Like our other senses, sight is a great tool to develop, a weapon to sharpen, and the eye a muscle to exercise. So, if you feel lost in front of works in a museum, an exhibition or a fair, here are some tips and exercises to practice to find a simple but essential pleasure: to let yourself be surprised and moved by art.
Summary How to look at an artwork A work is not just an image 1/ Start with the detail: It is all about space 2/ Engage in a physical relationship with the work: sensitivity rather than analysis at all costs 3/get overwhelmed by emotions: a work of art rarely lives alone 4/Above all confront it with others
How to look at a work?
By bringing night into broad daylight on its exhibition spaces, the Center Pompidou-Metz was able, through the strength and poetry of its display, to transform the visitor into an inspired somnambulist, eager to face the unknown, obliged to sharpen your gaze, adjust your pupils with each new encounter. "Painting the night" – such was the title of this course created in 2018 – brought together modern and contemporary artists under the prism of nocturnal inspiration. And in this luminous darkness, each work offered itself to be seen for itself: famous artists revealed another face through a choice of paintings rarely shown (even unpublished) when their neighbors, much less illustrious, often unknown to the public, stood up thanks to a relevant selection sublimated by the scenography.
“In matters of art, erudition is a kind of defeat: it illuminates what is not the most delicate, it deepens what is not essential. »
Paul Valéry
Original, breaking with the endless monographic or historical exhibition, the proposal was good because it freed the constrained viewer that we are, often affected by this syndrome (almost a reflex) which consists in searching, as soon as we set foot in an exhibition, the famous name, the masterpiece, what we already know or what we are supposed to know. At a time when notoriety is synonymous with records on the market, when museums communicate all over the place on the consecrated names in the history of art and the stars of the moment, offering a dizzying array of visitor aids, difficult to avoid self-censorship and to trust one's own judgement.
Absent from our educational system,l earning to look is done by the yardstick of knowledge and to the detriment of our sensitivities and singularities. No time to waste in the world of zapping: on average we devote less than ten seconds to a work compared to 42 twelve years ago; you have to look quickly and efficiently, but what do you really see? Paul Valery already lamented almost a century ago an overly cognitive approach to creation in museums: "In matters of art, erudition is a kind of defeat: it illuminates what is not the most delicate, it deepens what is not essential. She substitutes her hypotheses for sensation, her prodigious memory for the presence of wonder; and it annexes to the immense museum an unlimited library. Venus changed into a document. It's time to find Venus, to let go of your tinsel, to believe in yourself.
Seen in Beaux arts, Daphne Betard