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“while someone is eating”
: W. H. Auden,
Collected Poems
(New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 177. For a fascinating essay on the contemporary events that inspired Auden's comments on the sixteenth-century painting, see Alexander Nemerov, “The Flight of Form: Auden, Bruegel, and the Turn to Abstraction in the 1940s,”
Critical Inquiry
31, no. 4 (Summer 2005): 780–810.

for we get a measurable neural charge
: See Andrew Parker, “Revealing Rembrandt,”
Frontiers in Neuroscience
, April 21, 2014, doi:10.3389/fnins.2014.00076.

“The question of ‘liking' Nauman”
: Peter Schjeldahl, “The Trouble with Nauman,” in
Bruce Nauman
, ed. Robert C. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 100.

“which the senses find pleasing”
: Immanuel Kant,
The Critique of Judgment
, in
Basic Writings of Kant
(New York: Modern Library, 2001), 295.

“Art is first of all”
: Clement Greenberg, “The State of Art Criticism,” in
Twentieth Century Theories of Art
, ed. James Thompson (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1990), 102.

It not only informs
: For a good discussion, see Eric Anderson, Erika H. Siegel, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, “What You Feel Influences What You See: The Role of Affective Feelings in Resolving Binocular Rivalry,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
47, no. 4 (2011): 856–60.

“we live in two worlds”
: See Eric Kandel,
The Age of Insight
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 284.

“the bucket theory”
: The reference comes from Alan Musgrave,
Common Sense, Science, and Scepticism
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 62.

Indeed, our memory of how we felt
: Zajonc, in one experiment, exposed people to one-millisecond flashes of “random polygons,” then asked subjects how much they liked them and whether they recognized them. When they saw a polygon more than once, they liked it, even though they were usually unable to remember, at a level above chance, which ones they had actually seen. See W. R. Kunst-Wilson and R. B. Zajonc, “Affective Discrimination of Stimuli That Cannot Be Recognized,”
Science
207, no. 4430 (1980): 557–80.

Similarly, if you like contemporary art
: See Rémi Radel and Corentin Clément-Guillotin, “Evidence of Motivational Influences in Early Visual Perception: Hunger
Modulates Conscious Access,”
Psychological Science
23, no. 3 (March 2013): 232–34.

“I make a distinction”
: Edwin Denby,
Dance Writings and Poetry
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 259.

“empyrean air”
: The phrase belongs to William Hazlitt, “Picture-Galleries in England,” in
The Collected Works of William Hazlitt
(London: J. M. Dent, 1903), 7.

“way of seeing”
: See Svetlana Alpers, “The Museum as a Way of Seeing,” in
Exhibiting Cultures
, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 26.

fire extinguishers
: See, for example, Karen Archey, “Christopher Williams's ‘For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons sur la Société Industrielle (Revision 19),' ”
Art Agenda
, Dec. 11, 2014,
http://​www.​art-​agenda.​com/​reviews/​christopher-​williams​%E2%80%​99s-​%E2%80%​9Cfor-​example-​dix-​huit-​lecons-​sur-​la-​societe-​indu​strielle-​revision-​19%E2​%80%9D/
.

“must
create
his own experience”
: John Dewey,
Art as Experience
(New York: Perigee, 2005), 54.

“It fixed me like a statue”
: Thomas Jefferson,
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
, ed. J. P. Boyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1955), 11:187.

“I came to recognize”
: Richard Wollheim,
Painting as an Art
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 8.

No one really knows
: Ladislav Kesner makes the point that while we can empirically know people are having only a “fleeting encounter with a museum object,” it is “impossible to articulate the opposite—to define comprehensively, let alone in empirically measurable terms, the satisfactory perceptual activity vis-à-vis a museum object.” Kesner, “The Role of Cognitive Competence in the Art Museum Experience,”
Museum Management and Curatorship
21, no. 1 (2006): 4–19.

“This casual visitor”
: Edward S. Robinson, “The Behavior of the Museum Visitor,”
Publications of the American Association of Museums
, n.s., 5 (1928).

“The fact is that”
: Jeffrey K. Smith and Lisa F. Wolf, “Museum Visitor Preferences and Intentions in Constructing Aesthetic Experience,”
Poetics
24, nos. 2–4 (1996): 222.

