Menninghaus analyzes the mechanisms involved in the appreciation of works of art

Although one of the primary goals of the arts is to move the audience, there are few psychological studies focused on understanding what this means. This gap has been filled by the German researcher Winfried Menninghaus, who will give the conference “What does it mean to be moved by an artwork?” on March 20, at 3 pm, in IEA-USP's Event Room.

At the event, Menninghaus will present the results of a research project that is being developed with the goal of establishing "being moved" and "being touched" as concepts of genuine emotion and revealing their role in aesthetic appreciation. According to the researcher, “this includes a novel perspective on the time-honored issue of aesthetic pleasure associated with negative emotions."

Full member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Menninghaus is founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, created in 2013 with the proposal to use scientific methods to investigate the psychological, sociocultural and neural bases of aesthetic perceptions, preferences and reviews. His research focuses on the philosophical, evolutionary and empirical / psychological aesthetics; models, boundary phenomena and aesthetic functions of mythology and lifeworld, and literature since 1750, with emphasis on German Romanticism and literature of the 20th century.

The opening of the conference will be in charge of Helmut Galle, professor of German Literature at the Department of Modern Languages of USP’s Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (FFLCH).

The event will be broadcast live on the web.