Empirical aesthetics, the beautiful challenge: An introduction to the special issue on Art & Perception

The i-Perception special issue Art & Perception is based on the Art & Perception Conference 2010 in Brussels. Our vision with this conference was to bring together artists and vision scientists from different backgrounds to exchange views and state-of-the-art knowledge on art perception and aesthetics. The complexity of the experience of art and of aesthetic phenomena, in general, calls for specific research approaches, for which interdisciplinarity seems to be key. Following this logic, the special issue Art & Perception contains contributions by artists and vision scientists with different methodological approaches. The contributions span a wide range of topics, but are all centred around two questions: How can one understand art perception and aesthetics from a psychological point of view, and how is this reflected in art itself?