In other words, wine tasters might be just full of shit. lol

I think that dividing the test group into poseurs, non-poseurs, and winetasters might give different results.

99% of the people who tried retsina would hate it unless told in advance that it's supposed to taste like pitchpine lumber.

Works similarly with art. What you're told about a painting affects how you take it. The buzz around it -- critical, historical, what friends say, coolness factor, its price, its display placement -- all have their effect. Recent-ish example: Bouguereau. A French academician, he was huge in the 19th century. But Impressionism triumphed, "everyone" decided that academic art was kitsch, and his paintings wound up in attics, selling (if at all) for next to nothing. Though he'd been very successful, his name was dropped from art histories. In other words, art fans looked at his paintings, if at all, and sneered.

Then, back in the 1980s, a few people shyly started to make a case for his work. The time was right, something caught fire, his reputation started to grow again, and these days his paintings are selling for big bucks, and his name is back in the art history books. These days, art fans look at his paintings and don't sneer at them as kitsch, they go "Wow!"

But they're the same paintings.

So: the buzz around them circa 1870 was: "The man's a genius! Greatest painter of the century!" The buzz around them circa 1940 was: "Bouguereau? Who? Oh, that corny sellout?" The buzz around them today is "Wow, amazing! That academic art has a lot of virtues!" It's the buzz, not the paintings themselves, that made the difference.

Van Gogh was the anti-Bougereau between 1870 and 1980. His paintings were literally unsellable, or almost, during his lifetime, but now sell for as much as $50 million.

Does this mean that for ever dollar Bougereau gains, Van Gogh will lose a dollar? Maybe "Starry Night" is down to a measly $10 million.

Kenneth Rexroth wrote fifty years ago that used car dealers would go to jail if they followed the business practices of the art world. Two examples: overvaluing a donated painting to increase the donor's tax deduction, and logrolling: you buy my million dollar painting for two million, I buy your million dollar painting for two million, and we both gain a million without any money changing hands.

A famous art dealer a few generations ago, Bernard Berenson, was found out to have taken bribes for misattributing paintings by minor painters to more famous painters.

And it all affects how civilians take those paintings -- how much they see in them, how moved they are by them, etc.