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by Tom Vanderbilt

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  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.

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  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.

  The fatigue is not just physical but cognitive. To compare looking at art with shopping, one does not generally pause to look at each piece of clothing in a store, read the label to learn where it came from and how it was made, wonder what it is trying to “say,” what was going on in the mind of the designer, wonder why you do not seem to be seeing the same detail in the item that your neighbor appears to be fixating on, and so forth. You basically assess whether it will look good on you and move on. The density of sheer sensory input people absorb in art museums helps explain why they tend to overestimate the amount of time they have actually been in them.

  Moreover, the conditions of the contemporary museum can make sustained viewing well-nigh impossible. Looking at art in crowds, after all, is a rather strange concept: Would you want to read a book with six people looking over your shoulder? Would you want to watch a movie while someone behind you keeps saying things like “That looks like Uncle Joe’s dog”? It is also uncertain that the “walking past works of art” model is the best way to consume art: Do we not generally take things in better, as the museum critic Kenneth Hudson once asked, sitting down? Perhaps as some holdover of the austere aesthetic theories of the nineteenth century, looking at art has been equated with an almost penitential exercise, a severe act of self-contemplating in forbidding concrete rooms. More than one museum consultant has said the best way to increase patrons’ appreciation for art is simple: more coffee and chairs.

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  Researchers, very early, identified a distinct pattern: The more paintings a museum housed, the less time patrons spent looking at any one of them. The larger museums reduced the chance a painting would be seen at all. “According to averages,” a 1928 study by the Yale University psychology professor Edward S. Robinson found, “a given picture has about a one in twenty chance of being observed by a given visitor to the largest collection, whereas such a picture in the most effective of the small collections has about 1 in 3 chance of being observed.” Perhaps Tuymans would be relieved: Even inside museums, paintings go unseen.

  And so a visitor to the Met or any other big museum is rather like a deep-sea explorer: trying to see as much as he can before the oxygen runs out. At the Met, at least for the onetime visitor, assuredly nobody is singling out, per Wollheim, one work for two hours of viewing. The impulse is to see as much great art as possible, thus the nagging sensation of looking at a painting in one gallery and having your eyes already drawn toward the crowd that has gathered in front of Vermeer’s Study of a Young Woman. Research suggests that even as we are looking at one work, we are already becoming “involved” with the next piece. People may look more in large museums, but arguably they see more in small museums.

  According to the museum researcher Stephen Bitgood, everything we do in a museum is driven by a utility-maximizing impulse: getting the biggest bang for our buck. The moment we enter a gallery, we generally turn right, because we have been walking on the right side and it takes fewer steps to get to the nearest art.*3 Similarly, visitors tend not to walk back in exhibits to revisit previous rooms (some studies have shown that when people accidentally began an exhibition by taking the wrong direction, they actually looked less at exhibits, panicked with finding the right path).

  Where paintings are hung can matter more than their inherent quality in attracting visitor attention. In an experiment in a Swiss museum, when a painting was moved from its position in the middle of one room to the corner, the number of times it was “visited” during the experiment plummeted from 207 to 17. People do not like to read long wall text; when a 150-word text was divided into three “chunks” of 50 words, it got twice the readership (and the closer the wall text to the object, the better).

  Curiously, other studies have shown that average viewing times are similar whether or not viewers actually read labels, as if they had some internal budget allotted to each work. Even when people visit in groups, they tend to look at paintings alone, as if maximizing attention; the more people do talk to someone else in a museum visit, the less time they spend looking at art and the less they are moved by it. Video presentations in museums are sparsely visited, suggests Bitgood, because it is harder to tell in advance how much one is going to get out of them—particularly when there are “lower cost” alternatives visible nearby. “Don’t make large down payments,” one museum researcher counsels.

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  When one is faced with the storehouse of visual treasures that is the Met, or any other big museum, seventeen seconds might begin to seem like a rational average viewing time. And when I began to research what actually happens when we stop to look, it seemed as if we could probably spend a lot less time.

