A New Measure of ‘Good Taste’ in Visual Art

This article introduces a new test of visual aesthetic sensitivity, the VAST. This test consists of 42 pairs of non-representational figures, drawn by an artist and arranged in such a way that each pair contains an original and a version slightly altered by the artist to incorporate various types of faults. Test items were only accepted after unanimous agreement between expert judges. The score is the number of figures correctly identified as superior. A number of studies are reportedfrom cross-cultural comparisons between European adults and children, and Japanese and Chinese adults and children, showing that preference judgements are very similar between these various groups, and are no more alike between the two mongol races than they are between either of them and British subjects. The test has greater face validity because of the high aesthetic value of the items, as compared with previous tests, and scores are uncorrelated with intelligence or personality, suggesting that visual aesthetic sensitivity is relatively independent of these external factors.