What Do You See in Art? Nearly 50 People Told Us

We wanted to better understand the modern museumgoer. So we went to the Met Breuer exhibition “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible” and talked to visitors.

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MARTIN R. ANDERSON, 65, squints to appreciate the geometry of paintings at the museum. Kate Davis, 24, says the sunlight that bounces off museum walls and onto the art can’t be reproduced. Stan Kaplan, 65, flies across the country just to see a Leonardo da Vinci drawing “more beautiful” than the Mona Lisa. And an elderly woman posts to Facebook a selfie of herself beside a masterwork, presumably commencing an avalanche of social-media approval.

These were observations collected during a summer at New York City’s “newest” museum, the Met Breuer, an outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that opened in March in the former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art. There’s not much theatrical about the scenes — unlike, say, the one that featured two teenagers in San Francisco who placed eyeglasses on the floor of an art museum so they could watch tourists gather around their “installation” with fascination. But taken together, they are a gauge — imperfect and impressionistic — of what draws people to museums and what they see when they get there. They are reflections of the times, too, reminders that art is digested in ways it wasn’t. Art rewards internalization, but distractions surround us. Cultural critique is instant, impulsive, and travels virally.

We tried to find out what goes on in the mind of the modern museumgoer, unscientifically, by staking out the Met Breuer and interviewing nearly 50 art gazers over the course of two months, their pensive moments pierced by our questions as they peered at works. The setting was the Breuer’s big inaugural exhibition “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible,” as provocative a springboard for opinions as any. It focuses on the notion of “unfinished” art and does so broadly, displaying works that were never finished, works that are intentionally incomplete (non finito), and art that prompts conceptual discussion about what is complete, like a Jackson Pollock drip painting. The two-floor exhibition — which ends its six-month run next weekend — spans the 1400s to today and features artists as varied as Titian, Andy Warhol and a teenage Pablo Picasso.

As for those interviewed, they included students who said museums were like “eating your vegetables” and romantics who cherish their lunch breaks, when they can hop in a cab to go steal a few quiet minutes in front of a beloved painting they have already gazed at dozens of times before.

A handful of works in particular generated the most comment (a deathbed portrait of an artist’s mistress, a painting of someone being skinned alive) and common themes emerged over time (the ubiquity of technology, people’s short attention spans).

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