Priming: Responses change over time

Cotopaxi, Frederic Edwin Church's 1862
painting (7'x4') of the Ecuadorean volcano

Frederic Edwin Church was America's richest painter around the time of the Civil War. He traveled to spectacular landscapes, such as the Andes and Niagara Falls. He painted giant landscapes which he exhibited, one at a time, to masses of paying customers. Each new Church landscape was an event. His Heart of the Andes sold for $10,000, a vast sum for an American painting in the mid-19th Century. (Here's the 1863 NYT's review of Cotopaxi.)

But then tastes changed and the value of his art plummeted. Some of his pictures wound up in nightclubs and restaurants as cheap decor, as failed attempts to class up the dump.

And then tastes changed again, and Church's work slowly regained stature. By 1980, one of his works became the first American painting to sell for a million dollars. His top paintings now are featured prominently in America's top museums. His stature appears permanently secure.

Artist's conception of the White House's
lost Tiffany Screen

Here's a painting by current artist Peter Waddell, The Grand Illumination, that represents President Benjamin Harrison overseeing the turning on the first electric lights in the White House in 1891. The point of the picture, actually, is to provide an artist's conception of the most legendary work of decor in White House history, the colored class screen installed in the Entrance Hall by Louis Comfort Tiffany when he redecorated the White House for the urbane Chester Arthur. 

Today, glass artworks by Tiffany are once again worth a fortune, but they fell radically out of fashion in the 1900s. Teddy Roosevelt had the Tiffany glass in the White House junked. The great screen, like so much Tiffany glass, was destroyed. So this painting is based on black and white photos and some surviving Tiffany works of the same era to create a speculative image of what once was.

The point of these examples are that people once found that the works of Frederic Edwin Church and Louis Comfort Tiffany primed them to experience very positive emotions, and they work almost as well today. If, say, you are invited to a charity event held in a ballroom decorated by Tiffany, you'd probably feel more privileged, pleased, and generous than if the event were held in, say, a suburban church basement. If you invited a date to the charity bash, you might find she finds the Tiffany ballroom more priming than the church basement.

Yet, both Church and Tiffany also each went through decades when their art primed people in the exact opposite direction: they found their masterpieces depressing.

Why would social psychologists expect that their lame little attempts to prime feelings in subjects in experiments would continue to work the same over the decades when masters like Church and Tiffany couldn't get consistent responses?