While presenting this manuscript to art practitioners and art theorists, we noticed that there is great discomfort confronting this topic. Some questions raised were why is such research conducted, what is it good for, and does it impose preconceptions on men and women. Since Bourdieu and Darbel, it is widely assumed that sociodemographic factors such as education or profession have an impact on art reception. However, questions of basal sociodemographic factors like sex and age and their influence on art reception are seldom discussed. John Falk, a specialist on museum visitor studies, even states, “Quantitative measures such as demographics provide too little information about visitors in relation to museums to be useful variables for describing and understanding the museum visitor experience.”

Clearly, one has to admit that art reception is more complex and cannot be reduced to one simple factor. Along with sex, other criteria, such as the visitors’ knowledge, their expectations and motivation to visit the museum, and the subject or style of the artwork influence art reception and visitor behavior. In the Swiss national research project eMotion Mapping Museum Experience, we analyzed the effect of single works, different genres and varying art-historical periods of artworks. In addition, we tested how curatorial arrangements affect art reception; we tested the influence of companionship and communication on visitors’ aesthetic perception, and we analyzed the influence of knowledge on the reception of fine arts.

Astonishingly, approaching the question of the influence of sex on art reception, we found little research. A search in various peer-reviewed journals showed that the topic is practically nonexistent in scholarly publications. The same impression resulted from an extensive Internet search. This appears to us unusual.

Only in the field of evolutionary aesthetics do authors try, by referring to Charles Darwin and the concept of natural and sexual selection, first, to understand the emerging of aesthetics and art at all, and, second, to analyze the function of aesthetics in sexual selection. Following this line of argumentation, for example, Christopher Perricone sketches out why women would be better art critics and why most artists are male.