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by Tom Vanderbilt

  “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.”

  “Affect often persists”: Zajonc, “Feeling and Thinking,” 157.

  As the critic Clement Greenberg quipped: The quotation comes from Thierry de
Duve, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 19.

  “I think you need to give”: See George Plimpton, “The Art of the Matter,” New Yorker, June 10, 2012.

  Our ability to so quickly: As a curator once told the professor of psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Paintings give the illusion that you can see them in one second.” Or less! The apparent ease of our viewing—the painting is just laid out flat there for us, and there is nothing telling us what we are not getting—combined with quick and instinctive feelings of affect, helps explain why it is not uncommon to find, in surveys of visitors, a pervading sentiment that people are “waiting”: waiting for a painting to blow them away, waiting to “get the message” of a painting. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Rick E. Robinson, The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter (Malibu, Calif.: J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Center for Education in the Arts, 1990), 147.

  “find my first impression”: Kenneth Clark, Looking at Pictures (London: John Murray, 1960), 16.

  One museum study found: See “Interpretation at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts: Policy and Practice,” http://​www.​museum-​ed.​org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2010/​08/​mia_​interpre​tation_​museum-​ed.​pdf.

  which, as research has shown: In one well-known study, the psychologist Alfred Yarbus had viewers—equipped with a primitive eye-tracking device—look at a painting (Ilya Efimovich Repin’s Unexpected Return, which shows a soldier returning from Siberian exile), and then asked them questions like the following: How long had he been away? What is the socioeconomic condition of the family? Depending on the question asked, viewers’ gaze patterns were quite different. It is not difficult to draw a comparison to the information that labels might provide and how that would direct viewer attention. See Yarbus, Eye Movements and Vision, trans. Basil Haigh (New York: Plenum Press, 1967). Also, for a good summary of Yarbus’s research, see Sasha Archibald, “Ways of Seeing,” Cabinet, no. 30 (Summer 2008), http://​www.​cabinet​magazine.​org/​issues/​30/​archibald.​php.

  “decide how much time”: Hensher, “We Know What We Like, and It’s Not Modern Art.”

  That abstract by de Kooning: This example was provided to me by Pablo Tinio, in his paper “From Artistic Creation to Aesthetic Reception: The Mirror Model of Art,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7, no. 3 (2013): 265–75.

  We get caught: See David Brieber et al., “Art in Time and Space: Context Modulates the Relation Between Art Experience and Viewing Time,” PloS ONE 9, no. 6 (June 2014): 1–8.

  Elsewhere in the Prado: See Mary Tompkins Lewis, “The Power, and Art, of Painting,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 25, 2009.

  “exotic and dangerous character”: Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 11.

  In a study of visitors: See Jeffrey K. Smith and Pablo P. L. Tinio, “Audibly Engaged: Talking the Walk,” in Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience: Handheld Guides and Other Media, ed. Loïc Tallon and Kevin Walker (New York: AltaMira Press, 2008), 75.

  “a lot of people”: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 3.

  “Even when contemplating”: Alain de Botton, Art as Therapy (London: Phaidon Press, 2013), 170.

  Hence the anxieties: Ayumi Yamada, “Appreciating Art Verbally: Verbalization Can Make a Work of Art Be Both Undeservedly Loved and Unjustly Maligned,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45, no. 5 (2009): 1140–43.

  As one museum consultant: The curator Ingrid Schaffner notes that wall labels in contemporary art can “say what the small museum won’t tell,” that is, “it’s okay that you don’t find this pleasing, it wasn’t made to be.” See Schaffner, “Wall Labels,” in What Makes a Great Exhibition?, ed. Paula Marincola (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 154–69.

  “how unconsciously many people”: Harlow Gale, “On the Psychology of Advertising,” Psychological Studies, July 1900, 39–69.

  “one of the most interesting”: Art-Journal 11 (1872): 37.

  “Certainly, compared with its rival”: New York Times, Nov. 12, 1871.

  Hardly anyone replied: See Erika Michael, Hans Holbein the Younger: A Guide to Research (New York: Routledge, 2013), 327.

  “antique appearance”: Fechner collected the results of his study in the document Bericht über das auf der Dresdner Holbein-Ausstellung ausgelegte Album (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1872). Thanks to Sophie Duvernoy for translation assistance.

  Fechner’s work, which became known: See, for example, Jay Hetrick, “Aisthesis in Radical Empiricism: Gustav Fechner’s Psychophysics and Experimental Aesthetics,” Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics 3 (2011): 139–53.

