Robert Genn's Twice Weekly Letter
Insight and inspiration for your artistic career.

Dear Artist,

Recently I had an opportunity to watch people buying my paintings. It was a solo show where people were coming in and interacting in a friendly, social environment. By watching people's faces, I noticed something I hadn't quite seen before. Many buyers appeared to me to just glance at a work and make up their minds then and there. This blink-of-an-eye was of course followed by the regular rationalizations that buyers (particularly couples) go through when they're considering something: "Is it too big?" "Where will we put it?" "How do you feel about it, dear?" At the end of my letter I'm going to tell you what I think triggered some of those instant decisions.

New research in neuroscience seems to indicate that advertising is most effective when some sort of desire synapse is triggered in a nanosecond. By covering volunteer heads with EEG sensors, using eye-tracking techniques and galvanic skin responses, researchers such as Dr. Robert Knight of the University of California, Berkeley trace the emotional roots of decision making.


In applying this stuff to art, it would have nothing to do with the sort of buyer who looks at a work and thinks he needs it because he needs to look smart or intelligent. Or the buyer who recognizes a farm he's been on or a mountain he's climbed. It applies to an open-minded person who simply and instantaneously feels good about something.

The advertising business (US$600 billion this year), dealing as it often does with visual stimuli, pays big bucks to people like Robert Knight to tell them what's happening in people's heads. I've never heard of anyone doing this in our business.

A clue to Knight's thinking is his disdain for focus groups. By rationalizing everything, focus groups often come up with the "wrong" (and unemotional) decision. When you think about it, a couple anguishing over the purchase of a work of art is like a small focus group. Often as not they talk themselves out of it. At the same time, some works just seem to walk out of galleries. Are these works talking on an emotional level to the folks who can't resist them? And what is it about these works that they can't resist? No matter what type of art you're looking at, at the top of the list I'd put "Unusually satisfying pattern."

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "The brain makes behavior. If you can effectively measure the brain, which we think we can, we can give you information that's not available through any other methodology." (Dr. Robert Knight)

Esoterica: The brain, when instantly engaged, acts in an emotional manner--what we often call "heart." Art in its higher forms is all heart. Sorry to admit this, but when I look at some folks in galleries, it seems to me that we are able to engage their hearts in the same classic way advertisers work hard to achieve: (1) You get their attention. (2) They become emotionally involved. (3) They retain what they feel. And it all happens in the blink of an eye.

If you would like to read more information related to the above letter please visit the Grabbing the heart clickback


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