Re-Air: What Makes Spine-Tingling Art? Aesthetic Chills: Explained

0:03Hey everybody, Ben here, introducing what you are about to hear, which is a summer re-air of a favorite Art Angle episode from earlier in the year. This one, a passion project of mine on the concept of aesthetic chills. Enjoy.

0:24I think it's the clashing together of different jarring images that tends to release these little sparks of emotion. That's what I mean by a circuit-jumping moment. Like, it tends to appear when things go from one state to the next.

0:42I'm Kate Brown, and this is The Art Angle. Podcast from Artnet News.

0:51Can you think of a work of art that truly thrilled you? Maybe you can, and if you can, maybe it even literally made you shiver or sent a chill up your spine. This is a phenomenon that is called aesthetic chills. It's tied to strong emotional reactions to music or dramatic moments in fiction, or even to works of visual art. The effect is a bit mysterious, though it's also associated with some of our most memorable art encounters. And what does it mean for an artwork to literally be spine-tingling? Why does it happen when it happens, and why is it so rare? My colleague and Art Hangle co-host Ben Davis wrote a two-part essay in December on this fascinating phenomena.

1:29His essay argues that this was more than just a technical subject. He thought that it might even be a point towards some vital parts of what make art important in our lives that don't get enough attention. Based on the reaction of readers, many seem to agree. So we also published an essay of readers responding with their own examples of art that gives them an aesthetic chill. So to kick the year off, I thought I'd talk with him about this fascinating concept. Hey, Ben, how's it going today? Great, Kate. Excited to be here. I'm excited to crack into this. It was a multi-part essay that you wrote, essentially.

2:04I think it's a great subject of wide relevance spanning lots of different media, which is really cool. But let's start with definitions at the top. What is an aesthetic chill? It's when you feel like a shiver go down your spine, when you're experiencing some kind of art, music, visual art, sometimes it happens in front of nature. Sometimes it happens when you're watching a movie or TV, it can happen with literature. It's where the term spine tingling comes from. It's where the idea of I got chills comes from when people say that. It's where the idea of thrilling comes from. It's the root of the word thrilling.

2:41And it's also this kind of a word you sometimes hear a lot in art criticism, frisson, which is another way of saying the same thing, meaning like the electric charge you get from a work of art or an experience. Got it. So two part question, like you say that the subject of chills quote provides an entryway into talking about aspects of art that are important, but hard to classify. What do you mean there? And also, what was the initial prompt for this essay? This is a weird essay in a certain sense because it's not pegged to a specific thing. It's the kind of thing I'm very grateful that I get to write sometimes because it steps back from what's going on now.

3:18It's a nice thing to talk about here. This will come out at the beginning of the year, which is a time for reflection. And it kind of grew out of reflection for me. I've been thinking about this concept of chills for a while. I went back to the college. I went to Macalester College to give a lecture there in the art department some years ago. And I sat in on a class with my mentor, Karina Cordella, who's a great philosopher. And she was showing people a clip of opera. And she made a comment that this clip is a classic thing that gives people chills. It's that moment when the opera singer goes up an octave.

3:56And I've been thinking about that as like this interesting aesthetic moment, the moment when something changes suddenly, an emotional tone, and how powerful that is. And it kind of worked its way into my own writing as something that structured certain ways I was thinking about landing a beat or an argument or telling a story. There ought to be this moment of punctuation. In my last book, there's actually a specific moment in the final essay of that book where I was very specifically thinking about that need for the moment of punctuation. And then this sort of needled its way into my head. And I started to think about why I don't get this feeling sometimes with art and thinking about the importance of having rules so that you could break them and how part of being an art critic is defining what the rules are so that you can see when they're productively broken.

