The Institute

The Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics explores who aesthetically appreciates what, for which reasons and under which situational and historical circumstances, and analyzes the functions of aesthetic preferences and practices for individuals and societies. The MPIEA is currently the only research institution in the world that is solely dedicated to interdisciplinary research on aesthetic perception and evaluation.

The Russian Academy of the Science of Arts in Moscow (GaChN) may be considered its historical predecessor: there, researchers from the arts, cultural studies, psychology, and neurology collaborated with artists — among them, significantly, Vassily Kandinsky — between 1921 and 1929, conducting cross-disciplinary research projects which investigated the aesthetics of individual art forms.

Mission, objectives, topics

The objective of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics is to arrive at a deeper understanding of the mechanisms, elicitors and functions of aesthetic liking and aesthetic preferences: Who appreciates what and why and under which conditions? And what functions do aesthetic practices and preferences serve for individuals, social groups and societies? The research focuses primarily on the foundations of aesthetic evaluation, perception and experience.

Key topics include:

• the nature of “aesthetic pleasure” and the different types of aesthetic appeal and “aesthetic emotions”;
• the cognitive and affective mechanisms involved in aesthetic perception and their neural, physiological and behavioral correlates;
• the motivational implications and consequences of aesthetic liking (tendencies to seek prolonged and/or repeated exposure to aesthetically appealing objects, pictures, songs, texts; decision-making grounded in aesthetic judgments, such as purchasing aesthetically appealing objects, etc.);
• the ontogenesis of aesthetic preferences, their change over lifetime, and their historical, cultural and individual variability;
• the range of historically and culturally varying concepts used to designate and discuss aesthetic judgments, such as “beautiful,” “ugly,” “sublime,” “interesting,” “fascinating,” “poetic,” “uncanny,” “marvelous,” “awesome,” “moving,” “touching,” “shattering,” “tragic,” “suspenseful,” etc.;
• the functions of aesthetic practices and judgments for the development of cognitive and affective capabilities as well as for the subjective well-being, self-conception, and “self-fashioning” of individuals, for social communication, and for economic purposes;
• aesthetically appealing properties of objects in different domains (auditory, visual and multi-modal aesthetics), in different art forms (painting, sculpture, song, instrumental music, language, literature, film, video clips, architecture, fashion, design), and in specific genres of these art forms.

Despite its impressive foundation by Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887), empirical aesthetics has largely remained a marginal field of research, both in academic psychology and in the study of the arts. The mission of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics is to provide a new institutional and scientific framework for coordinated and interdisciplinary research into aesthetics. In a world in which aesthetic experiences, shared aesthetic preferences and aesthetically motivated decisions have become ubiquitous aspects of everyday life, systematic, basic research into the nature and functions of aesthetic practices, judgments and motivations is no mere luxury, but an important research goal.

In this effort the institute faces the challenge of further developing and integrating theories, hypotheses and models from very different disciplines, most notably from psychology, the traditional poetics of the individual art forms, musicology, art history, literary studies, biology, sociology, and the neurosciences. The mission of our institute is based on the assumption that progress towards an integrative aesthetic theory can only be achieved through a strong focus on basic research and joint interdisciplinary efforts.