CAN THE REACTION TEST CONTRIBUTE ANYTHING TO ART?
AN ESSAY ON THE PROJECT CALLED "MARTA IS COOKING A CAKE"

To incorporate the differences between the reactions of the audience against an art project with the production process of art, by evaluating with scientific methods, is an important debate. For if we assume that today’s art is produced by social, economic, political and subjective concepts, we may think that the reaction of the audience is a component of this production process. For this reason, the objective of this study is to determine how and to what extent gender differences play a role in the perception of an artistic production, by looking at the audience reactions.

With the participation of 20 students from The Department of Architecture in Yildiz Technical University, there has been a reaction test on the art project called “Marta is cooking a cake”, which intends to remark the concepts of gender and the status of woman in society. The test subjects, 10 men and 10 women, are asked questions about the perception of the project, and especially the effects of sexual differences on the perception of the artistic production are investigated.

In this article, in the light of the findings from the reaction test, we have seen that it is important for an artist to make a reaction test on an artistic project, in terms of having a foresight about the content of his/her future projects. We have also found that women and men make different interpretations on an artistic project according to their social roles.