4:49And all that is in the mix. and it's also finally a little bit about being vulnerable to me because it takes me, and maybe we'll get into this a little more at the end of this conversation, to kind of a vulnerable place. The idea of a moment that gives you chills, as it turns out when I really dig into it, it really relates to very specific personal things you're experiencing that are really unique to you at the moment that you're encountering a work of art and certain assumptions you had that you have to surface and talk about something you got wrong or got right about a work of art just ends up feeling a little bit vulnerable to talk about this particular specific kind of experience.

5:33And I think that's kind of productive. I've been trying to be a little bit more vulnerable in my art writing. I think that there's a tendency for art writing to be written from the point of view of someone who knows everything and you pretend like you know everything because you don't want to expose how much guesswork there is in something like art writing. I think in some ways I've been thinking about how it welcomes people in to art writing more if you just admit you know it's like we're all making this up as we go you know we all have our little quirks that are filtering away into our writing and that's okay.

6:05I thought that might be a way to connect with people and sure enough this essay has been a big hit for me, including a lot of people like writing me with their own experiences, which we'll get into too. Do you experience this, Kate? Chills? I mean, I love the essay because it brings up the fact that I don't feel it enough. And then I was thinking about how those moments when I did, which I think we'll talk about later, because there are a few. But what I really liked about it too, or at least my read of it was like this idea of being washed over with pathos too. And it's interesting how chills, it's not an intellectual experience.

6:39It's not experienced by the head. It's experienced by like the full body. It's a real sensation. And I think in the case of like a lot of art, you need to sort of like have a quote unquote, have understanding in order to like get access to some sort of emotion. And that's a bit of a problem. And that's not quite the same problem that happens in music. Music can just be evocative and you don't need a didactic panel to explain to you why it should be. So maybe we can talk about that because the beginning of your essay, you say that music and film are more commonly associated with this experience.

7:09And I, from my own life experience, would agree. Like, why not art? Let's dig into that. And like, why not static art? Right. Why not art? Or why is it more commonly associated with music and film? That's true, by the way. I mean, I've read a lot of research about this. You know, there are surveys where people ask people who experience the aesthetic chills phenomenon. on. And it's not everybody. Not everybody experiences this. I think something like 40 % of people don't. But among those who do, people just very commonly report that music is the most common trigger followed by various forms of narrative.

7:48Well, I think that that's partly because almost always aesthetic chill appears at a moment of change. And visual art tends to be static. Visual art object is a painting or a sculpture. So it's just, it's more difficult to have this kind of experience. As I said, in music, like a singer going up an octave is a very classic example of this. For me, if you listen to the band Nirvana, they have like a song on their last album, which is an unplugged album. It's a cover of Where Did You Sleep Last Night or In the Pines by Lead Belly. And there's this moment when he begins screaming and it feels like it delivers on this kind of creepiness that had been building up inside the song.

8:36And that for me personally is a very classic moment when I've gotten a chill. In movies, you know, twists are big when you thought something was going to happen and then something else happens. I think that's one reason why people are crazy about spoilers because the aesthetic chill is a very powerful experience, which suggests that you're fully engaged with your body and mind with an artwork. And it's somehow spoiled by knowledge. I mean, some people can experience a chill every time a certain twist or they hear a certain song. But for a lot of people, foreknowledge of what's going to happen ruins the sense of punctuation or moving between two kinds of emotions that's associated with aesthetic chills.

9:21And the last thing I'll say that is very commonly associated with getting a chill is motivational speeches or inspirational speeches. There's a very famous speech by Charlie Chaplin from the Inn of the Great Dictator. It's kind of an anti-war speech and it's a little bit unnerving to look at because he's dressed like Hitler, essentially. The great dictator is mocking Hitler. But it's a very earnest speech from Charlie Chaplin. And it's one of the things in experimental settings that people most consider chills-inducing. And within that kind of material, it's this ramp up of emotion. It's the movement from the beginning of a speech when you're beginning to engage the crowd and when it ramps up into a big crescendo of emotion, exhorting people, which you really see in this Charlie Chaplin speech.

