Why do we love art? The psychology behind our preferences
This article draws on my master's thesis: Verdier, D. (2024). How to serve the democratization of Art among citizens in the digital context of 2024? M.Sc. in Management of Social Innovation, HEC Montréal (supervisor: Rafael Ziegler).
Openness to art depends on who we are: our psychology, personality, experiences and context. Understanding why a work moves you — through colour, emotion or personality type — helps you choose pieces you will still love years from now.
Emotion and colour come first
Perception is the first layer of experiencing art — colour, form, texture (Silvia, 2005, on emotional responses to art). Palmer and Schloss's ecological valence theory shows we prefer colours tied to things we like: our colour taste is emotional, not arbitrary. This is why the palette of a painting often decides whether a room feels calm, warm or alive.
Personality shapes what we notice
Drawing on Jung, Isabel Briggs Myers built the MBTI (1921) to map psychological preferences. Used loosely, it is a useful lens: people who favour Sensing tend to enjoy concrete, detailed, textured works; those who favour Intuition are drawn to abstract, conceptual, symbolic pieces; Perceiving types prefer experimental, spontaneous art that breaks the rules.
Three audience types — and projection
Colbert & d'Astous (HEC, 2021) summarize cultural taste in three profiles: aesthetes (dense, demanding, abstract work), the cerebral (meaning, answers, facts) and the dark (dramatic, sombre subjects). Whichever you are, perceiving a canvas is partly perceiving yourself — we project human traits onto works, a form of projective identification (Bolgert, 2003).
