems not to be an adequate method for gaining knowledge on deeper art-specific processes because deeper art experience, much less true art epiphanizing, will not emerge. This path, however, can provide important data on important sub-phenomena and sub-processes which are parts of what we call art experience. So Path #3 can strongly assist and prepare conducting high-quality research via Path #2. And there is a great list of elegantly and systematically conducted experiments which seem to be very worthwhile to follow or adapt for conducting research within Path #3.

To validly capture experiences is a challenge, to capture them while perceiving art is even more demanding. The main reason for this is that art experience is a highly complex and undefined process that combines strong cognitive and affective qualities. This process is multimodally triggered and is very much associated with previous experiences, expectations and knowledge. It might be possible to investigate some sub-phenomena and sub-processes using standard lab-based experiments, but devoted interest in artworks, fascination, and love for art (see for more art-related emotions and motivations [48]), can only be validly addressed within the art gallery or within contexts that mimic their conditions. This is particularly the case if the aim is to research and understand deep art experience, which I term “art epiphanizing” within this paper. To be able to simulate such contexts, their key properties have to be known. The present paper shows that some of these properties which have to be addressed are adequate presentation conditions regarding the size of the stimuli, the distance to the stimuli and the possibility to choose the time needed to inspect and to re-attend them. Much harder to achieve is to emulate the sheer value and meaning of an original artwork [47]. If studies explicitly address prestige, authenticity or originality effects, then research has to be conducted within a real museum context (for instance by asking visitors immediately after a visit about their experiences in the gallery, see [49]); if it is more about content factors (e.g., [50]), the original museum context seems less important but still has to be taken into account. A last point, which is mostly neglected and hardly addressed at all, is the inclusion of social factors, for instance the mere attendance of others might change the experience of art. The typical social interaction while perceiving art is another issue that might help to more deeply elaborating art. Just recently we have shown that the alleged evaluation of others systematically change the appreciation of others [8]. These factors have to be investigated in more detail in the future.

Empirical aesthetics has a long tradition regarding the relatively short history of experimental psychology, but ecological valid studies are still quite rare and so knowledge concerning art epiphanizing is quite sparse [51]. I hope that future research will go back to museums or to naturalistic settings to investigate and understand the fascinating experiences we potentially gain from artworks, these wonderful artifacts of human culture. Table I might act as a kind of recommendation scheme when which kind of research strategy should be pursued.