10:15Those are the kinds of moments that are very like chills inducing for people. So it's just associated with temporal art. It's associated with emotional change in time. Psychobiology is just guesswork and projecting your contemporary assumptions about how the world works back into the deep past. But, you know, there's a case to be made that probably one of the things that chills affect about is a warning. Your body is like, pay attention now. You know, When you're in nature, suddenly you have an experience where it's like, okay, there's danger present where things looked ordinary. So there's that aspect to it.

10:49Yeah. It's such a fun thing to think about. Even as you're talking like Nirvana totally also like Alice in Chains unplugged when like in Rooster where like it drops into like the chorus, like these shifts like lacrimosa as a classical example. And you describe this sort of sync up of multiple kinds of circuit jumping moments. So is it like a thing with the brain pattern where like we search for patterns and when the pattern sort of syncopates and breaks, that's when there's like pathos happens that causes the chill? So there's this thing I found in doing this research called ChillsDB. That's Chills Database.

11:20Love that. Scientists, researchers trying to figure out what this means because, you know, there are all kinds of theories about what the Chills experience is, what it means for art and how people process it. It's very much connected to memorable experiences, although it's not a synonym for good art. There's a lot of art that I love that is not chilling. But they have all this kind of material that they've shown to people to see what best elicits chills in an experimental audience so that they can have material to work with. It's really weird, some of the stuff that's in there. That's the most chill-inducing.

11:58Can you give an example? Like what's in there? A lot of it is kind of dark or thrilling. One of the top things was a fan-made video about the Hunger Games set to this song called The Hanging Tree, which is Jennifer Lawrence singing. And it sort of sounds like a folk melody and then it builds to like a choral thing. And the YouTuber who put this together has montaged together all these images out of order from the Hunger Games so that it builds to this kind of cathartic crescendo of these character actors and actors that you know with like tears in their eyes. explosions going off and so on. And it's essentially just a montage of moments from like the third and fourth Hunger Games movies, which are pretty mediocre on their own, but put into this new format.

12:43I would say that in film, it's very associated with montage. I think it's the clashing together of different jarring images that tends to release these little sparks of emotion. That's what I mean by a circuit jumping moment. Like it tends to appear when things go from one state to the next. It also tends to appear when there's some sort of personal association, emotional association that bubbles up through the art. It's like your brain suddenly having an experience or memory through the medium of the art, and it's connecting with the emotion that's broken loose by whatever kind of moment of punctuation that happens.

13:19That's what I mean by multiple moments of circuit jumping coordinated. So to embarrass myself a little, something I say in this essay is that the single piece of media in any media that most reliably gives me the chills is the movie trailer for the 2010 movie, The Social Network. I'm so glad you're bringing this up because I was going to bring it up if you didn't. Look, this is a famous movie trailer, maybe one of the most famous movie trailers of all time. Well, it's most notable and famous because it is set to a girls choir version of the song Creep by Radiohead. It has a very eerie effect and it touched off that whole trend.

14:01You can blame this trailer for the fact that there's always these kind of minor key choral versions of pop songs in trailers. And it does what a movie trailer often does, which is has like this very sharp escalating curve of emotion. Like it sort of starts in this kind of drifting way, setting the stakes, and then it builds to the series of the emotional beats or highlights from the film. lots of cathartic moments, people with tears in their eyes, people yelling at each other, set together as the song, crescendos. And then most famously, the trailer begins with about a minute of just screenshots of Facebook, of what it was like to grow up on Facebook, you know, people posting status updates, photos of getting married, and so on.

14:45So what I've noticed in the things that give me chills is that when I unpack them, it's really coordinating a bunch of things. There's this kind of formal thing of moving from a valley to a peak of emotion. In the case of this, that's synced up with music that is both building to a crescendo and is itself kind of doing this circuit jumping thing where it's like a song I recognize, I personally associate with being a teenager, but it's remade in this kind of eerie form. So your brain is kind of like hearing the remembered version and the new emotional color of this version and it's kind of vibrating between those two things.

