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THE ECSTASIES AND ANXIETIES OF ART

 

On the morning of April 9, 2008, on a drab pedestrian corridor in the Belgian city of Antwerp, an image was quietly unveiled: a black, white, and gray painting, applied directly to concrete, that depicted monkeys copulating.
*
¹

The painting was by Luc Tuymans, a Flemish painter of considerable import and renown. It had been “commissioned” by a Belgian arts television channel as a subtle way of answering a simple question: Would people, especially those who were not already devoted consumers of contemporary art, know art if they saw it?

In the short film about the experiment, one sees, ahead of the painting's debut, a variety of curators from major museums, all grandly declaiming the importance of Tuymans, most confidently betting that people would notice the work—that they could virtually not help noticing. The unsuspecting people of Antwerp, one curator predicted, would
be “forced” to think “why that work had come into their life.” “I think it will stop people,” another said. “Make them think, wake them up.”

In forty-eight hours of observation, despite the painting's arresting subject matter and its visual prominence, less than 4 percent of nearly three thousand passersby stopped to examine it. Whatever the artistic merit of that particular Tuymans work, it was escaping most of the populace of Antwerp. “Can experiments like this help people to take more interest in art?” the station had wondered. People voted with their feet—and kept walking.

There are many objections to be raised to the experiment's methodology, perhaps to its entire premise. The first is equating people's failure to stop at an unheralded image on a random street with some lack of aesthetic appreciation. The average urban pedestrian is assaulted by a huge range of sounds, smells, and, especially, sights. Is failing to notice a Tuymans on a wall any more a lack of appreciation than failing to notice a paving pattern on the sidewalk or the unusual bird perched on a wire overhead? As W. H. Auden once observed of Brueghel's famous painting of the fall of Icarus—in which no one, arguably even Brueghel himself, seems to pay much notice to the downed wingman—even suffering happens “
while someone is eating or opening a window or just dully walking along.”

So already, Tuymans's painting is dwelling in the cognitive shadows, relying on some scrap of neural surplus to even be seen. Then there is “expectancy.” Images appear on city walls all the time—graffiti, wheat-pasted advertisements. The one thing we are generally not expecting to see are original paintings executed by eminent contemporary artists (with the exception, of course, of an artist like Banksy, whose work people actually look for on urban walls and still miss). The things we are not expecting to see, we are less likely to see.

What if you did, in the busy course of your day, cast a glance over to the painting? (It is unclear how many people who did
not
stop for the painting actually might have seen it.) What if you did register it as an interesting, provocative, or even beautiful image? So what—the world is filled with such images. Content swims lost without context. How would a person, even one who recognized the style of Tuymans, know it was an original? How would this single image, outside the gallery walls, lacking wall text, announce its importance to the viewer?
Surely, a row of Tuymans's work, advertised as being “real” works—
for we get a measurable neural charge from originals—would net more viewers.

Last, some people might have seen the painting and decided they simply did not like it and thus did not stop. “Liking,” particularly in contemporary art, is a rather discouraged word. It is not uncommon to read, for example, sentences like “
The question of ‘liking' Nauman or not seems impertinent” (note the deadly quotation marks).

The mistrust of pleasure has, of course, long pervaded aesthetic thinking. Kant, in
The Critique of Judgment
, termed the base-level hedonic response the “agreeable,” or that “
which the senses find pleasing in sensation.” This was not to be trusted: To the hungry man, everything tastes more or less good. These were, furthermore, “private judgments,” the sort of thing we talk about when we say, “There's no accounting for taste.” Kant was after bigger fish: the “disinterested” aesthetic response. Not only would you
not
know it was a Tuymans; you would not even think of it in terms of its style, its technique. You would not think of it as a painting at all. You would just let your faculties freely range over the thing's ineffable beauty. The empiricist David Hume, the other member of the heavyweight tag team of Enlightenment aesthetics,
*
²
might counter that it did not really matter whether you liked Tuymans—whatever the reasons, you would be “blameless”—for this would just be one of a “thousand sentiments.” He was interested in an enduring standard that would confirm that Tuymans was more than a mere pleasure.

