Earlier this year, a Californian prankster fooled art lovers into staring thoughtfully at a pair of glasses left on a museum floor.
It wasn't art - it was a joke. Or was it?
Art, a prank, or both? (TJ Cruda / Twitter)
A new study has found just calling something art makes our brains react to it differently.
Two dozen students were wired up to EEG machines to measure their brain activity, and shown images - some were said to be art, others just photographs.
When an image was presented as art, the participants consistently rated it more attractive than when it was said to be a photograph.
Different parts of their brain were also used - 'photographs' lit up the brain's outer layer much more than 'art'.
"When we think we are not dealing with reality, our emotional response appears to be subdued on a neural level," says lead researcher Noah van Dongen of Erasmus University in Rotterdam.
"This may be because of a tendency to 'distance' ourselves from the image, to be able to appreciate or scrutinise its shapes, colours, and composition instead of just its content."
The idea of presenting ordinary objects as art started with the World War I-era Dada movement, the most famous example probably Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain' which was literally just a urinal.
A replica of Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain' from 1917 (Getty)
Mr van Dongen says the findings back up a theory first put forward in the late 1700s by philosopher Immanuel Kant.
"Kant's two-century-old theory of aesthetics, where he proposed that we need to emotionally distance ourselves from the artwork in order to be able to properly appreciate it, might have a neurological basis and that art could be useful in our quest to understand our brain, emotions, and maybe our cognition."
The study is being presented at the The European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Congress this week, and published in journal Brain and Cognition.
Newshub.