15:23And then this montage at the beginning really summons up all these personal associations that are kind of inchoate of just how strange it is to have entered into this social media world where you have these intimate emotional experiences in this new kind of public kind of way and what that's meant to you and how it's been woven into your life. That's all in the mix and kind of comes together, I think, so that any one of those things in isolation might cause some people a chill. Together, they work really effectively. And they all follow the same format of jumping over an emotional circuit. When you were talking about the Social Network trailer, I was thinking about Arthur Jaffa's work, which is a surprising thing to say, but like Arthur Jaffa's work, Apex, from 2013.

16:07I mean, that is a work that gives me chills. It is so powerful. And it's this Robert Hood techno track. and then there's just the splicing of images of Black American life in all of its beauty and tragedy and trauma. And it's cut, cut, cut. And some of the things you recognize and some of the things are horrifying and beautiful and some of you've never seen before. Some are really iconic. Is that kind of the pattern? Absolutely. And I think that's a great example of how the montage, again, functions really well. In that fan-made video about the Hunger Games, it's this montage in the social network trailer.

16:40It's a montage in the Art of the Jafa. I think montage is very important here precisely because montage clashes together unlike things and is often held together by music. By far the most reliable chill video is this choral rendition by Rufus Wainwright of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. Not surprising in a way because that's such an emotionally powerful song with so many associations for people. And that song is really interesting because it literally says what you're saying. The minor chord to the major lift. The minor chord to the major lift, yeah. That's it. Absolutely. Usually I found that when you analyze any one of these examples, there are lots of things like this.

17:16There's almost like lots of material in it that unconsciously is telling you, have this experience, you know, and without you realizing it, even in the Facebook example, part of what makes it effective is like the entire work the trailer is doing is like convincing you that a movie about Facebook might be interesting and dramatic. You know, the entire work of the trailer is going from like minor thing that you think is a trivial novelty to major thing you have to pay attention to. It has this kind of demonic power over your life. The entire work it's doing is like snapping you from one emotional state in how you pay attention to another thing than the other.

17:57And that's corresponding in this kind of artistic way with all these other things. In any case, let's talk about art from within the art world, because there are some interesting examples that you bring up in the second part of your essay. What was a work that gave you a chill and why? And I feel like some of your examples are actually not temporally based work, are they? No, actually. So I sort of set myself at the task with this essay is first to define what's happening and why this happens. And then it's kind of like the case of the dog that barked in the night, meaning the Sherlock Holmes thing where like the dog didn't bark, you know, the clue is that the dog did not bark in the night.

18:33And so why is this so hard to have in an art context? Because I pulled a bunch of people for this who are art writers. And even among that set, hardly anybody on first contact mentioned art as a big place where they had this experience. One of the few was Julia Halperin, the art writer and editor, who immediately said that this work by Janet Cardiff and George Burris Miller, 40-part motet, which is a sound artwork, she said it gave her chills. But, you know, it's a sound artwork. It functions in time. And it is a sound sculpture that uses medieval choral music, so exactly the kind of energy you would associate with chills in the first place.

19:19So I was trying to figure out why we do not often have a chill in a museum. And I came to the idea that there are like four reasons. One is because it's mainly static work. Two is because not all emotional states are associated with chills. It's usually these kind of big emotions of terror or awe or joy or cathartic sadness, like moments when those are unleashed. And, you know, that's not really what the museum space is designed for. It's designed for contemplation and a certain sense of being at ease and tranquility. And that's just not the emotional tone that people associate with having an aesthetic chill.

