Is there any difference between seeing art in the museum versus in the lab?: A comparative study of phenomenal art experiences of original artworks and digital reproductions

In the current post-digital age, technology is omnipresent in our everyday lives and digital encounters with art are increasingly pervasive. Museums, artists, and art professionals continue to utilize emerging technologies in their practices, and both access to and awareness of digital platforms continue to expand. In spite of this, little is known about how experiences with digital reproductions on a computer compare to original artworks in a museum, especially regarding viewers’ global, felt-experiences. Previous investigations of digital art experiences report rather small and inconsistent differences between museum and laboratory conditions. These studies have tended to focus on hedonic responses and aesthetic judgements, and of these, few include comparative museum conditions with high-quality, genuine works of art. In the current study, we present a direct comparison of first-hand experiences of artworks in the gallery and in-lab experiences of their digital surrogates, with a focus on participants' subjective or felt-experience. We used a previous large-scale collection of museum experiences as a basis for this comparison, selecting eight artworks from the original study to digitize and present to new participants in a traditional laboratory setting. Initial results replicate previous findings, where aesthetic judgement ratings were found to be significantly, but only marginally, higher in the museum condition. In addition to collecting standard aesthetic judgement ratings, we also employed a new self-report measure for capturing phenomenal experiences with visual art encounters that uses confirmatory latent profile analysis to identify and assign individual reports to one of five established experience types: Harmonious, Novel, Transformative, Disengaged, and Negative. We found a small but significant difference in the frequency of experience types between the museum and digital cohorts, with the latter producing more Disengaged and Novel experiences, and lower rates of Harmonious and Negative experiences. A significant interaction between setting and experience type was also found for Negative and Transformative experience types for most variables. Our study shows that artworks that cluster around negative affect experience types are better supported within the scaffolding of a museum setting.