Grumpy Toddlers and Dead Pheasants: Visual Art Preferences Are Predicted by Preferences for the Depicted Objects.

Prior research has demonstrated that color preferences are driven by preferences for objects associated with those colors (e.g., that the sky is blue or that feces are brown influences preferences for blue and brown; Palmer & Schloss, 2010). We extended this work to visual art, asking whether subject matter guides visual art preferences. Across three phases, different groups of participants (1) tagged paintings with salient associations, (2) rated their preferences for paintings and for previously generated object-tags. and (3) rated how well the object-tags represented each painting, allowing us to compute weights reflecting objects' importance within each painting. Our primary result demonstrates that painting preferences are strongly correlated to object preferences. Furthermore, individual object preferences better predicted painting preferences than did group-averaged object preferences. Our work demonstrates that, despite the seeming subjectivity of art preferences, subject matter significantly influences the formation of preferences.