THE father of consumer choice theory, Alfred Marshall, believed that the more of something you have the less of it you want: a phenomenon economists call diminishing marginal utility. However this was only taken to be the case for an individual at one point in time, not over his entire life. Addiction could prompt us to learn to like something if we consume more of it. Marshall picked out good music as an example. The more we listen to good music, the more we want to buy.

Modern economists are more sceptical about our aesthetic judgement. The mere exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon where the more someone is exposed to a stimulus the more they like it, irrespective of its characteristics. This result has been documented across subjects as wide as food, political opinions, nonsense words and music. In all these examples familiarity was sufficient to create positive feelings.

A study by James Cutting applied this observation to aesthetics. He paired lesser known works by impressionists to canonical pieces; over a lecture course undergraduate students were shown a lesser-known work for two seconds at the beginning of each class. Mr Cutting found that participants ended up preferring the lesser known pieces to the canon merely through exposure. That was in contrast to a control group of students from the same campus that tended to like the canonical works best.

But in a new paper researchers varied the quality of art that the participants were exposed to. Half the treatment group of undergraduate students were repeatedly exposed to the critically respected work of John Everett Millais over a seven week lecture course and half to Thomas Kinkade, who is a good deal less respected, although much more popular.

They compared the opinions of this treatment group to a control group who had no repeated exposure. You can see from the graph below that there was a significant decline in participants' opinions of the work of Thomas Kinkade the more they saw the pieces, while the opposite holds true for John Everett Millais. The exposure effect only held true for the "good" art.