19:57And then I think that you need to have rules to break rules. I think that often people I talk to were taken by surprise by getting a chill or having an emotional experience with something kind of a silly work of art or in an unexpected place. And in an art gallery, art can be anything. And there aren't a lot of genre expectations of artists except for the ones they establish themselves. And often artists work in a ton of different styles at once. And unless you set up a set of expectations that you're going to violate, it's very difficult to have that punctuation. So in a way, art is like doomed or in a way is a victim of its own freedom.

20:42One place that people in an art context talk about getting a chill is anytime there's a Rothko survey and you see his whole artwork laid out chronologically. And there's this period towards the end when he commits suicide, when the paintings go from being these brilliant abstractions with colors to being all black. And that's just a moment where a rule has been established and then it changes and it connects with a story you're telling yourself about the artist. And that, I think, often has been considered a chills-inducing moment within the museum. And then finally, you already mentioned it, it's wall labels, right?

21:21which is that we already talked about spoiler warnings you know that it's the unexpected it's the moment when you're looking at something and your emotional relationship to it changes and if the mode of looking in an art museum is all about kind of exercising your knowledge like you know what an artist's signature is because like oh that's a donald judd that's a frida callo and then you look at the label to confirm that and it kind of explains to you a little just so story about what it is, when it was made, how you're supposed to feel. All that's useful information, but I think it can keep you from having the kind of unexpected experience of having a revelation or an epiphany that might be chilling.

22:06Right. Yeah. I was thinking about it for myself and there was two artworks that came up actually for me. Were you at Documenta 14 in Athens? I didn't go to the Athens part of the show. It's funny. I didn't go to the castle show. Between the two of us, we saw the whole thing. We got it covered. There is this work called The Way Earthly Things Are Going by Emika Okbo. And I didn't know the artist before. I also didn't see a didactic panel walking in, but you walk into this kind of like large auditorium room and then there was just these speakers. It's also a sound work. These speakers around. And then there's these women's voices singing this ancient Greek song of mourning.

22:41and then there's this ticker tape, like a LED screen around and it's the live feed of Wall Street, like the indices, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now that you're telling me all about this, it's exactly that thing of this, like, I think of the acapella chorus. I don't even think it's in our memories. I think that's like deep in our bloodstreams and our biology from millennia. And then seeing that kind of super historic emotive thing contrasted with this hyper-capitalist screen. I became a puddle. The contrast between the sacred and the profane vibrating off each other. And it was actually choral music?

23:13Yeah, it was like a female chorus in harmony. Because I feel like there's something about that too. It strikes me how many of these examples involve gospel music or choral music, where you have multiple individual tones vibrating against each other in harmony, which produces this kind of frisson effect all on its own. Again, that's another one of these wires being tripped that are in the whole mix. It's all about the energy you get when two tones are held next to each other and become greater than the sum of their parts. Okay. So then analyze this one, because this one's a painting. I think it's really interesting to hear your feedback on it, actually.

23:52This was one that came from the wall label, I have to admit, but there's a big painting at the Neue National Gallery in Berlin, and it's by Lotte Lazerstein, It's from 1930 and it's called Evening Over Potsdam. And it's this like painting of a group of people sitting at a table. And it looks like a pretty traditional painting at first. But what's unusual about it is that nobody is talking. They're not interacting at all. They're all just sitting there staring into space. So at first it seems kind of like a normal dinner scene. And then you realize that something is wrong. And upon reading the label and realizing what year this is from, this is like in the rise of Nazi Germany.

24:26And that is what that painting is about. I felt very emotional seeing that work. Wow. When did you see that? It was unveiled like a few years ago and I've thought about it ever since. I think that's a beautiful example of how a still image might function like this, where it is like you see one thing, you have one expectation about it. Some new piece of data or some detail you notice suddenly reveals a second layer. And that's exactly a moment of punctuation that you have this kind of effect around. And what about you? Is there like one work for you that comes to mind? I've talked about this work on the show before, Delcy Morelos, big show by this Colombian artist named Delcy Morelos, that was at the DIA Art Foundation in Chelsea last year.