READING AND SPEAKING

2. Now listen to part two and try to match the pictures below with what each speaker describes.

How long does it take to look at a painting?

When I taught classes in the Art Institute in Chicago, I ran into people who came to the museum regularly, over a period of years.

One elderly woman told me she came to see one of the Art Instituteʼs Rembrandt paintings – a curious picture of a young woman, leaning on the bottom half of a Dutch door – three or four times a week during her lunch hour. How long had she done that? I asked. She said, “I donʼt know. Decades.” To be conservative, letʼs say she meant two decades, and letʼs say her lunch hour was one hour. Thatʼs 3,000 hours of looking. If looking had been her 9 to 5 job, thatʼs over a year of doing nothing but sitting in front of one painting. What amazing conversations she must have had with the woman in that painting!

Thereʼs a book by the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, called Old Masters, in which a man goes to see a painting in the museum in Vienna every other day for his entire adult life. He does that for an entirely different reason than the woman in Chicago: he goes because heʼs so desperately misanthropic that he hates everything and everyone, except this one painting – a painting by Tintoretto – which he sort of likes. It is an unidentified portrait, so no story goes with it, only a face. He goes and sits in front of it and ponders how much he dislikes everything except that one manʼs face.

Either way, hate or love, to spend that much time in front of an artwork, you have to be in dialogue with it. You have to listen to it, and think something in response, and look again, and see how the work has changed. You have to believe that you can have an ongoing, evolving relationship with something that is unchanging. Many people might say that is impossible.

Looking for a long time is not the usual way people see artworks. The usual interaction with an artwork is a glance or a glimpse or a cursory look. What I have in mind is a different kind of experience: not just glancing, but looking, staring, gazing, sitting or standing transfixed: forgetting, temporarily, the errands you have to run, or the meeting youʼre late for, and thinking, living, only inside the work. Falling in love with an artwork, finding that you somehow need it, wanting to return to it, wanting to keep it in your life.

I would like to hear from anyone who has an experience like this, and from anyone who has spent a long time looking at an artwork. What happens after the first few minutes? Why do you want to return? There have been a number of surveys of how visitors interact with paintings in museums. One found that an average viewer goes up to a painting, looks at it for less than two seconds, reads the wall text for another 10 seconds, glances at the painting to verify something in the text, and moves on. Another survey concluded people looked for a median time of 17 seconds. The Louvre found that people looked at the Mona Lisa an average of 15 seconds, which makes you wonder how long they spend on the other 35,000 works in the collection. A survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art supposedly found that people look at artworks for an average of 32.5 seconds each, but they must not have counted the ones people glance at.

The Internet has many entertaining pictures of people looking, or not looking, at paintings. This one is captioned “That man is not looking at a painting.” 

All this goes to show that our encounters are usually brief encounters or non-encounters. But this is not a simple topic: […] Time, patience, immersion: these are qualities that some art continues to call for […]. Iʼm sorry I lost touch with that woman in the Art Institute who looked at the Rembrandt. I wonder, in the end, what it told her, and what she said to it.

So how long does it take to look at a painting? A lifetime, more or less.

(an excerpt from an article by Professor James Elkins)