In a less scientific study
: Philip Hensher, “We Know What We Like, and It's Not Modern Art,”
Daily Mail
, March 12, 2011,
http://​www.​dailymail.​co.​uk/​news/​article-​1365672/​Modern-​art-​How-​gallery-​visitors-​viewed-​work-​Damien-​Hirst-​Tracy-​Emin-​5-​seconds.​html
.

“an intelligent man”
: Benjamin Ives Gilman, “Museum Fatigue,”
Scientific Monthly
, Jan. 1916, 62–74.

The density of sheer sensory input
: See Alessandro Bollo et al., “Analysis of Visitor Behavior Inside the Museum: An Empirical Study,”
http://​neumann.​hec.​ca/​aimac2005/​PDF_​Text/​BolloA_​Dal​PozzoloL.​pdf
.

“walking past works of art”
: This phrase comes from Philip Fisher, via John Walsh, “Paintings, Tears, Lights, and Seats,”
Antioch Review
61, no. 4 (Autumn 2003): 767–82.

more coffee and chairs
: See James M. Bradburne, “Charm and Chairs: The Future of Museums,”
Journal of Museum Education
26, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 3–9.

“According to averages”
: Robinson, “Behavior of the Museum Visitor.”

trying to see as much
: The museum researcher Stephen Bitgood argues that visitors are driven by a “value ratio, aiming to reap the largest benefit or satisfaction
per investment of time and money.” See Bitgood, “An Analysis of Visitor Circulation: Movement Patterns and the General Value Principle,”
Curator
49, no. 4 (2006): 463–75; and Bitgood, “An Overview of the Attention-Value Model,” in
Attention and Value: Keys to Understanding Museum Visitors
(Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2013).

Research suggests
: For a fascinating, micro-level video analysis of how people stand in front of paintings in museums, see Dirk Vom Lehn, “Configuring Standpoints: Aligning Perspectives in Art Exhibitions,”
Bulletin Suisse de Linguistique Appliquée
, no. 96 (2012): 69–90.

People may look more
: The museum researcher Beverly Serrell, looking at a number of museums, including the American Museum of Natural History, found that the one with the lowest “sweep rate”—square footage divided by time spent by visitors—was a small museum in Alaska. One reason was self-selection: The people who came all the way to Homer, Alaska, really wanted to see the show. See Serrell, “Paying More Attention to Paying Attention,” Informal Science, March 15, 2010,
http://​informal​science.​org/​perspectives/​blog/​paying-​more-​attention-​to-​paying-​attention
.

In an experiment in a Swiss museum
: See Martin Tröndle et al., “The Effects of Curatorial Arrangements,”
Museum Management and Curatorship
29, no. 2 (2014): 140–73.

Curiously, other studies
: See Jeffrey Smith,
The Museum Effect: How Museums, Libraries, and Cultural Institutions Educate and Civilize Society
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 34.

Even when people visit in groups
: See ibid., 22. Smith calls the behavior “visit together, look alone.”

the more people do talk
: See Martin Tröndle et al., “A Museum for the Twenty-First Century: The Influence of ‘Sociality' on Art Reception in Museum Space,”
Museum Management and Curatorship
27, no. 5 (2012): 461–86.

“Don't make large down payments”
: See Jay Rounds, “Strategies for the Curiosity-Driven Museum Visitor,”
Curator
47, no. 4 (Oct. 2007): 404.

In as little as fifty
: See, for example, Paolo Viviani and Christelle Aymoz, “Colour, Form, and Movement Are Not Perceived Simultaneously,”
Vision Research
41, no. 22 (Oct. 2001): 2909–18. Semir Zeki raises the interesting idea that the primacy of color in visual processing might affect our aesthetic evaluation: “It is plausible, and interesting, to suppose that combinations that satisfy some more primitive significant configuration, and are found to be more aesthetically pleasing, may be processing more rapidly than those which, not coming as close to satisfying a significant configuration, are found to be less satisfying aesthetically.” See Semir Zeki and Tomohiro Ishizu, “The ‘Visual Shock' of Francis Bacon: An Essay in Neuroesthetics,”
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
7 (Dec. 2013): 9.

