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The fatigue is not just physical but cognitive. To compare looking at art with shopping, one does not generally pause to look at each piece of clothing in a store, read the label to learn where it came from and how it was made, wonder what it is trying to “say,” what was going on in the mind of the designer, wonder why you do not seem to be seeing the same detail in the item that your neighbor appears to be fixating on, and so forth. You basically assess whether it will look good on you and move on.
The density of sheer sensory input people absorb in art museums helps explain why they tend to overestimate the amount of time they have actually been in them.

Moreover, the conditions of the contemporary museum can make
sustained viewing well-nigh impossible. Looking at art in crowds, after all, is a rather strange concept: Would you want to read a book with six people looking over your shoulder? Would you want to watch a movie while someone behind you keeps saying things like “That looks like Uncle Joe's dog”? It is also uncertain that the “
walking past works of art” model is the best way to consume art: Do we not generally take things in better, as the museum critic Kenneth Hudson once asked, sitting down? Perhaps as some holdover of the austere aesthetic theories of the nineteenth century, looking at art has been equated with an almost penitential exercise, a severe act of self-contemplating in forbidding concrete rooms. More than one museum consultant has said the best way to increase patrons' appreciation for art is simple:
more coffee and chairs.

Researchers, very early, identified a distinct pattern: The more paintings a museum housed, the less time patrons spent looking at any one of them. The larger museums reduced the chance a painting would be seen at all. “
According to averages,” a 1928 study by the Yale University psychology professor Edward S. Robinson found, “a given picture has about a one in twenty chance of being observed by a given visitor to the largest collection, whereas such a picture in the most effective of the small collections has about 1 in 3 chance of being observed.” Perhaps Tuymans would be relieved: Even
inside
museums, paintings go unseen.

And so a visitor to the Met or any other big museum is rather like a deep-sea explorer:
trying to see as much as he can before the oxygen runs out. At the Met, at least for the onetime visitor, assuredly nobody is singling out, per Wollheim, one work for two hours of viewing. The impulse is to see as much great art as possible, thus the nagging sensation of looking at a painting in one gallery and having your eyes already drawn toward the crowd that has gathered in front of Vermeer's
Study of a Young Woman
.
Research suggests that even as we are looking at one work, we are already becoming “involved” with the next piece.
People may look more in large museums, but arguably they see more in small museums.

According to the museum researcher Stephen Bitgood, everything we do in a museum is driven by a utility-maximizing impulse: getting the biggest bang for our buck. The moment we enter a gallery, we generally
turn right, because we have been walking on the right side and it takes fewer steps to get to the nearest art.
*
³
Similarly, visitors tend not to walk back in exhibits to revisit previous rooms (some studies have shown that when people accidentally began an exhibition by taking the wrong direction, they actually looked less at exhibits, panicked with finding the right path).

Where paintings are hung can matter more than their inherent quality in attracting visitor attention.
In an experiment in a Swiss museum, when a painting was moved from its position in the middle of one room to the corner, the number of times it was “visited” during the experiment plummeted from 207 to
17
. People do not like to read long wall text; when a 150-word text was divided into three “chunks” of 50 words, it got twice the readership (and the closer the wall text to the object, the better).

Curiously, other studies have shown that average viewing times are similar whether or not viewers actually read labels, as if they had some internal budget allotted to each work.
Even when people visit in groups, they tend to look at paintings alone, as if maximizing attention;
the more people do talk to someone else in a museum visit, the less time they spend looking at art and the less they are moved by it. Video presentations in museums are sparsely visited, suggests Bitgood, because it is harder to tell in advance how much one is going to get out of them—particularly when there are “lower cost” alternatives visible nearby. “
Don't make large down payments,” one museum researcher counsels.

When one is faced with the storehouse of visual treasures that is the Met, or any other big museum, seventeen seconds might begin to seem like a rational average viewing time. And when I began to research what actually happens when we stop to look, it seemed as if we could probably spend a lot
less
time.

One day, at the Met, I met with Paul Locher, a psychology professor
at Montclair State University who has shown subjects, via a device called a tachistoscope, images of paintings in bursts as short as fifty milliseconds. “Masking” occurs afterward to ensure the afterimage does not linger longer on the eye. At these speeds, notes Locher, paintings are “happening” on the retina in a precognitive way. Even before we know it, this “gist” response has told us a lot about a painting (despite the fact we have actually seen, in raw percentage terms, very little of its real estate).

In as little as fifty or a hundred milliseconds of looking at, say, Vermeer's
Study of a Young Woman
, we could tell what colors we are viewing, whether we are seeing a woman or a man, and the overall form (for example, if it's symmetrical). Because it is a person, our eyes are going to be drawn, virtually instinctively, just as in life, to the
young woman's face (in landscape paintings, our eyes
rove more freely).
Judged by eye tracking, most of our looking takes place right in the center. “We never look at outer areas,” Locher told me. “Artists seem to have known that foveal vision is very limited and to put the important stuff in the middle of the composition.”
As for the frame, while it may, as the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset once noted, “convert whatever happens to be visible within it into a picture,” we do not seem to notice it much.

As the viewer keeps looking at the image, a “dual process” kicks in, a kind of conversation between our bottom-up sensory organs and our top-down cognitive machinery, moving from sheer object recognition to things like artistic style or semantic meanings. We can imagine the dialogue:
Bottom: Look! Here's eyes, nose, a mouth. Top: Hmmm…looks like a woman. But it's not real; it's a portrait of a young woman. Bottom: Hey, these colors are quite beautiful too! Top: That could be Dutch
. (Runs over to the memory room.)
Could be that guy Vermeer. Why don't you check out the quality of light? Bottom: I'll be right back!

