Professor Shigeru Watanabe,
presently Project Leader for Keio University’s Centre for Advanced Research on Logic and Sensibility has extended the study of avian art appreciation with his participation in a project probing pictorial preferences of Padda oryzivora – a.k.a. the Java Sparrow.  The birds used in the study were all complete artistic novices – enabling the following question to be experimentally tested : Do Java sparrows naturally
prefer Cubism, Impressionism or traditional Japanese-style artworks? To
find out, the experimenters constructed an extended art-gallery-like
cage with three video screens installed along its length. Two of the
screens showed slideshows of artworks from each of the three categories,
and the third displayed an abstract pattern as a control. The seven
java sparrows participating in the experiment were monitored over time
to see which artworks they preferred to perch next to (with the
assumption that this implied a preference for the art).
Results:

“The researchers observed that five of the seven birds
perched in front of the cubist paintings longer than they did the
impressionist paintings. Three Java sparrows preferred Japanese-style to
cubist paintings, but another two preferred cubist to Japanese-style
paintings. Between Japanese-style paintings and impressionist paintings
(said to be influenced by Japanese-style painting), six of the seven
sparrows showed no clear preference for either.”

A second experiment used operant conditioning techniques to reveal
the birds’ discriminative properties regarding the different
artistic styles of the paintings – allowing the researchers to make the
claim that : “This is the first report demonstrating reinforcing
properties of visual artworks in non-human animals.”

The research paper Discriminative and reinforcing properties of paintings in Java sparrows (Padda oryzivora) is published in the journal Animal Cognition, Volume 14, Number 2, 227-234.