A group out of Emory headed by senior researcher Krish Sathian has published an article announcing that art is rewarding. Sure, it sounds a bit like discovering, “Hey, Sgt. Pepper is a pretty good album,” but the Emory team is studying the mechanics behind the experience of art and have used fMRI to image the specific areas of the brain that activate when one looks at a piece of art. The paper, entitled “Art for reward’s sake: Visual art recruits the ventral striatum,” appears in the journal Neuroimaging, and suggests that viewing art objects triggers a reward center deep in the brain, the ventral stratium. Interestingly, similar reward activity influences other behaviors, like addiction, gambling and financial decision making.
It’s a very small study, only 8 subjects, so I suspect that art and science afficionados will have to wait for further research into the neurological mechanisms underlying the artistic experience. It is my personal hope that this neuroimaging study will ultimately lead to a cure for abstract expressionism.
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Skeptical Humanities 
Abstract expressionism isn’t a disease; it’s a legitimate lifestyle choice!
Listen, my brother came out to me as an abstract expressionist, and I haven’t talked to him since. He can keep his degenerate, non-representational art to himself, thank you very much.
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