  One day, at the Met, I met with Paul Locher, a psychology professor at Montclair State University who has shown subjects, via a device called a tachistoscope, images of paintings in bursts as short as fifty milliseconds. “Masking” occurs afterward to ensure the afterimage does not linger longer on the eye. At these speeds, notes Locher, paintings are “happening” on the retina in a precognitive way. Even before we know it, this “gist” response has told us a lot about a painting (despite the fact we have actually seen, in raw percentage terms, very little of its real estate).

  In as little as fifty or a hundred milliseconds of looking at, say, Vermeer’s Study of a Young Woman, we could tell what colors we are viewing, whether we are seeing a woman or a man, and the overall form (for example, if it’s symmetrical). Because it is a person, our eyes are going to be drawn, virtually instinctively, just as in life, to the young woman’s face (in landscape paintings, our eyes rove more freely). Judged by eye tracking, most of our looking takes place right in the center. “We never look at outer areas,” Locher told me. “Artists seem to have known that foveal vision is very limited and to put the important stuff in the middle of the composition.” As for the frame, while it may, as the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset once noted, “convert whatever happens to be visible within it into a picture,” we do not seem to notice it much.

  As the viewer keeps looking at the image, a “dual process” kicks in, a kind of conversation between our bottom-up sensory organs and our top-down cognitive machinery, moving from sheer object recognition to things like artistic style or semantic meanings. We can imagine the dialogue: Bottom: Look! Here’s eyes, nose, a mouth. Top: Hmmm…looks like a woman. But it’s not real; it’s a portrait of a young woman. Bottom: Hey, these colors are quite beautiful too! Top: That could be Dutch. (Runs over to the memory room.) Could be that guy Vermeer. Why don’t you check out the quality of light? Bottom: I’ll be right back!

  Of course, the more developed the “top,” the better the “bottom,” and the richer the conversation between the two. Art experts are said to have a “good eye.” What they really have is a good brain. It is less that they spot things that others do not; it is that they know where to look; indeed, studies routinely demonstrate how the visual scan paths of experts differ from those of novices.

  One of the most important things we glean in that first fifty-millisecond burst is whether or not we like it. “The appreciation of the aesthetic worth of a picture,” argued the psychologist Hans Eysenck, “may be as instantaneous as the perception of the picture itself.” In one of Locher’s studies, when subjects were asked, after the second hundred-millisecond exposure to a painting, how “pleasing” they thought it was, the results roughly correlated with how pl
easing they thought it was after almost thirty seconds of “exploration” (though the longer they had to look, the more they liked). “When you watch people in a gallery,” Locher told me, “they know very quickly what they don’t want to spend time with.”

  At these speeds, people are not necessarily asking themselves why they might like or dislike something. They are still in what the noted arts educator Abigail Housen calls “stage one” of aesthetic processing: simply gleaning the basic details and making a liking judgment (based largely on what they already know). Getting to stage two, starting to think about ways to look at it, she says, requires a question like “What do you see that makes you say that?” That requires looking again.

  But most of us, she says, do not get past this second stage, to the third and fourth looks. This is the point at which a painting becomes an “old friend,” when we begin to realize what was first pleasing may not be what is ultimately compelling. Perhaps not surprisingly, the painter Brueghel fared the worst in Locher’s study; on the surface, his work might not seem, to echo Kant, “agreeable.” The figures are often grotesque, the colors earthy and ocher tinged. As many art historians have noted, it can be difficult to even figure out the focal center of his works.

  But the point is that we often know we like (or dislike) something before we know what it is. The psychologist Robert Zajonc argued that the way we feel about something, rather than coming on the heels of cognition—that is, “before I can like something, I must have some knowledge about it”—actually accompanies and may even precede it. “For most decisions,” writes Zajonc, “it is extremely difficult to demonstrate that there has actually been any prior cognitive process whatsoever.” How could there have been, for example, in the hundred-millisecond judgments of paintings? Affect is, suggested Zajonc, like a powerful, primal, independent early warning system. “The rabbit,” he wrote, “cannot stop to contemplate the length of the snake’s fangs or the geometry of its markings.” It has to know how it feels about the snake even before it is fully aware it is a snake. And so we write off things before they ever get a second look.