Kant and Hume had in mind ideal critics, not busy passersby on an Antwerp street, who are more likely to follow the injunction of the art critic Clement Greenberg: “
Art is first of all, and most of all, a question of liking and of not liking—just so.” The power of liking or disliking, or what psychologists call “affect,” should not be underestimated:
It not only informs what we feel about something like art but influences how we
see
it.

For all its flaws, the Tuymans experiment reminds us that more than we are sometimes aware of, we live in a “top down” world: We see what we expect or want to see, rather than noticing, “bottom up,” things in and of themselves. Or, as the neuroscientist Eric Kandel puts it, “
we live in two worlds at once”—the bottom-up and the top-down—“and our ongoing visual experience is a dialogue between the two.” A bottom-up stimulus, like a Tuymans painting, might “force” us to notice it if it were sufficiently large, vivid, or seemed to present some threat to us. It is more likely, however, to attract our attention by means of top-down perception: Perhaps we just came from, or are going to, a Tuymans show at a nearby museum and have him, and art in general, on our brains.

As Lisa Feldman Barrett, who directs the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University, described it to me, for a long time the brain was viewed as a largely bottom-up organ. The script ran something like this: Neurons lie dormant in the brain until they are roused by some outside stimulus (say, a random Tuymans painting). Then the brain perceives the stimulus, perhaps evaluating it for personal relevance (does this look like something I have seen before?) before deciding on an appropriate emotional or affective response (how do I feel about this?). The philosopher Karl Popper called it, not charitably, “
the bucket theory of the mind”: the brain as empty vessel, waiting passively to be filled.

“That's not how it works, really,” said Barrett. “I'm not saying that bottom-up processing doesn't happen.” But what is most often going on, she suggests, is that the brain is a “generative model of the world based on your past experience of the world.” Like your own obsessive Instagram account, the brain has encoded every event in your life—every sunset walk you have ever had, every person you have met, every piece of art you have ever seen, and whether you “liked” it.
Indeed, our memory of how we felt about something is often stronger, paradoxically, than our memory of actually having experienced it. “Based on the context,” Barrett said, “your brain is making predictions about what stimuli you expect in that situation.”

How you feel about something, she said, is there
before
you detect the stimulus; you may see the Tuymans and decide you like it, but chances are you like Tuymans and then decide to see it. “It's part of the prediction,” she argued. “It's actually helping to influence what you're
paying attention to as the stimulus in the first place.” If you are feeling good (or bad) about the world, the brain, she says, will try to complete the pattern of things that for you are associated with pleasantness (or unpleasantness).

A slogan painted on a truck by the artist Banksy nicely evokes this idea: “The grumpier you are, the more assholes you meet.”
Similarly, if you like contemporary art, the brain is more likely to be directing attention toward things that seem like contemporary art, the way, for example, that people who are hungry are able to more quickly pick out food-related words. The brain likes to resolve randomness into a recognizable pattern. And for most of us, a busy city street is simply too noisy, too random, to contemplate art, at least
as
art. As the critic Edwin Denby once observed, “
I make a distinction between seeing everyday life and seeing art.” It is not that the looking itself is functionally different. “But seeing art,” wrote Denby, “is seeing an ordered and imaginary world, subjective and concentrated.” The fact that art is not something we see every day, on the street, is what, he suggested, makes it so extraordinary.

This is why we head to museums, not just to look at things that have been recognized as art, but to actually see them. Rituals, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas observed, are a kind of frame, separating some experience from the everyday. A museum, like a painting's frame, calls attention to what is inside it and sets the boundaries for where the art ends. We go inside to look at special things, to breathe “
empyrean air” and feel the demonstrable hedonic aura of authentic pieces of art. Yet we also go to look at them in special ways, freed from normal concerns and limitations; museums have been called a “
way of seeing,” perhaps even a training ground for looking at the wider world.

