"For the average person trying to purchase art, knowing something about the artist - and knowing that the artist is authentic - can reduce the risk of buying a worthless piece," she added. "All consumers in the study, but especially men, evaluated art with a strong emphasis on how motivated and passionate the artist was. So if you're an artist or if you're managing an artist, developing that human brand - getting the message across that you're authentic - becomes essential."

When it comes to appreciating art, men and women really do think differently, research shows.

While women use both sides of their brain, men only use the right half to judge if a piece of work is beautiful, a team of scientists discovered.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports the findings.

The researchers asked 10 men and 10 women to judge the beauty of artists paintings and photographs of urban and rural landscapes.

At the same time, the researchers measured the magnetic fields produced by electrical activity in the brains of the volunteers.

This revealed that both men and women were using a part of the brain associated with spatial awareness, called the parietal lobe. However, while women used both right and left sides, men used only the right parietal lobe.

The researchers suggest that this is because women are contextualising the information and thinking more about the details of what they are seeing, assessing the position of objects according broad categories, such as "above" or "below", or "left" or "right".

The men, they say, are focussing on the overall image using a more precise form of mental mapping.

"Women tend to be more aware than men of objects around them, including those that seem irrelevant to the current task, whereas men out-perform women in navigation tasks," the scientists told PNAS.

"Men tend to solve navigation tasks by using orientation-based strategies involving distance concepts and cardinal directions, whereas women tend to base their activities on remembering the location of landmarks and relative directions, such as 'left from', or 'to the right of'."

The different ways men and women mapped the world appeared to influence their perception of beauty, they believe.

Source: 

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