I always bring earplugs when I go to an art museum. My friend puts on an eye mask before listening to an anticipated album for the first time. My partner goes out of his way to avoid seeing trailers for movies he might watch. All of us are making efforts to have a pristine aesthetic experience. There’s some specific value each of us wants out of our encounter with the art, and we take steps to control our environment to get whatever that is, doing our best to sweep away distractions. But, as so often happens in any domain, our desire for control is frustrated.
This summer, I visited the Munch Museum in Oslo, the largest museum dedicated to a single artist in Europe. The building was designed by Spanish architect Juan Herreros, and it sits on the fjord of Oslo. It’s spectacular. And, when I visited, it was predictably crowded. Children ran through the hallways and pressed their faces against the wall of windows facing the fjord, leaving grease marks at knee height. People who had left the mock shutter-closure sound on their phones took pictures, producing a symphony of clicks. I gritted my teeth.
When I go to an art museum, I’m seeking out a very particular experience. I want to be able to appreciate the technical aspects of the art and to be able to imagine what it would feel like to make each brush stroke on the canvas, to push a chisel through the woodblock, to drag a piece of charcoal across the toothy paper. And it’s hard to experience art that way with children running around. Other people want different things out of their aesthetic experiences. Some people want the full force of an affective or emotional response to art. Others wish for an educational experience—to learn something about history, or other people’s tastes, or the state of the world. The recent book Your Brain on Art describes the wealth of benefits that come with aesthetic experience, from lowering the stress hormone cortisol to improving memory and even extending lifespan. Philosophers have paid particular attention to the personally transformative power of art; Iris Murdoch praises the “unselfing” potential of art, and John Dewey discusses immersive “self-forgetfulness.” Whatever we want from our aesthetic experience, it’s often disappointing when we don’t get it.
There’s another way of experiencing art that gets relatively little attention in philosophy. We can think of art as part of a communal project, and of aesthetic experiences as something we do together. When we think of art this way, the other people in our environment cease to be distractions from the aesthetic experience and become integral parts of it. We let our attention expand such that it’s directed not only towards the piece of art itself, but also to the people around it. And this changes our aesthetic experience. We don’t just react to the art; we also react to other people, and to their reactions to the art and each other. We get a different kind of value when we see art through others’ eyes. Maybe we overhear a parent inventing a story for their child about the figures in the painting. Or we notice someone linger over a painting we had walked by, and we go back to try to figure out what had grabbed them. Such aesthetic experiences are also valuable. Had I approached my time in the Munch Museum this way, I would have thought my aesthetic experience incomplete without the others in the gallery. Regardless of what we’re expecting from our aesthetic experience, art undeniably has something to offer us. We leave value on the table when we fail to get anything from art. Sometimes, the experience we’re looking for isn’t available to us, but to walk away empty-handed is always a mistake.
The question is whether we can choose between different ways of appreciating art. I think we can. In “The Seducer’s Diary,” a section in Either-Or, Kierkegaard describes the reflective aesthete, who is forced to listen to the incessant chatter of a man prattling on. As boredom drives the aesthete to despair, he notices a drop of perspiration on the tip of the speaker’s nose. Suddenly, the aesthete directs all attention to the quivering drop of sweat, and the experience changes. Instead of suffocating boredom, the aesthete feels excitement. Will the drop fall before the man wipes it away? Kierkegaard’s portrait of the aesthete is anything but flattering, but I think there’s something to be learned from it. The aesthete hoped to have an interesting conversation; when that was unavailable, he found value in the drama of watching in a suspending droplet of sweat. We can choose how to direct our attention and find value we had previously overlooked.
That’s not to say it’s easy. The day after I visited the Munch Museum, I went to the National Museum in Oslo, where a class of elementary school students wandered through the design galleries. I tried to be open to a different way of valuing the art, as enriched, rather than compromised, by the class’s presence. I like kids, and I usually like watching them do normal kid things. But I found it almost impossible to simultaneously enjoy the technical aspects of the painting in the way I had wanted and to attend to the children as part of a communal aesthetic experience. I simply didn’t have the cognitive space to be able to appreciate the tactile, technical aspects of the art and to enjoy the children’s energetic play in front of the art at the same time. I found myself flipping back and forth between two ways of being open to value, frustrated that I couldn’t fully appreciate the art’s technical value or its communal significance. And, for all I know, the children were equally frustrated by my standing for minutes in front of a piece of art where they wanted to play.
But hope isn’t lost. The next time I’m in a museum and run into someone listening to an audio tour without headphones or a kid talking a little too loudly, I might do a little better at expanding the kinds of aesthetic experiences I’m open to and the type of value I’m looking for. I think this is a learnable skill. Like Kierkegaard’s aesthete, we can become better at choosing the aesthetic experience we want to have and directing our attention accordingly. Not only that, but it’s a skill worth cultivating. For one, it insulates us from the irritation that accompanies distraction. Avoiding irritability is good for us, and it’s undoubtedly good for our friends, families, and partners who come along for the ride. But also, if we develop the ability to choose what kind of aesthetic experience to aim for, we open ourselves up to new ways of appreciating and valuing art. It might be impossible for me to fully appreciate the technical value of art while children run around, but I can choose to be open to the value of watching kids interact with art. When we’re flexible about what kind of value we’re looking for, we’re less likely to walk away from art empty-handed. That’s something worth striving for.
Thanks, Aaron Glasser and Gabe Tugendstein, for their helpful conversations on these topics.
Margot Witte
Margot Witte is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where they work on topics in ethics and epistemology. Their current projects concern interpersonal ethics, intimacy, and epistemic justice.