Of course, the more developed the “top,” the better the “bottom,” and the richer the conversation between the two. Art experts are said to have a “good eye.” What they really have is a good brain. It is less that they spot things that others do not; it is that they know where to look; indeed,
studies routinely demonstrate how the visual scan paths of experts differ from those of novices.

One of the most important things we glean in that first fifty-millisecond burst is whether or not we like it.
“The appreciation of the
aesthetic worth of a picture,” argued the psychologist Hans Eysenck, “may be as instantaneous as the perception of the picture itself.”
In one of Locher's studies, when subjects were asked, after the second hundred-millisecond exposure to a painting, how “pleasing” they thought it was, the results roughly correlated with how pleasing they thought it was after almost thirty seconds of “exploration” (though the longer they had to look, the more they liked). “When you watch people in a gallery,” Locher told me, “they know very quickly what they don't want to spend time with.”

At these speeds, people are not necessarily asking themselves
why
they might like or dislike something. They are still in what the noted arts educator Abigail Housen calls “stage one” of aesthetic processing: simply gleaning the basic details and making a liking judgment (based largely on what they already know). Getting to stage two, starting to think about
ways
to look at it, she says, requires a question like “
What do you see that makes you say that?” That requires looking again.

But most of us, she says, do not get past this second stage, to the third and fourth looks. This is the point at which a painting becomes an “
old friend,” when we begin to realize what was first pleasing may not be what is ultimately compelling. Perhaps not surprisingly, the painter Brueghel fared the worst in Locher's study; on the surface, his work might not seem, to echo Kant, “agreeable.” The figures are often grotesque, the colors earthy and ocher tinged.
As many art historians have noted, it can be difficult to even figure out the focal center of his works.

But the point is that we often know we like (or dislike) something before we know what
it
is. The psychologist Robert Zajonc argued that the way we feel about something, rather than coming on the heels of cognition—that is, “before I can like something, I must have some knowledge about it”—actually accompanies and may even
precede
it. “
For most decisions,” writes Zajonc, “it is extremely difficult to demonstrate that there has actually been
any
prior cognitive process whatsoever.” How could there have been, for example, in the hundred-millisecond judgments of paintings? Affect is, suggested Zajonc, like a powerful, primal, independent early warning system. “The rabbit,” he wrote, “cannot stop to contemplate the length of the snake's fangs or the geometry of its markings.” It has to know how it feels about the snake even before it is fully aware it is a snake. And so we write off things before they ever get a second look.

Because this response feels so valid, Zajonc argued, it can be hard to overturn. Certainly, there is something valid in relying on gut feelings to help us sort out how we feel toward a work of art. Art critics do it all the time. Gut feelings help us filter the world, and what is taste, really, but a kind of cognitive mechanism for managing sensory overload? But there is reason to be cautious. We may not always be reading those gut feelings correctly.

We can be strangers to our taste. Have you ever brought something home from a trip—a bottle of Italian wine, a piece of Balinese art—that seemed fantastic when you first encountered it in Italy or Bali but no longer seems to excite you? Perhaps what you
really
liked was being in Italy or Bali. “Because affective judgments are inescapable,” Zajonc observed, “they cannot be focused as easily as perceptual and cognitive processes.” They are more open to influence, less easily controlled. Our own liking for something is affected not only by whether someone else is looking at something but by
how
they are looking at it.
You are more likely to like the Vermeer if you see someone smiling at it rather than frowning.
Even that creepy look from the overzealous guard might throw you off.

Changing your mind—or, more accurately, your feelings—takes effort. “
Affect often persists after a complete invalidation of its original cognitive basis,” wrote Zajonc. Another problem is that the brain, as a pattern-matching engine, is less likely to respond positively to things it has not encountered before.
As the critic Clement Greenberg quipped, “All original art looks ugly at first.” We may not even see what we do not like. “
I think you need to give yourself a chance with art,” the art historian Linda Nochlin has argued. “I don't think love at first sight is always what you're going to love at second, third, fourth and fifth.”
Our ability to so quickly get the “gist” of a painting affords the illusion that we have seen it all. The art critic Kenneth Clark, meanwhile, declared that he could spot a great picture in a shopwindow from a bus moving at thirty miles an hour—only to jump off the bus, go back, and “
find my first impression betrayed by a lack of skill or curiosity in the execution.”

But how does the way most people look at art in a museum influence what they like?
One museum study found that its visitors reported wandering until something caught their eye. It sounds like a good strategy:
Why waste time with things you do not like? But what catches your eye may have little to do with what you might really want to see; that first involuntary glance might have been triggered by a painting that is large, particularly garish, or in the center of the wall, where curators like to put “important” paintings and where we tend to look. What catches your eye may also be what you already had in mind to see.

These top-down influences are rather like the labels on paintings (
which, as research has shown, influence where nonexpert viewers look in a painting). In the brilliant film
Museum Hours
, set at Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, a tour guide leads a group through the astonishing gallery of works by Brueghel. Stopping by
The Conversion of St. Paul
, the guide notes how hard it is to locate the focus of the work (as already mentioned with the Icarus painting, this is a not-uncommon effect in Brueghel). Is it the figure of Saul? Yes, insists one viewer; consider the title of the painting. But then why is he barely visible, on the ground, fallen off his horse? Why is a “horse's ass” rendered so much more prominently? The guide suggests, not without controversy, that the painting's focus is a small boy, “a soldier too young for any war,” his helmet dropping over his head, lurking beneath a “fine tree.” It is just my interpretation, the guide cautions. But now that this intriguing, formerly invisible boy has been pointed out to me, he is one of the first things I look for when I see the painting. Would he otherwise have caught my eye?