“There’s a difference between art that pleases people and art that pleases people in a way they don't know they need yet,” she said. “I’m not making stuff people already find beautiful, I’m trying to persuade them of new ways to see beauty.”
The work Schaechter does today also grapples with questions that bridge art and science. Why can the same image be beautiful to one person and ugly to another? How does our sense of aesthetics influence our other cognitive functions, like emotions or reasoning?
These are the kinds of questions that drive researchers at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, where Schaechter is now the artist-in-residence. The center—the first such scientific hub in the U.S.—allows researchers to explore what exactly our brains are doing when we experience art, and what we’re doing when we create art out of our experiences.