  “Everybody knows that he”: The Fechner quotation is referenced in J. E. V. Temme, “Fechner’s Primary School Revisited: Towards a Social Psychology of Taste,” Poetics 21, no. 6 (1993): 463–79.

  Critics noted that his studies: Subsequent studies have found various forms of statistical bias; for example, while there might be a weak “population wide” preference for a certain rectangle, when you drilled down to the individual level, people had quite strong—and quite varied—preferences. See I. C. McManus, “Beauty Is Instinctive Feeling: Experimenting on Aesthetics and Art,” in The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, ed. Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 179. McManus writes, “Some people do like rectangles, but there is no special status for the Golden Section rectangle.”

  And how did you know people: This point comes from Richard Padovan: “The general preference for figures between a square and a half and a square and three quarters could equally be due simply to the subjects’ familiarity with similar shapes in such everyday things as playing cards, window panes, books, and paintings.” See Padovan, Proportion: Science, Philosophy, Architecture (London: Taylor and Francis, 1999), 312.

  After Fechner, many have objected: The philosopher Rudolf Arnheim, for example, charged that by making it a matter of “preference,” the practitioners of experimental aesthetics “neglected everything that distinguishes the pleasure generated for a work of art from the pleasure generated by a dish of ice cream.” Fechner’s studies of rectangles, even if they seemed to reveal some preferences, could tell what people liked; they could not tell why. Most studies, Arnheim charged, “tell us deplorably little about what people see when they look at an aesthetic object, what they mean by saying that they like or dislike it, and why they prefer the objects they prefer.” See Arnheim, “The Other Gustav Theodor Fechner,” in New Essays on the Psychology of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 45. Even one of the field’s most prominent advocates, the psychologist Daniel Berlyne, who picked up the experimental aesthetics torch in the early 1970s, observed that “experimental aesthetics has had a long but not particularly distinguished history.” Berlyne, Studies in the New Experimental Aesthetics (Washington, D.C.: Hemisphere Publishing, 1974), 5.

  Artists, Zeki has argued: As with Fechner, there are suggestions that neuroaesthetics tries to reduce the complexity of art to simple metrics, like “beauty,” whose relevance in contemporary art is suspect. For example, an interesting study of gallery visitors who were hooked up to a device that measured galvanic skin responses, heart rate, and other physiological measures while people looked at paintings found that a work like Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, while rating low on “aesthetic value,” nevertheless generated higher-than-average physical responses. “We assume that the reason is the work’s broad popularity and that the encounter with the ‘original’ may cause these strong effects.” See Martin Tröndle and Wolfgang Tschacher, “The Physiology of Phenomenology: The Effects of Artworks,” Empirical Studies of the Arts 30, no. 1 (2012): 79–117. Another critique is that the findings of neuroaesthetics are too obvious. For example, the art cri
tic Blake Gopnik wrote, “To discover that kinetic art is an art of motion, and that it triggers motion sensors in the visual cortex, or that the Fauves were colorists, and (guess what) made art that especially triggers color sensors,…adds almost nothing that wasn’t already obvious about these movements.” Quoted in Arthur P. Shimamura and Stephen E. Palmer, eds., Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 145. Neuroaesthetics, others have argued, “may be killing your soul.” Philip Ball, “Neuroaesthetics Is Killing Your Soul,” Nature, March 22, 2003.

  “exploring the potential”: See George Walden, “Beware the Fausts of Neuroscience,” Standpoint, April 2012, http://​www.​stand​pointmag.​co.​uk/​node/​4367/​full.

  So Mondrian, for example: Writes Zeki, “When we view one of Mondrian’s abstract paintings in which the emphasis is on lines…large numbers of cells in charted visual areas of our brains will be activated and responding vigorously, providing a line of given orientation falls on the part of the field that a cell with a preference for that orientation ‘looks at.’ ” See Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 114. Interestingly, it may not matter how you look at a painting by Mondrian to excite the right effect. One study found that his work Composition was preferred more in three other orientations than the original way it was meant to be displayed (although subjects were much better at guessing the proper orientation of other modern paintings). See George Mather, “Aesthetic Judgment of Orientation in Modern Art,” i-Perception 3, no. 1 (2012): 18–24. Another study took a number of Mondrian images and rendered their lines as oblique, rather than horizontal and vertical (using “lozenge”-shaped frames to avoid a corrupting influence of the frame’s orientation). Here people much preferred the original paintings (though as always there could be a familiarity effect—people know what Mondrians are supposed to look like). See Richard Latto, “Do We Like What We See?,” in Multidisciplinary Approaches to Visual Representations and Interpretations, ed. Grant Malcolm (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004), 343–56.