Turner Prize: What can cognitive scientists tell us about art?

How do people make sense of Tuner Prize nominee Tino Sehgal's These Associations' And what can cognitive scientists learn from the way they do it? The result of the Turner prize 2013 has been reported worldwide as a shock win - mostly because this year, the chosen artwork is less shocking than usual. French artist Laure Prouvost's madcap films overturned both critical expectations and the bookie's 6/1 odds against her to win. While William Hill and Ladbrokes had David Shrigley's mischievous peeing sculptures as a 2/1 favourite, the critics had fancied Tino Sehgal's live conceptual/performance artworks. The Turner prize and its contestants have become famous for creating controversy and public discussion about the limits of what artists, galleries and critics consider worthy of aesthetic judgement. However, new research from Queen Mary University of London's Cognitive Science Group suggests that audiences are generally unfazed by this kind of issue. In ordinary conversations between visitors to the Tate Modern, one of the most supposedly 'experimental' artworks in this year's Turner Prize was immediately and unproblematically subjected to complex processes of aesthetic judgement by the viewing public. To find out how (and if) people made sense of Tino Sehgal's Turner Prize-nominated artwork These Associations , I recorded and analysed over two hundred ordinary conversations between visitors to the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall.