Art Hacks: Understanding How to See Art

You Are One of Multitudes

 In a previous Art Hacks posting I spoke to the issue of learning about art. And it concentrated on the resources available to a busy studio artist whose time and finances are limited.  Another aspect of learning about art is understanding the art you do see.  And this is profoundly more complex than it seems.  While you don't need to know Art History or Art Theory that doesn't mean that your art can ignore or otherwise that your point of origin for creating art has been thought about and studied for centuries and you're stuck with explaining why you are doing what you're doing given the inherited gifts of the past.

Visual Philosophy

One of the best descriptions of a visual artist to their art practice is that an artist is exercising a Visual Philosophy. The by-product, the artwork is rationalized by a belief system that has been developed by the individual artist to express a vision in a philosophical ecosystem of taste, implementation, and intellectual inertia.

Each of these considerations  depend on not only learning but refining the information you gather into something unique to your own art. And the idea of philosophy should not necessarily be confused with asserting messages of any kind. It can be nothing more than the esoteric biorhythm that you use to create the art that you do. 

Attention Span

Numerous studies of people's behavior in museum settings indicate that the average time spent looking at an individual art piece is very, very short. The Toledo Museum of Art has put together a primer on the subject for the average patron.  There are others and the studies are mixed ranging from 17 to 40-odd seconds.

All artists are different but anyone attempting to create fine art is attempting to speak to an order of humanity that shares a love and understanding of the work being produced. This is not the same as creating work that phishes for the attention of a well-known commercial audience.

Generally speaking, having your work exhibited in a museum is validation that the work you do is being accepted at a high level of aesthetic sophistication or curiosity. This brings us back around to the actual value of the piece being exhibited in a museum.  Does anyone actually see it? I will return to this subject in a much more detailed entry.

But the fact of the matter is that being shown in a museum is more important as resume highlight than as an exposure mechanism.  There is a robust discussion that questions whether or not showing in a museum is more important than having your work bought and exhibited in a well attended venue - public, private, or digital.

An artist who randomly visits a museum in which their work is being shown and expects to happen upon any meaningful criticism of their work is more likely to expect being struck by lightning given the statistical odds.

The exception to this scenario is attendance at art openings in which your art is exhibited. Art opening ceremonies first curate a cohort of attendees who are a peer audience for the work. Secondly, the audience is constrained to the perimeters of the show itself. Attending these openings is time well-spent.

An Artist's Reason for Museum Visits

Presumably artists have more targeted motivations for visiting museums. Unlike a tourist or patron who goes to a museum to see as much as they can in a constrained amount of time and energy, an artist (should) be better prepared to make use of the resource.

This means taking the time to do a personal inventory of work that is of interest and that that is not. Decide which list is a priority this visit.

Take a second pass of your wish list and further prioritize the candidates of interest. You know how much energy you'll have and you also know your saturation point. Draw a line under the last item you would expect to see no matter what and make that your plan 'A'.

Make a plan 'B' likewise as a backup should things change.

Finally, articulate what you hope to accomplish by going.  Consider this a set of expectations that you need to meet to consider the visit a success or 'Done'.

Attending with these things in hand, ensure that you don't get sidetracked before seeing what you what to see for good reasons.  Once you've accomplished all you wanted to (been there, done that), you can call it day or graze in other parts of the museum.

Define 'See'

An artist must be learning all the time. In fact, Robert Motherwell believed that art could not be taught but that "it could be learned". And learning was defined as deep, frequent exposure to other artists and art.

The act of seeing includes reading about the artist and their intentions in the art they create.  In the case of historical art, are there myths or stories you need to be familiar with to enjoy or critique the work?

And once you visit the art, take it in.  Dedicate some real time to just throwing around mental models of how and why it was made.  Why this solution to the problem?  How would you do it differently? Why?

Take the time to develop a more comprehensive and mature memory imprint than 'like'.  This  builds your  capacity to think about your own work.