Art-Gallery Mode
There’s always something significant, poignant, or poetic everywhere you look if your mind is in that certain mode – so rare for adults — of just looking at what’s there, without reflexively evaluating or explaining the scene.
I sometimes call this state “art gallery mode,” because of a trick I learned from an art history major. We were at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, browsing famous abstract paintings by Pollock, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and other artists whose swirls, rectangles, and blobs are regarded as masterpieces.
I said something like “I like some of these but I’ve stopped pretending to know what they mean.”
He told me not to bother figuring out what they mean. “All you’re supposed to do is look at it and notice the feeling it gives you. That’s it.”
This improved my experience immediately in at least two ways. It relieved a kind of inner pressure, which I hadn’t noticed I was feeling, to understand what I’m looking at. I didn’t have to think about what the artist was trying to say, or even think about artists or art at all. I didn’t have to “get it,” or try to look like I get it. All I needed to do was look at what was there and let it affect me in exactly the way it happened to. This is something any human mind can do –- it doesn’t need to be endowed with any special knowledge or insight.
