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

parsimony, we keep this simple grouping (which is also supported by the factor analytical approach described below). Thereby we follow the tradition in empirical aesthetics to concep- tualize the affective reactions in a dichotomous way [44, 45] but adapt it to the environmental setting, beyond ’liking’ or ’disliking’ an artwork. Cognitive response to art as a motor of behavior change. The process of art perception also includes cognitions, which revolve around finding meaning and identifying a personal con- nection to the artwork. These reflections can include different aspects concerning the artwork and its topic, as well as the spectator and their understanding of themselves. Part of the first cognitive processing of the artwork is the forming of a ’first impression of the artwork,’ which includes a quick evaluation of the content of the artwork, resulting in a ’perceived quality of the artwork’ and an ’identification with the artist’ [46]. The ’perceived quality of the artwork’ is formed by activating memories and connecting them with the com- position, global structural organization, and semantics of the art [13], while the ’identification with the artist’ represents an implicit judgment on what kind of person the artist might be. A study by White, Kaufman, and Riggs [47] showed that the background of the artist influences the way the artwork is being perceived. After the first impression, higher cognitive processes in the perception of environmental art take place, which is summarized as ’reflections and cognitions on the art’ in the most influen-

tial models in empirical aesthetics [13–20, 44, 48]. These reflections are responsible for finding meaning in the artwork, which may lead to self-discovery [49] and self-improvement [13, 15]. The underlying idea is that the more reflection and the more meaning spectators are able to ascribe to the art, the more they are likely to be motivated to act. In the case of climate change, this can be represented by an increase in support for environmental policies. We suggest that the general reflections on the art include a ’relevance of climate change in the daily life’ of the spectator, an ’awareness of consequences’ of one’s behavior. Environmental psychology describes an awareness of consequences as becoming aware of negative conse- quences of human activity on the environment, which was found to facilitate pro-environmen- tal behavior [50–52]. Moreover, awareness of consequences was increased after seeing environmental art [10, 53]. While a connection to one’s daily life is needed to make the topic of climate change personal and to constructively engage people with environmental problems [43]. Same as the connection to people’s daily life, the subjective perception of how likely cli- mate change will affect them can be an important cognitive step that makes climate change personal. A suggested overall structural model. The design of the present study allows to bring together characteristics of the audience and the artworks included since the number of art- works and participants per artwork is sufficient for a multilevel structural equation modeling

approach. However, the correlational nature of the data does not allow for causal inferences, so this needs to be taken into consideration when interpreting the results presented. Based on the considerations presented in the previous sections, we expect that the relation between art experiences and climate policy support depends both on person characteristics (e.g., socio-demographics, art expertise, environmental attitudes, etc.) and characteristics of the artwork (e.g., its form, material, the neuro-aesthetic principle applied by the artist, etc.). Fig 1 presents a stylized overview of the analysis framework, which we used to structure the following analyses. We expect that there is a chain of effects when a member of the audience is confronted with a climate change-related artwork. In the order of the different effects, we follow the model pro- posed by Locher [46], since other models are less clear on the order of emotional and cognitive reactions [13]: When the viewer encounters an artwork, their perception is influenced by their personal characteristics, as well as characteristics of the individual artwork. The exposure to PLOS ONE Visual art inspired by climate change — An analysis of audience reactions PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247331 February 19, 2021 5 / 18