Why music sounds better when you know the musician is eccentric.
Our brains associate eccentricity and creativity in musicians, painters, writers and other artists — as long as weirdness doesn't feel like a gimmick. At the South by Southwest festival, Lady Gaga invited a performance artist to surrender on her, in a move that probably provoked some to question her artistic vision, if not her mental health. For others, the act probably only contributed to her mystique, making her music much more fun. New research shows that an artist's eccentricity, even in areas irrelevant to the medium of expression, can improve our perception of the artist's work. But there's a catch: the eccentric behavior can't be a gimmick.
Eccentricity
In our minds, eccentricity and creativity come together like, well, Bjork and swans. Just as generating a creative idea requires you to deviate from conventional ways of thinking, whimsy implies deviation from conventional social behavior. If you ignore the rules in one domain, you can ignore them in another domain as well. Once we form a stereotype of the whimsical artist, we can see those who better fit the stereotype as better performers. In a study listeners kept rap songs better if they thought the musicians were black. For a paper , several experiments were conducted. First, they showed the participants a picture of Van Gogh's sunflowers and told them that the painter had probably cut his own earlobe. Viewers with this information liked the painting more. In another, participants looked at three works of art and half were told that the (fictional) artist was personally eccentric. These topics liked the works better and were willing to pay more than four times as much for them.
