Visual art inspired by climate change—An analysis of audience reactions to 37 artworks presented during 21st UN climate summit in Paris

RESEARCH ARTICLE Visual art inspired by climate change—An analysis of audience reactions to 37 artworks presented during 21st UN climate summit in Paris Christian Andreas Klo¨ cknerID*☯, Laura K. SommerID☯ Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * Christian.Klockner@ntnu.no Abstract This paper suggests and tests a psychological model of environmental art perception and subsequent support for climate change policies. The model is based on findings from art perception and environmental psychology, which indicate that the response of the viewer to the artwork is (1) first an emotional reaction, which can be positive and/or negative. The emotional activation leads to (2) evaluation of the perceived quality of the artwork. This forms the first impression of the artwork the viewer gets, which then triggers (3) reflections on the artwork that are finally related to support for climate policies. The model test uses data collected at the ArtCOP21 that accompanied the 21st UN climate summit in Paris. At 37 connected events, the research team collected 883 audience responses with a brief quanti- tative paper-pencil questionnaire. The data were analyzed using a multilevel-structural equation modeling approach. Results support the suggested theoretical model. Moreover, the effect of reflections on the artwork on support for climate policies is moderated by envi- ronmental attitudes, meaning the lower the environmental attitudes, the higher the effect of

reflections on policy support. Finally, artwork features like color, size, displaying something personal, etc., could be identified that had a significant relation to differences on the artwork level regarding the first impression of the artwork and the reflections elicited. The study shows that being confronted with climate change-related artwork relates at least in the short run to increased climate policy support, which is mostly channeled through an emotional activation with following cognitive processing. Features of the artwork relate to how strongly and which emotions are activated. Introduction Global environmental change, such as climate change, is a topic that engages scientists as well as artists working with many art forms. Artists who respond to such changes provide their per- sonal interpretations of the topic. With respect to climate change, the art scene is evolving quickly [1–3]; however, very little is known about how being confronted with such artwork PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247331 February 19, 2021 1 / 18 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Klo¨ckner CA, Sommer LK (2021) Visual art inspired by climate change—An analysis of audience reactions to 37 artworks presented during 21st UN climate summit in Paris. PLoS ONE 16(2): e0247331. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0247331 Editor: Valerio Capraro, Middlesex University, UNITED KINGDOM Received: October 21, 2020 Accepted: February 5, 2021 Published: February 19, 2021 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the

benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247331 Copyright: © 2021 Klo¨ckner, Sommer. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The data is available in the repository of the Norwegian Center for Research Data: https://search.nsd.no/study/ NSD2630?record-type[0]=study.