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by Tom Vanderbilt

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  Because this response feels so valid, Zajonc argued, it can be hard to overturn. Certainly, there is something valid in relying on gut feelings to help us sort out how we feel toward a work of art. Art critics do it all the time. Gut feelings help us filter the world, and what is taste, really, but a kind of cognitive mechanism for managing sensory overload? But there is reason to be cautious. We may not always be reading those gut feelings correctly.

  We can be strangers to our taste. Have you ever brought something home from a trip—a bottle of Italian wine, a piece of Balinese art—that seemed fantastic when you first encountered it in Italy or Bali but no longer seems to excite you? Perhaps what you really liked was being in Italy or Bali. “Because affective judgments are inescapable,” Zajonc observed, “they cannot be focused as easily as perceptual and cognitive processes.” They are more open to influence, less easily controlled. Our own liking for something is affected not only by whether someone else is looking at something but by how they are looking at it. You are more likely to like the Vermeer if you see someone smiling at it rather than frowning. Even that creepy look from the overzealous guard might throw you off.

  Changing your mind—or, more accurately, your feelings—takes effort. “Affect often persists after a complete invalidation of its original cognitive basis,” wrote Zajonc. Another problem is that the brain, as a pattern-matching engine, is less likely to respond positively to things it has not encountered before. As the critic Clement Greenberg quipped, “All original art looks ugly at first.” We may not even see what we do not like. “I think you need to give yourself a chance with art,” the art historian Linda Nochlin has argued. “I don’t think love at first sight is always what you’re going to love at second, third, fourth and fifth.” Our ability to so quickly get the “gist” of a painting affords the illusion that we have seen it all. The art critic Kenneth Clark, meanwhile, declared that he could spot a great picture in a shopwindow from a bus moving at thirty miles an hour—only to jump off the bus, go back, and “find my first impression betrayed by a lack of skill or curiosity in the execution.”

  But how does the way most people look at art in a museum influence what they like? One museum study found that its visitors reported wandering until something caught their eye. It sounds like a good strategy: Why waste time with things you do not like? But what catches your eye may have little to do with what you might really want to see; that first involuntary glance might have been triggered by a painting that is large, particularly garish, or in the center of the wall, where curators like to put “important” paintings and where we tend to look. What catches your eye may also be what you already had in mind to see.

  These top-down influences are rather like the labels on paintings (which, as research has shown, influence where nonexpert viewers look in a painting). In the brilliant film Museum Hours, set at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, a tour guide leads a group through the astonishing gallery of works by Brueghel. Stopping by The Conversion of St. Paul, the guide notes how hard it is to locate the focus of the work (as already mentioned with the Icarus painting, this is a not-uncommon effect in Brueghel). Is it the figure of Saul? Yes, insists one viewer; consider the title of the painting. But then why is he barely visible, on the ground, fallen off his horse? Why is a “horse’s ass” rendered so much more prominently? The guide suggests, not without controversy, that the painting’s focus is a small boy, “a soldier too young for any war,” his helmet dropping over his head, lurking beneath a “fine tree.” It is just my interpretation, the guide cautions. But now that this intriguing, formerly invisible boy has been pointed out to me, he is one of the first things I look for when I see the painting. Would he otherwise have caught my eye?

  With art, the critic Philip Hensher notes, unlike theater or a concert, you as the viewer “decide how much time you’re going to give it.” Viewing time, he suggests, is a “good measure of how interested you are by it.” But it is a flawed measure. You may really like something but are feeling pressed to move on by the thought of how much there is to see. There may be things that would interest you, if only you knew. That abstract by de Kooning—did you know he used ordinary household paints to do it, hard up as he was for cash? We get caught in a feedback loop: We spend time with a painting to try to understand it, but how much time we spend with a painting is driven by how much we understand of it.

  Certainly, some works need little interpretation. “We do not know what it means,” writes Robert Hughes of Goya’s Dog, with its lone forlorn canine head peering into the unknown, “but its pathos moves us on a level below narrative.”*4 On the other hand, there are things that no one will ever really see—or feel—in a painting. Elsewhere in the Prado, Velázquez’s Las Meninas has lost the meaning it must have had when hanging in Philip IV’s private office. The art historian Michael Baxandall speaks of the “period eye,” ways of looking that have been lost to us; even after being told, for example, that the ultramarine used in certain fifteenth-century Italian paintings was incredibly costly, we will not be able to look upon it with sheer fifteenth-century hunger, to feel its “exotic and dangerous character.”

  We may miss things even when we think we are paying attention: In a study of visitors to the Whitney Museum, viewers who listened to the museum’s audio tour tended to linger longer in front of paintings, but when they were later asked questions about the work that were not covered in the audio text, they actually did worse than people who just looked. Any viewers who think they have “got the picture,” that they have seen what they like or dislike, can be caught in a vicious circle: They are not looking in the ways that would bring out the “rewards” that would stimulate paying more attention, which itself would bring more things to see and thus more rewards.

