Maritime Aesthetics

Bringing Empirical Aesthetics to the Art of the Sea

“In American Waters”

The sea holds a special place in the American imagination, as well as in the art and industry that American minds have conjured onto canvas or cast into craft. “In American Waters” is an upcoming exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum that explores the American relationship with the sea during a particularly formative period in American history, when American port cities like Boston and New York were producing some of the world’s most advanced shipcraft, and a burgeoning middle class found itself increasingly desirous of art and memorabilia that evoked the sea and all its boundless promise.

Out of the confluence of ingenuity and collective emotion this period brought to a swell, two distinct art forms emerged, each taking their place on the proverbial American mantelpiece in unique, but not entirely unconnected ways. The first of these, what we henceforth call “seascapes”, were quite literally that: landscapes of the sea. Not unlike the works of the Hudson River School that sought to convey the majesty of the American interior, these works take as their often singular subject the allure of the American shoreline, and usually do so without even a reference to the humans or humanmade things that inhabit the landmass just out of frame. In contrast, what we henceforth call “shipscapes”, were effectively portraits of ships: exceptionally detailed depictions of the cutting edge shipcraft being produced at the time in the ports that shipped American plenty around the world.

Nearly a century later, what can we make of these two portfolios, so closely linked in inspiration, yet so starkly divergent in content? “In American Waters” is an attempt to navigate this and many other questions, bringing to a new generation the treasures of an American populous whose legacy remains, but whose treasures, tragedies, preferences and priorities may seem only a distant haze on a horizon long at our historical stern. Rather than simply revisiting the past, though, the Museum has long considered core to its mission the linking of that past to the present and future, leveraging the creativity of its curators, collaborators and visitors to bring new insight to the work both on and outside its walls.

This website is a tour through one particular part of this mission we’ve been exploring. Want to explore with us? Welcome aboard.

Empirical Aesthetics

Empirical (neuro)aesthetics is a subfield of scientific research that attempts to understand experimentally and quantitatively how people create, consume, understand and appreciate beauty. A profoundly interdisciplinary field, empirical (neuro)aesthetics incorporates insights from psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and (with the most recent wave of artificial intelligence) even computer science.

The Peabody Essex Museum believes strongly that science can deepen our appreciation of art, and that using science to better understand how we interact with and respond to art can lead to ever more meaningful interactions between museum visitors and the art that museums work so hard to curate and display. With its focus on aesthetic experience, and a diverse methodological toolkit, empirical aesthetics provides an intimate link between the worlds of art and science, and in the ideal can help enlighten both to equal measure.

What You’ll Find Here

Across the various pages of this website you’ll find the results of an ongoing empirical, quantitative analysis of observer responses to a collection of seascapes and shipscapes from the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum. The results are organized both by theme and by method.

• Introduction provides an overview of the kinds of data and analyses we use to understand how viewers interact with the artworks selected.
• The Horizon goes into depth on the horizon, a feature common to both the seascapes and shipscapes, and a theme of significant consequence “in american waters”.
• What’s trending? looks at larger trends across the data collected, providing in bullet form a whole variety of prelimnary results not yet incorporated into the larger narrative.

Disclaimer

The results presented here are largely preliminary, have not yet undergone peer review, and are subject to change as analyses progress. For questions or more information, please contact Colin Conwell at conwell@g.harvard.edu.