Mass Art and the Emotions

In the chapter Mass Art and the Emotions Noël Carroll looks at the how emotions are used in art. However unlike most of the other chapters of the book Carroll seems to forget that the book focuses on mass art specifically and not art in general. For the discussion in the chapter is mostly tied around how art and emotions go together, he doesn’t try too much to distinguish between how emotions work in mass art and how they might work in other forms of art.

Carroll does acknowledge that “mass art will gravitate (ideally) toward appealing to the emotional dispositions that are distributed amongst the largest numbers of people”. He thus says that mass art will generally use more basic emotions, as these are shared by the largest amount of people worldwide, allowing for the biggest possible audience, which is of essential importance to mass art. However Carroll only admits that mass art might make more use of certain sorts of emotions, which are not necessary for other forms of art (I presume here that Carroll would argue that with avant-garde art it is logical that more ‘exclusive’ emotions could be used that are not necessarily recognized and felt by many people in real life). He however does not say that the role of these emotions within the art is different.

I personally however feel that there might be much more relevant differences between mass art and other forms of art when it comes to the use of emotions. It seems logical indeed to conclude that mass art will generally use more basic emotions since these will be most accessible to the largest possible group. However I do think that there is a clear difference as well between mass art and other forms of art in the reason why emotions are used in the first place in that specific piece of art. As I do not believe that, like Carroll wants us to believe, emotions are used in all art forms to focus our attention. I do that Carroll is right in saying that emotions are used in mass art for that very reason; however with especially avant-garde art I do not think that emotions are always used in as a way to focus people’s attention. Especially because some artists do not wish to focus people’s attention at all, they do not want to make it too easy for their audience to step in and understand the art, and so emotions are used in a much more complex way.

For example if we look at the movie A Serious Man by the Coen Brothers it seems the intention of the directors to make the movie focus on normal emotions with a ‘normal speed’. As the movie does not race through all sorts of emotions like love, hate, sadness and so on. It builds up very slowly. You thus have to work as an audience to keep your attention to the movie and the story, instead of that the movie takes you along with a smooth story and a lot of emotions.

This brings me to my second point: I also think that in mass art emotions are used in a much more extreme way. Apart from different sorts of emotions being used, I think we can easily acknowledge that in for example the average romantic comedy we go sky-high with emotions like love,  and within minutes we go way down with emotions like hate, anger and sorrow. The intensity of the emotions in mass art is thus much higher than it will be in general with other forms of art. It is also much higher than the intensity of most people’s emotions in real life. This is not to say that emotions cannot be used in such a way in other forms of art, because there are enough examples of art, that does not qualify as mass art, which uses emotions in a very extreme way, in order to for example shock an audience. What I do mean to say is that these other forms of art might try to provoke one very intense emotion, like hate, but it will not evoke many different extreme emotions. This is what differentiates mass art from other forms of art: it tries in a very short amount of time to take people through many different emotions, in order to keep people interested and focused.

Along with the foregoing arguments I think it is fair to say that with mass art it is expected that the audience all experience the same sort of emotions when they see/experience the same art. When in a movie the hero gets dumped by his girlfriend we are meant to feel sad or sorry for him, and when in the end they do come back together the makers want us to feel happy. However with other works of art the artist might not have envisioned the audience as all having the same emotions with regard to the artwork. The artist might have tried to evoke different emotions in different people, or might not have cared at all about which emotions the artwork would provoke. Thus in general with non-mass art it is much harder to see which emotions people are supposed to feel when experiencing the art.

Of course there might be works of mass art that in reality make people feel differently than the makers were expecting. However I think it is fair to say that in such an instance the makers failed in making a good work of mass art. Since they clearly did not understand what the audience was expecting, or simply did not deliver the quality the audience was expecting. So for example a horror movie with horrible actors might actually make people laugh because it is so badly acted; or in a romantic comedy we might not at all feel sad for the main character getting dumped if the makers have failed to make us feel a connection to the character. However in all these cases it is clear that the makers failed; as it is was not supposed to happen that people would experience those emotions.

Thus I think Carroll could have gone a lot more in depth with the differences with regard to emotions between mass art and other forms of art. As I do believe that there are significant differences. It would have been interesting to see whether if Carroll had focused more on these questions he might have ended up with a different conclusion in general with regard to whether or not mass art can be considered art proper.

By Laura Pierik (Third year student, LUC The Hague)