  In those same surveys, the idea of an emotional response to art looms large. People want to be moved; they want to feel something like a Stendhal syndrome—being lifted to ecstasy by sheer aesthetic bliss. They seem suspicious of a more “intellectual” response, of delving too deeply into why they might like something. This all accords with Zajonc’s theories. As instinctive as feelings are, they are hard to talk about. Perhaps, he suggested, this is because humans, before we had language, had effective ways to express emotions nonverbally (your face reveals your dislike of food before words do). We reach for inexact terms like “cool” or “awesome” or even “beautiful.”

  The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was particularly bothered by the word “lovely”—“a lot of people, of course, who can’t express themselves properly use the word very frequently”—hit upon this when he suggested that emoticon-like faces (the sort that many decades later would populate social media) would be more expressive of our aesthetic responses than adjectives. “Even when contemplating extremely celebrated and much-loved images,” notes Alain de Botton, “we are liable to feel painfully silenced by the basic question of why we like them.”

  Hence the anxieties of art: Not only am I not sure whether I do (or should) like this work, but I cannot explain why. (What may often be driving our liking, it has been suggested, is how easily we can verbalize the things about a painting we like or dislike.) I wonder whether the inherent hostility so many people have toward critics is less about the idea of being told what they should like and more a frustration at someone being able to so eloquently say why he likes something.

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  But it would be wrong to presume, as some seem to, that thinking about art is somehow at odds with having an emotional response to it. “Feeling is not free of thought,” wrote Zajonc, “nor is thought free of feelings.” As one museum consultant told me, part of the disappointment people might have felt at Tate Britain as they wandered from the galleries of historical paintings and into rooms containing contemporary art is that they came from galleries rich not only with art but with interpretation and stories about that art, and then they were plunged into spare rooms of spare art with spare ways to think about it. “They were a
ngry—all the classic comments, ‘my four-year-old could do this.’ It was because they’d been left in free fall. There was no hand-holding, no context.”

  Jeffrey Smith tells a story of one day hearing a curator at the Met wax rhapsodic about a newly acquired painting by Delacroix. The work, which now hangs in gallery 801, is a portrait of Félicité Longrois. As Smith learned, she was close to Delacroix, a maternal figure to the artist, and, much earlier, was briefly a mistress of Napoleon’s. Suddenly, armed with this new information, as Smith puts it, he found that this “nice painting of an old woman” captured his attention in a new way. He had to “look closer.” Who was this woman who had so touched Delacroix (her death, he wrote to George Sand, augured the loss of “a whole world of feelings that no other relationship can revive”)? What in the painting might reveal the depth of the painter’s regard? The painting had not changed at all, and yet it was no longer the same work, nor was he the same person in front of it. The more he knew about it, the more he could feel toward it. Not only would it capture his eye where it would not before, but it had, in some measure, captured his heart. But first the painting had to get into his head.

  LOOKING AT THE BRAIN LOOKING AT ART

  But how does art strike us, lodge in our brains, change us? What happens to us when we have a “response” to art? Does it look different, biologically or neurologically, than a response to a great meal? And if our propensity to notice, much less be moved by, art is so tenuous, it raises the question: Amid the flurry of impressions of the gallery (or of daily life), are there things we are more instinctively drawn to?

  One afternoon, I found myself inside the offices of a company called NeuroFocus, across from a skate park in Berkeley, California. I was watching a promo for the Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth on a flat-screen monitor. The images were lushly beautiful (a time-lapse mushroom slowly unfolding itself to the world), striking (underwater footage of elephants swimming), and violent (a cheetah-targeted zebra at the point of the kill). Accompanied by a rousing score, which triumphantly swelled to the image of a jumping shark, it felt epic and sublime. But a question arose: The shark might have jumped, but did it register on my brain?

  “Surprisingly, you’re one of few people where the shark doesn’t grab your attention,” Andrew Pohlmann, the company’s marketing director, later told me. We had before us a scrolling printout of thin jittery lines, each tied to some flicker of electrophysiologi­cal activity in the brain, as measured by the hive of EEG sensors dotting my head, enmeshed in a cafeteria-worker-style cap. Leave-in hair conditioner provided the conductance that electroencephalogra­phy requires.

  “There are sixty-four sensors,” A. K. Pradeep, the company’s CEO, told me. “Each sensor measures the brain two thousand times a second—that’s 128,000 data points every second.” The plot marked “EX02” generated one of the largest spikes. “That’s a blink,” added Robert Knight, director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley and NeuroFocus’s chief science adviser. “It’s a huge artifact. When your eyes roll up, they sweep an electrical potential across the brain.”

  Such “artifacts” aside, what NeuroFocus, a subsidiary of the ratings giant Nielsen, was looking for in the jagged peaks of the EEG plot were harbingers of engagement. It wanted to know not only that I was doing more than gazing blankly at the images on the flat screen before me but, as indicated by the torrent of electrical activity, that I had noticed, remembered, and perhaps even been moved by what I had seen.

  This has long been a holy grail of advertising. In the late nineteenth century, Harlow Gale, an instructor of “physiological psychology” at the University of Minnesota, set out to study what he called a “problem of involuntary attention.” He was talking about advertising.

