Zeit Contemporary Art is pleased to present PERSPECTIVES, a new podcast on art and its ideas. Each episode will assemble the voices of thinkers, artists, and philosophers who approach art and its role in contemporary society from unique points of view.
In this first episode, released in conjunction with the online viewing room Joie de vivre, Samuel Shapiro sits with Eva Specker, a prominent psychologist at the University of Vienna. As a researcher in the department of cognition, emotion, and methods in psychology, a member of the Empirical Visual Aesthetics Lab, and a member of the board of the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Eva dedicates her scientific career to questions that might at first seem to belong more to the realm of art history. She investigates how emotion is communicated through works of art, how we experience awe, how environmental context changes the way we look at art, and even how curatorial narratives shape perception. Accordingly, her research takes place in scientific laboratories and art museums alike. She’s conducted fieldwork in the Albertina and Belvedere Museums in Vienna, the Queens Museum in New York, and at the Venice Biennale.
Uniquely positioned between the fields of psychology and art history, Eva is deeply invested in the question of what happens when we look at a work of art. In this conversation they discuss experience and emotion, objectifying the subjective, data-driven curating, authenticity and reproduction, and how our current state of lockdown might impact our emotional relationship to art.
Samuel Shapiro is an art historian based in New York City. He has worked at numerous art museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. A graduate of Harvard, where he obtained a degree in History of Art and Architecture and Social Anthropology, Shapiro is soon to begin his doctorate in the History of Art.
