Can art give meaning to seemingly senseless things?

The media occasionally reports instances where people mistake ordinary objects for art. This often happens in art galleries or museums. Does this suggest that people perceive meaning differently when in an artistic setting? Our team delved into how individuals attribute significance to seemingly nonsensical sentences, when they believe they are extracted from poems. We assembled a collection of sentences that conclude with semantically unrelated words, such as ‘Early in the morning the street was brown.’ We recruited two groups of participants, informing one that these seemingly senseless sentences were from poems. Interestingly, those who believed in the poetic context evaluated these sentences as more meaningful compared to those who did not. These findings are now prepared for publication, so stay tuned!

Dyr bul shchyl

ubesh shchur

skum

vy so bu

r l èz

— Alexei Kruchenykh, 1912