The Artistic Interests Facet (Openness).
Artistic Interests is the aesthetic face of Openness - the person who stops for a sunset, gets absorbed in a piece of music, or feels something shift in front of a painting. It is only one of six components of Openness, and it is commonly mistaken for the whole trait or for being an artist: you can be deeply moved by beauty without making any art, and you can be intellectually open while caring little for the arts.
Artistic Interests (a facet of Openness to Experience)
Artistic Interests is one of the six facets of Openness to Experience in the Big Five. It captures how strongly you are drawn to art, music, poetry, and natural beauty, and how much aesthetic experience moves you. It describes appreciation and absorption - being affected by beauty - rather than artistic talent or skill, and it is separate from the imaginative, intellectual, and novelty-seeking sides of Openness.
This page explains what the Artistic Interests facet measures, what high and low scores look like, how it sits apart from the other Openness facets, and the trade-offs at each end.
What Artistic Interests measures
Artistic Interests is your responsiveness to beauty and aesthetic experience: being moved by music, art, poetry, design, or landscape, seeking out such experiences, and finding them important rather than incidental. High scorers feel aesthetics keenly and arrange their lives to include them; low scorers are relatively unmoved by art and beauty and orient toward other sources of meaning and pleasure.
Crucially, it is about appreciation, not production. This facet measures how much beauty affects you, not whether you can paint, compose, or design. A person can be profoundly stirred by a symphony and play no instrument, just as a skilled technician can produce art with little personal aesthetic response.
High and low
High Artistic Interests shows up as a life shaped around aesthetic experience: museums, music, well-made objects, and natural beauty get sought out and genuinely matter. It tends to bring a richer sensory and emotional palette and an eye for form, balance, and craft that others miss.
Low Artistic Interests is not the same as shallow or unrefined. Low scorers simply are not strongly moved by art and beauty, and they invest their attention elsewhere - in ideas, people, action, or practical results. They can find time spent on aesthetics puzzling or wasteful, but they carry no obligation to perform appreciation they do not feel, and many lead rich lives organized around entirely different values.
How it differs from the other Openness facets
Openness has six facets, and Artistic Interests is only the aesthetic-sensitivity one. It is distinct from Imagination (a vivid inner fantasy life), Emotionality (openness to your own feelings), Adventurousness (appetite for new experiences and variety), Intellect (curiosity about ideas and abstract problems), and Liberalism (readiness to challenge tradition and authority). The reason facet detail matters is that these can diverge: someone high on Artistic Interests but low on Intellect loves music and painting yet has little appetite for abstract theory, while someone high on Intellect but low on Artistic Interests devours ideas but feels little in a gallery.
Trade-offs
At the high end, a strong pull toward beauty can compete with practical priorities, raise the bar for surroundings to a point that is hard to satisfy, or make aesthetically poor but necessary environments genuinely draining. At the very high end it can shade into a fussiness about form that others find precious. At the low end, the cost is a thinner aesthetic dimension to life and sometimes a blind spot for how much design, presentation, and beauty matter to other people and to the work. Neither pole is better - they reflect different sources of meaning, and the useful move is to know which one you are and build your environment accordingly.
Also relevant: All 30 facets explained
Frequently asked questions
What does it mean to score high on Artistic Interests?
You are strongly moved by art, music, poetry, and beauty, you seek those experiences out, and they matter to you. It is the "aesthetic sensitivity" component of Openness, separate from imagination, ideas, and novelty-seeking, and it reflects appreciation rather than artistic skill.
Is low Artistic Interests the same as having bad taste or being uncultured?
No. Low Artistic Interests means you are simply not strongly affected by art and beauty and you find meaning elsewhere - in ideas, people, action, or results. It is independent of the other Openness facets and says nothing about intelligence or worth, only about where your attention and pleasure naturally go.
Do you need to be artistic or creative to score high on Artistic Interests?
No. This facet measures how much beauty and art move you, not whether you make art. Plenty of high scorers never paint, compose, or design - they are absorbed appreciators - and some skilled producers of art report relatively little personal aesthetic response.
How do I find my Artistic Interests score?
Our 300-item Big Five test scores all 30 facets, including Artistic Interests, against population norms; the 120-item form also resolves the facets. The shorter 50-item and 10-item forms give your Openness trait score but do not break it into facets.
References
- Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1995). Domains and facets: Hierarchical personality assessment using the Revised NEO Personality Inventory. Journal of Personality Assessment, 64(1), 21-50.
- Silvia, P. J., & Nusbaum, E. C. (2011). On personality and piloerection: Individual differences in aesthetic chills and other unusual aesthetic experiences. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 5(3), 208-214.
- Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.
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