Think of the oft-reported experience people have, in exhibitions of modern art, of mistaking a building fixture for a work of art (
fire extinguishers seem among the most common objects reported). The joke is often made that after conceptual artists like Duchamp, Warhol, and Koons it can be hard to tell the difference. But another way to think about it is that we are so primed in that moment toward the visual consumption of images, the things that are normally beneath our radar are suddenly swept up into our rapacious gaze. In the same way we miss the Tuymans, we suddenly see the building fixture in a new light.

But what is actually going on when we look at paintings in a museum?

There are many accounts of what
should
go on. In his classic
Art as Experience
, the philosopher John Dewey argued that to perceive, the “beholder,” as he termed the viewer, “
must
create
his own experience.” In other words, the beholder must try to approach in some way, with the same rigor, the process by which the artist created the work—how it was done, what was intended, what choices were made. The beholder who was too “lazy, idle, or indurated in convention to perform this work,” Dewey scolded, “will not see or hear.”

There are stories of heroic episodes of viewing, with attendant moments of rapture. “
It fixed me like a statue for a quarter of an hour, or half an hour, I do not know which,” wrote Thomas Jefferson upon seeing Drouais's masterpiece
Marius at Minturnae
at the Louvre. “I lost all ideas of time, even consciousness of my existence” (today it might only be people waiting in long lines to enter the Louvre who can report this temporal disassociation). The philosopher Richard Wollheim reported logging up to
two hours
in front of works. “
I came to recognize that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down,” he wrote in
Painting as an Art
. “It was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was.”

No one really knows how long it takes to “appreciate” a painting or what that even means. Apart from these acts of aesthetic endurance, how do most people really behave when they are in a museum? They are actually an elusive quarry. “
This casual visitor is in the main a mystery,” observed a report in 1928. Years later, after decades of “visitor studies,” one museum researcher lamented, “
The fact is that we do not have a good sense of who our visitors are beyond the basics.” What they were
doing
was an even larger enigma.

One thing that is known is that they do not look at paintings very long. When Jeffrey Smith, who for many years headed the Office of Research and Evaluation at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, analyzed the viewing times of Met visitors across a variety of paintings—including Rembrandt's
Aristotle with a Bust of Homer
and Leutze's
Washington
Crossing the Delaware
—he found the median viewing time for a painting was seventeen seconds.

What to make of this? An age of diminished attention, or a sign that people are incapable of participating in the deep looking so prized by Dewey and others? A few caveats. First, that is a
median
figure, meaning some viewings were much longer (the average was twenty-seven seconds).
In a less scientific study conducted by the art critic Philip Hensher at Tate Britain, for instance, visitors gave glances of five seconds to contemporary works by artists like Tracey Emin but several minutes' worth of looking to works by Turner and Constable.

The second issue is the sheer size of a museum like the Met. Have you ever noticed how looking at art in museums seems to bring about a kind of acute tiredness, beyond what one might find in other activities combining walking and looking? In the early twentieth century, researchers identified, with some alarm, a condition they dubbed “museum fatigue.” Part of the problem was in the poor ergonomics of museums. A 1916 report in
The Scientific Monthly
shows a rather dapper, mustachioed gentleman (identified as “
an intelligent man, with good eye-sight”) engaging in an aesthetic decathlon: straining down to peer inside cases, crouching to reach labels on sculptures, straining upward to look at paintings arrayed floor to ceiling in the old “salon style.” Of course, the “salon style” is now only referenced in historical paintings; museums, over the twentieth century, in acknowledgment of this ergonomic crisis, got far more minimal in their displays—with the exception of wall text, which was once a rarity, but has prospered, particularly with art that needs a lot of explaining. As they get sparser, museums keep growing: The walls get more blank, but there are more of them.