Art in 27 Seconds
How much time does a single person spend engaging with a single piece of art? According to a 2001 study conducted by Jeffrey K. Smith and Lisa F. Smith, the mean time spent viewing a piece of art was 27 seconds, with a median time of 17 seconds. And while some paintings may capture a person’s attention for longer, the longest time they observed was a mere three and a half minutes.
A painting that may have taken months to complete will only get a lingering glance before a pedestrian moves onto the next one. In the common museum exhibition, the patron breezes by the paintings, finishing the circuit in less than 2 hours. A mere 2 – 3 hours spent in the presence of many pieces of art seems like a paltry amount of time to spend on an activity that so many claim to enjoy. It would be like your friend claiming they enjoyed a wonderful football match, but then finding out they only watched 10 minutes of play time.
What hope can art have for influencing the human condition in 27 seconds? The amount of time a person spends with art weakens as her freetime is burdened with societal obligations, including those of his work, family, community, and country. Yet can we really blame these forces, exterior to the museum exhibit, for forming the kind of people who only spend 27 seconds with art? What could shake someone from their default state and make someone appreciate a piece of art? The power of the aesthetic itself must be the thing that disturbs the waking slumber.
An impressionist landscape painting of cliffs of Etretat by Claude Monet deserves more than 27 seconds.
Claude Monet, The Cliffs at Étretat, 1885, oil on canvas. Clark Art Institute, 1955.528
Even a flat JPG image of the painting shows the original brush strokes on the texture of the water. The levels of the exposed clifface, while not hyperrealistic, create a strange middle-ground in the piece. In the foreground lies a large piece of earth on the beach shore, while whispy clouds on a light-blue sky meet the horizon of the ocean in the background. After gazing at this painting on my monitor for several minutes I suddenly realize I missed an important detail – the sun is setting, outside of frame, leaving the bottom of a spire in shadow while brilliantly lighting the top of the rock. Taking a look back at the clouds, there seems to be a mix of brown and green which subtly accent them and give them shape within the sky. Small dots of bright green dot the cliff to the right of the painting, representing the moss that surely has accumulated on the cliffs in real life. Every object within the painting, from the cliffs to the ocean to the boats, do not have crisp, clean lines defining their size and boundary in space. Instead, each piece has a slightly fuzzy outline, reminiscent of so many Impressionist art. I change the angle at which I look at the picture and now the color of the ocean, which before seemed to be mostly a uniform bluegreen, has yellow and deep blue in one area of the ocean. The tall grass at the top of the cliffs is not yellowgreen, but has patches of red throughout.
This is the way an art critic breaks down art. Technique, intention, pigment, lighting, foregrounds and backgrounds. I am not a painter, but I can still appreciate a painting for what it is and more importantly for the feelings it arouses in me. This painting evokes a feeling of reality more than a photo of the exact same spot at the exact same time of day would. More emotionally powerful art can and should evoke stronger emotions. More than 27 seconds with art could pierce the attention of the viewer and leave them with something more than a postcard to take away from the experience.