young woman's face
: For an interesting account of how subjects in paintings, like Vermeer's girl, came to be usually looking “at us,” see Olivier Morin, “How Portraits Turned Their Eyes upon Us: Visual Preferences and Demographic Change in Cultural Evolution,”
Evolution in Human Behavior
34, no. 3 (2013): 222–29. In some cultures, he notes, the direct gaze is discouraged, but “in traditions where gaze direction is left free to vary, so that we find both averted and direct-gaze portraits, the latter style should enjoy more success and, over time, become the default option.”

rove more freely
: See Davide Massaro et al., “When Art Moves the Eyes: A Behavioral and Eye-Tracking Study,”
PLoS ONE
7, no. 5 (2012): 1–12. How we look at individual faces is also an interesting mixture of top-down and bottom-up. When we look at famous faces, for example, we look less at the eyes and other upper areas—typically so important for identification—probably because we already recognize the person and we are just looking elsewhere to confirm our hypothesis. See Jason J. S. Barton et al., “Information Processing During Face Recognition: The Effects of Familiarity, Inversion, and Morphing on Scanning Fixations,”
Perception
35, no. 8 (2006): 1089–105.

Judged by eye tracking
: See Paul Locher, “The Structural Framework of Pictorial Balance,”
Perception
25, no. 12 (1996): 1419–36.

As for the frame
: This would be for the good; he noted that the frame, “instead of attracting attention to itself,” limits “itself to concentrating attention and making it spill onto the picture.” Neither painting nor wall but a hermetic barrier between the two, it was meant to be invisible everywhere except when it did not have a painting inside it. See José Ortega y Gasset, “Meditations on the Frame,”
Perspecta
26 (1990): 185–90.

studies routinely demonstrate
: See, among others, C. F. Nodine, P. J. Locher, and E. A. Krupinski, “The Role of Formal Art Training on the Perception and Aesthetic Judgment of Art Compositions,”
Leonardo
26, no. 3 (1993): 219–27.

“The appreciation of the aesthetic worth”
: H. J. Eysenck, “The Experimental Study of the ‘Good Gestalt'—a New Approach,”
Psychological Review
49, no. 4 (July 1942): 351. Thanks to Paul Locher for the quotation.

In one of Locher's studies
: Paul J. Locher, “The Aesthetic Experience with Visual Art ‘at First Glance,' ” in
Investigations into the Phenomenology and the Ontology of the Work of Art: What Are Artworks and How Do We Experience Them?
, ed. Peer F. Bundgaard and Frederik Stjernfelt (New York: Springer, 2015).

“What do you see”
: See Abigail Housen, “Eye of the Beholder: Research, Theory, and Practice” (paper presented at the conference “Aesthetic and Art Education: A Transdisciplinary Approach,” Sept. 27–29, 1999, Lisbon, Portugal).

“old friend”
: See “Aesthetic Development,” Visual Thinking Strategies,
http://​www.​vtshome.​org/​research/​aesthetic-​development
.

As many art historians have noted
: Kenneth C. Lindsay and Bernard Huppe note, for example, “We must search through masses of detail in order to find the iconographical center.” Lindsay and Huppe, “Meaning and Method in Brueghel's Painting,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
14, no. 3 (March 1956): 376–86.

“For most decisions”
: Robert Zajonc, “Feeling and Thinking: Closing the Debate over the Independence of Affect,” in
Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition
, ed. Joseph P. Forgas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

You are more likely
: See Andrew P. Bayliss et al., “Affective Evaluations of Objects Are Influenced by Observed Gaze Direction and Emotional Expression,”
Cognition
104, no. 3 (Sept. 2007): 644–53. For another study, which actually used paintings as the target stimulus, see Clementine Bry et al., “Eye'm Lovin' It! The Role of Gazing Awareness in Mimetic Desires,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
47, no. 5 (Sept. 2011): 987–93.

Even that creepy look
: See Carole Henry, “How Visitors Relate to Museum Experiences: An Analysis of Positive and Negative Emotions,”
Journal of Aesthetic
Education
34, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 99–106. She reports in one study an uncomfortable exchange between a visitor and a guard: “The student's museum experience was no longer focused on the art but instead reflected an embarrassing incident.”