Study Task 2

 DEPRESSIVE ART

‘The motivational compatibility account for the influence of mood on creative generation. Building upon the feelings-as-information framework, it was proposed that positive moods signal to individuals that they are safe, motivating them to take advantage of this presumed safety by seeking stimulation and incentives (i.e., having fun), whereas negative moods signal to individuals that there are problems at hand, motivating them to solve these problems. Based on these assumptions, it was predicted that positive and negative moods should enhance effort on creative generation tasks construed as compatible with the motivational orientations they respectively elicit. Specifically, positive, relative to negative, moods were predicted to enhance effort on tasks construed as fun and silly, whereas negative, relative to positive, moods were predicted to bolster effort on tasks construed as serious and important. Evidence for this model and several of its underlying assumptions were adduced in 3 experiments in which mood was manipulated, and participants completed creative generation tasks that were framed as either fun or serious. Results are discussed with an eye toward addressing alternative theoretical explanations.’

'Its specific contribution lies in the aesthic elaboration of a salient rule of depressive disorders: disenagagement.'

'Contemporary art cannot be isolated from the depressive paradigm.'

'They consistently rethink aesthetics through a  depreciation of its inherent feature, the relational, that is, not only the viewer's connection to the image but also intersubjectivity, communication, community, interpellation, and still more important, the attachment to the other.'

'Depressiveness unfolds as not so much a theme as an aesthetic depreciation of connectedeness.'

Artists;

‘My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art.’ -Edvart Munch

"I am unable to describe exactly what the matter with me is. Now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head... at times I have attacks of melancholy and of atrocious remorse." -Vincent van Gogh

‘the artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.’ -Picasso