On a bright sunny day, under overwhelmingly blue South African skies, the farmer pulled out his knife and cut into the juicy orange. As I savored the delicious segment, he explained that his goal was to achieve the right balance of sweetness and acidity. A fruit that was only sweet would be boring and insipid. If only acidic, it would be unpleasant. The right combination of sweet and acid made for a rich and flavorful, one might say aesthetic, taste experience. In their Distancing-Embracing model of aesthetics, Menninghaus et al. develop this fundamental idea known to the orange farmer under overwhelmingly blue South African skies.

Empirical aesthetics has a long but thin history (Arnheim Reference Arnheim1954; Berlyne Reference Berlyne1971b; Fechner Reference Fechner1876). The field typically asked questions of preference in a fairly straightforward and perhaps insipid manner. In the mid-2000s, the field found new vigor with the addition of neuroscientific approaches (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2004a; Vartanian & Goel Reference Vartanian and Goel2004), as well as the articulation of early models of visual aesthetic experience (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2004b; Leder et al. Reference Leder, Belke, Oeberst and Augustin2004). This renewed vigor is evident in the accelerated number of publications in neuroaesthetics around this time (Fig. 1).

Figure 1.

Number of published reports between 1965 and 2016 based on a PUBMED search for neuroaesthetics OR (neuroscience/neuropsychology AND art) OR (Neuroscience/neuropsychology AND beauty).

Models for empirical visual aesthetics continue to be refined and debated (Bullot & Reber Reference Bullot and Reber2013a; Chatterjee & Vartanian Reference Chatterjee and Vartanian2016; Jacobsen Reference Jacobsen2006; Redies Reference Redies2007; Tinio Reference Tinio2013) and contribute to the evolution of this still nascent field. In the process, investigators became increasingly sensitized to areas that deserve further scrutiny. These areas include an understanding of the temporal dimensions of aesthetic experiences, as well as the role that negative affect and emotions play in positive aesthetic experiences (Chatterjee & Vartanian Reference Chatterjee and Vartanian2016; Leder & Nadal Reference Leder and Nadal2014). In addressing these points, the Menninghaus et al. proposal is welcome and overdue. Their central point is that acidity in the sweetness of aesthetic experiences is not unusual or extraordinary; it is precisely what makes aesthetic experiences intense, memorable, and rewarding.

On their account, various distancing mechanisms rendered by cultural conventions of what is framed as art or by dislocation in space and time allow artworks their alchemy in converting negative emotions to positive experiences. Much of the target article is about the dynamics of this conversion through an interplay of positive and negative emotions, the simultaneity of mixed emotions, and ways in which aesthetic sensorial qualities, meaning construction, and adherence to expected scripts mitigate pain to make way for pleasure. I have little to add to this comprehensive and insightful interpretation of aesthetic experiences. The model works best with art forms that unfold over time, such as literature, music, and cinema. But, do these ideas generalize to static visual arts such as photography and painting? In museums, people spend less than 20 seconds at images they like (Smith Reference Smith, Smith and Tinio2017), and undoubtedly, some of this time is spent in reading information about the art rather than immersing oneself in the image. How can such a short encounter do the work of embracing?

I suggest two ways in which the momentary expressions of, and encounters with, photographs and paintings could dilate time and lend themselves to the processing dynamics outlined by Menninghaus et al. Let me refer to these moments as decisive and distilled. The “decisive moment” is a phrase coined famously by the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (Reference Cartier-Bresson1952). It refers to a particular aesthetic of street photography of which he was a master. Events typically unfold with a beginning, a peak, and an end. The trick is to depict that peak moment that is informationally dense and hints at what came before and what comes after an impossibly thin slice of time. For example, Cartier-Bresson's famous 1933 photograph of children in Seville, Spain (see https://www.dodho.com/henri-cartier-bresson-collection-spain/) captures the delight of children laughing and playing, incongruously juxtaposed with the ravages of war depicted in rubbled homes and a hobbling boy. In viewing this image, one cannot help but feel mixed emotions of the kind outlined by Menninghaus et al. In the same vein, one cannot approach Picasso's Guernica (alluded to by the authors), painted around the same time and in response to related events as the Cartier-Bresson photograph, without feeling its pain. This image represents a distilled moment. To experience the painting in its full force requires familiarity with cubist artistic conventions and knowledge of the historic events being depicted. Here, knowledge of the past and a certain visual literacy are part of the beholder's share that distills into the image the essence of an extended horrific narrative.

The aesthetic challenge for photographs and paintings then differs from those for art forms that extend in time. Photographers or painters who wish to include negative emotions to make their art more intense, memorable, and rewarding have to dilate time in the mind of the viewer, rather than modulate the experience within the already temporally extended forms of literature, music, and cinema.