One Day University

Why is it that people will praise an original Rembrandt, but will dismiss a perfect forgery as inferior? Why do some people enjoy modern art? Why do young children like to draw pictures? Many psychologists and art critics have argued that our appreciation of art is mostly due to early exposure to culture. Professor Bloom’s experimental research challenges this view. He argues that there is something hard-wired in all of us that underpins why we like the art we like and why we don’t like even perfect knock-offs. Indeed, there are hints that our capacity to understand and take pleasure in even quite subtle aspects of contemporary art is a human universal, emerging spontaneously in human development and having roots in our capacity for social reasoning.