I’ve been taken to art museums before I could speak, and I didn’t have much choice in the matter. I got my first camera when I was 6 years old, and in a fit of reading too many mystery novels, I used it to take pictures of cars that would drive by the street we were housed at. This later developed into a tendency to photograph everything when I went to a museum. Arguably, because everything that’s framed is placed in a position of some highlight.
I took a 3-day long trip to the Louvre in 2008 that very easily broke me, my device and my habit. There were simply too many things to photograph, and later, my parents showed me that all museums keep high resolution photographs of their work as part of a digital archive (this is to validate authentication claims and also to preserve a state for historic objects like sculptures or artifacts). So that broke yet another imaginary goal that I had set for myself. There was no way my friendly-to-use Sony wrist-band accommodating camera was going to capture shots with such detail and resolution as the museum’s own archive.
Some people, like a bunch of my classmates at Columbia, learned to appreciate arts through formal classroom education. Even at the engineering school, we were required to take at least one class in Art Humanities, Literature Humanities or Music Humanities to fulfill our graduation requirements. But I Wanted To Be Different From The Rest™, so I selected Music Humanities.
I thought I was insufferably cool as I churned out absurd essays that compared Bach’s ostinato to Megadeth’s rhythmic style, or Wagner’s use of a musical motif to the foundational genre elements of dubstep (as defined by me). I am happy to report that those essays, after being graded, will never see the light of day. This destruction through the inevitable passage of time brought to you by the pre-cloud flavor of Microsoft Word.
One of my biologist friends was stranded in her Arts Humanities class and had heard of my reputation to churn out, shall we say, essays of the sort described above. She said, “I have to go to the Met, and pick one of these paintings to write about.”
“What do you have to write about it?”
“That’s what I need your help for.”
We followed the assignment she was tasked with, which would go on to change how I learned to see art.
Here’s the assignment:
You have to park your butt in the chair in front of a very specific piece (even if it’s smaller or not the main exhibit) and stare specifically at the piece for 1hr.
Pick the piece you want to study. In my friend’s case, this was pre-assigned to her from the curriculum. In your case, you can just enter a room and pick the thing your eyes are most drawn to. This is the most fun way to approach art.
Sit with one blank sheet of paper and time yourself for 30 minutes. I know that other art teachers use 1hr or even 3hrs.
If you are a literary sort, you can take notes (in bullet form) either until the page is filled or your time is up about the piece.
If you have artistic talents (then I envy you), copy something from the image into the sheet. This is usually a way for art students to practice achieving a certain technique in perspective or lighting/shading, etc.
There’s obviously going to be other humans who will interrupt your line-of-sight to the painting/sculpture/artifact, and a thousand notifications on your phone, but the critical thing about this is to do it without distraction. Amy E. Herman writes in Visual Intelligence that this practice can also train your observational skills, which have very real-world consequences in terms of managing your safety. I also learned about this through John Berger’s BBC show Ways of Seeing (now in four free episodes on Youtube), if you prefer to have visual aids accompany you in real time.
I’m drawn to this exercise because it teaches me to cultivate focus. The images we consume on a daily basis are increasingly trying to grab our attention (which is their rightful duty in terms of any UI/UX/marketing goals). The attention economy is what it is. But what I do think is interesting is that we cultivate focus by specifically applying it to something, even after the initial threshold of interest.
However, taken to an extreme, this exercise devolves to “Blue curtains signify that the artist was in critical depression over the death of his second wife” class of interpretations. There's plenty of times where you have to squint at the tiny plaque accompanying a single dot on a canvas, desperately justifying how this represents some greater artistic context. My friend and comedian Shafi Hossain says that museum dates are simply hiking dates with more reading involved. This is also one of the reasons why René Magritte is one of my favorite artists.
Magritte, a copywriter and a maker of posters and ads, single-handedly pushed the notion that every image is a lie. Every visible object hides another object, and the human curiosity to see beyond the occlusion presented is what drives mystery. His work centers around mystery, unease, occlusion, word play with art and he says:
“....However, I must point out a mistake: in one vitrine there is a notice describing the objects represented in my paintings as “symbols”. I should be grateful if you would ensure that it is corrected. In representational arts, symbols are for the most part employed by artists who are very respectful of a certain way of thinking: that of endowing an object with some conventional and commonplace meaning. My conception of painting, on the other hand, tends to restore to objects their value as objects (which never fails to shock those who cannot look at a painting without automatically thinking how it could be symbolic, allegoric[al], etc.)”
– René Magritte to Philippe Roberts-Jones, 26th April 1964 (from Magritte by Alex Danchev)
It’s pretty evident that Magritte was someone who liked jokes because he also did this:
Magrittes: Top-Left: The Son of Adam (1964), Top-Right: The Listening Room (1952), Bottom-Left: Fine Realities (1964), Bottom-Right: The Postcard (1960)
Clearly, this screams, “no theme; nothing to see here but some chonky apples.”
The problem with a lot of art formalism is that it's inaccessible to a lay-person, or to someone encountering a piece for the first time. The first time I saw the Mona Lisa or even Michelangelo's David, I was more overwhelmed by the crowd of tourists photographing it than anything specific about the art itself. For example, I stumbled across Wangechi Mutu’s The Seated sculpture series as I was being stood up on a date at the Met, on a cold January evening in 2020. At the time, I was too anxious about my date to notice the sculptures. But after 45 minutes of waiting against them from the cold, they felt familiar and protective. Later, I learned (through some Googling) that Mutu had been inspired to create a set of guardians.
Basically, the art you like doesn’t have to be “important” as deemed by some curatorial authority, net worth or even aesthetic merits, but it has to be worthy of your attention. There are ways in which you practice giving it your attention, sometimes by identifying symbols or styles that you know you gravitate to. So let them speak to you, and maybe you’d hate your trip to an art museum less.
On making art museums fun
I did this exercise before - back in, oh gosh, 2004 or so, for a creative writing class. I hated it - I felt like the art that I wanted to enjoy was somehow needed to be consumed and regurgitated in a way I didn't want to consume it. ...like whatever I wrote about it as a sophmore in undergrad was nowhere near what the artist had intended.
But, then again, maybe my artist also had a good sense of humor and was like, hey, stop making something out of chonky apples that is really just chonky apples. This was a good reminder, Peels. :)
Oh God there's so many assignments where it's like, "I'm literally looking at a blue canvas, I don't know what you want me to make of it" (Cy Twombly is a classic example). I absolutely do need Magritte to remind me that sometimes a thing doesn't need to be interpreted to be meaningful.
Thanks for reading, Sasha (long time no see) ❤️