  In a simple yet clever test, Gale sat participants at a table in a dark room and briefly flashed an electric light on a collection of magazine pages mounted to the wall, each containing different combinations of words and images of brands. He then asked them to recall what they had seen. He was interested in not only what subjects saw but “the conscious as against the unconscious effects of advertising.” He found a “decided advantage for the left side of the page,” based on reading patterns. Or that against a white background, black text captured men’s attention most, while women seemed drawn to red text. The fledgling field of psychology had met the emerging discipline of mass advertising.

  Gale wanted to know not only what advertisements people saw but why they reacted more to some than others. He was left with a lasting impression, one that speaks to the question of our liking for art: “how unconsciously many people reason and cannot indeed give the real reason when they try.”

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  In 1871, people in the city of Dresden flocked to an exhibition of paintings by Hans Holbein the Younger. As much as for sheer appreciation of the old master, they were drawn by what The Art-Journal of London called “one of the most interesting Art-controversies that can be recalled.” At the exhibition’s center were two versions of what was widely considered the artist’s supreme achievement: The Madonna with the Family of Mayor Meyer. The problem was that no one knew which was authentic: the “Dresden” version or the “Darmstadt” version. For years, art historians and critics had been probing the provenance and peering into the brushwork, and a surprising consensus was emerging that the Darmstadt painting—long assumed to be the fake—was actually authentic. “Certainly, compared with its rival,” wrote The New York Times of the Darmstadt Madonna, “the execution is found to possess singular evenness and unity.”

  Into the fray came Gustav Fechner, a onetime professor of physics who had pioneered the study of “psychophysics”—the science of trying to quantify how much we perceive things. The distant influence of Fechner can be felt today on any consumer test panel. Under the auspices of a study on the painting’s authenticity, Fechner distributed surveys to more than eleven thousand visitors of the Holbein exhibition. What he really wanted to know, as he probed them for their thoughts on which composition more beautifully depicted the Madonna, was which they preferred.

  The study was a bit of a bust: Hardly anyone replied. Those who did said they liked the Darmstadt version more.*5 This surprised Fechner, who thought viewers would find the older-looking, darker Darmstadt version less pleasing; perhaps, he suggested, they simply equated the “antique appearance” with the more authentic, thus more liked, work. Later psychologists grumbled about the methodology. Who knows what confounding factors might have swayed the visitors’ judgment (many press accounts, for example, favored the Darmstadt version).

  As an idea, however, Fechner’s study was strikingly novel: putting two pieces of art, almost identical, side by side, and asking everyday people what they thought. Fechner’s work, which became known as “experimental aesthetics,” was trying to unpack, using scientific means, people’s aesthetic preferences “from below.”

  He wanted to know not what nineteenth-century aesthetic philosophy suggested the cultivated mind was supposed to like but what people actually did like when it was presented to them under controlled conditions. Fechner did not ignore the idea that we might like art for social reasons. “Everybody knows that he has to like Raphael, Michael Angelo [sic], Titian, Albrecht Dürer and Dutch genre paintings,” he wrote. But what happened as people stood in front of paintings by new or unknown artists?

  He took this all the way down to the most basic stimuli, probing subjects with batteries of geometric shapes, emerging with the famous “golden section rectangle”—that precise ratio of length to width that seemed to hit the aesthetic sweet spot of the most people. He was accounting for taste: There was something inherent in that rectangle (or in people, per Hume) that made it rise above the other rectangles. But how accurate was his accounting? Critics noted that his studies actually showed preferences for rectangles to be fairly all over the place. And how did you know people were not simply choosing rectangles that looked like the rectangles th
ey were used to seeing? Perhaps preference was just tradition. Who could ever disentangle the difference?

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  After Fechner, many have objected to the idea of reducing the complexity of people’s reaction to art to a single variable (beauty, pleasantness, and so forth) on a sliding scale. But the arrival of modern neuroscience brought new promise—could the study of the brain help explain our reactions to art?—as well as revised versions of an old critique: How could our response to art be reduced to an electrical signal?

  With this lingering question on my mind—what might our neural activity tell us about our feelings about art that we could not discern ourselves—I went to meet Semir Zeki, a professor of neuroscience at University College London who is credited with coining the term “neuroaesthetics.” As the word entails, it is an empirical aesthetics updated for an age of fMRI, a search for the “neural laws” that might underlie our aesthetic experiences. Artists, Zeki has argued, not without controversy, are neuroscientists, “exploring the potential and capacities” of the brain, sometimes almost preternaturally anticipating in their work what seems to stimulate the “visual brain,” as Zeki calls it.

  So Mondrian, for example, might trigger, suggested Zeki in his book Inner Vision, neuronal cells that have a preference for the orientation of the lines he has painted. Is a liking for Mondrian then a preference that our art-viewing cells were having? Would they not respond, like an eager dog, to any set of lines in the world? If we did not care for Mondrian, was the problem with our line-orienting cells? Could we retrain them to appreciate what Mondrian was doing? It is not unthinkable: When people have received pulses of transcranial direct current stimulation to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, they seem to like the images they are looking at more.