Imagine that you walk through a museum corridor and are suddenly struck by an artwork. After your visit, you can barely remember any other exhibit. How does it come that some artworks are attracting our gaze much more than others? And to what extent can we predict this encounter between artwork and museum visitor?
DOI: 10.17613/1aa2-7632
These two artworks were both part of the same exhibition in Vienna, but played very different roles in the eyes of the visitors. While one of them was viewed and remembered by many people, the other one was heavily overlooked. Why?
This blog entry seeks answers based on two premises: Firstly, works of art are agents that can actively attract the viewer’s attention. Secondly, the attraction potential of single artworks is measurable and can thus be expressed in numbers.
The following observations are based on the study “Belvedere Before and After” [1] that took place in two subsequent years at the Austrian Gallery Belvedere. It was a joint project of the Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History, the EVA Lab at the University of Vienna and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tübingen.
The museum’s major rearrangement between 2018 and 2019 offered the unique opportunity to study the visiting behaviour of the same artworks in two different exhibition constellations. A multidisciplinary team of art historians, museologists, psychologists and computer scientists, led by Raphael Rosenberg, Luise Reitstätter and Hanna Brinkmann joined forces in order to analyze the effects of the new exhibition format.
The fieldwork took place in the last week of January 2018 and January 2019, following an identical procedure: First, regular visitors were invited to take part in the study. After being informed and having agreed, they signed a consent form with respect to their voluntary and anonymous participation. Then they were equipped with eye-tracking equipment. At that time, it was the first large-scale mobile eye-tracking study conducted in a museum.
The equipment consisted of a Pupil Labs Headset and a Microsoft Surface Pro Tablet in a light backpack (< 1 kilogram). The software used for recording was EyeRecToo and the calibration process worked as in CalibMe. After the calibration, participants independently visited an acclimatization room and three consecutive exhibition rooms following their personal art perception preferences.
Post-visit, participants took part in a subjective mapping process, providing personal insights through drawing on an illustrated floor plan and talking about the areas they remembered the strongest. A detailed questionnaire complemented information on the visitors’ backgrounds and the usability of the eye-tracking glasses. This mixed-method-approach of collecting quantitative and qualitative data proved to be very helpful for interpreting the actual results.
The sample consisted of 109 participants in the “Before” and 150 participants in the “After” constellation. Regarding demographics, visitors were quite similar in both settings, mainly consisting of tourists visiting the museum not alone but in company. Out of these participants, a sample of 50 was analyzed further due to the time-consuming process of manual annotation.
How can the fact of an exhibit being an eye-catcher be measured? Regarding the term of the eye-catcher, it might designate anything that arrests the eye, and of course there are many more agents that do so apart from the artworks. This pie chart distinguishes between artworks, textual elements, media (audio guides or smartphones), people around the visitor and a quite diverse category entitled “other” meaning anything that was not coded in the analysis, from looks at the floor to views out of the window.
One way of identifying the eye-catching exhibits is to measure the average time of the sample group spent with each specific artwork. In fact, views are usually not that long for each exhibit, as has been found out by many museologists. In a food analogy suggested by Smith & Smith, looks are divided into three groups according to their length: “sample” (0–15 seconds), “consume” (16–40 seconds) and “savour” (40+ seconds). The majority of looks at artworks usually belongs to the first category. [2]
Even though the time spans of looking at the artworks and reading the labels is different in the two study situations, one outcome is still quite striking: The order of the artworks in regard to their average viewing time more or less stays the same. How can it be that artworks that are exhibited in different ways in the museum space are looked at for a similar amount of time by different people? This leads us to the assumption that there could actually be inherent properties of the artwork that shape how people perceive them.
A second way of identifying the eye-catching exhibits is the number of mentions of each artwork by the visitors, either as a specific highlight or during the subjective mapping as an artwork they specifically remember. Again, there are some differences before and after the museum’s rearrangement, but the division between more and less favoured artworks stays upright.
As a last step, a possible correlation was checked between the number of mentions of the artworks and their viewing times. Both in “Belvedere Before” and “Belvedere After” there is a positive trend, meaning that longer viewing times correlate with more mentions of an exhibit. It is not surprising that a more extended encounter ultimately leads to a stronger memory of the artwork.
In the first papers published on this study, the focus was on the museological question of curatorial practices and visitor profiles that strongly influence our art perception. Still, an art historical discussion of these results is yet to be made. Together with Raphael Rosenberg, we started an attempt to find art historical patterns and grouped the individual artworks according to inherent properties that might qualify them as eye-catchers.
There are only a few artworks with a high standard deviation,, meaning that viewers behave very differently from each other. This is for example the case for the painting “Largo” by Ludwig von Hofmann, which at first glance seems to be a rather dull seascape. Some viewers however start to look beyond the painting and discover the frame full of exciting imagery. This is one of the exceptions where the attitude of the visitors is more crucial than the property of the artwork itself.
We identified at least six factors for eye-catching potential of artworks, the first one being fame. This applies to the highlight of the museum’s collection, “The Kiss” by Gustav Klimt.
The second factor is size. Bigger artworks in the context of a lot of smaller artworks are being looked at significantly longer, as it is the case for a seven-meter-long artwork by Max Klinger.
The third factor is the medium, with statues being rather neglected in contrast to paintings. Only sculptures that stick out by their material quality and their colourfulness are looked at a bit longer.
As a fourth factor, the genre of the artwork seems to play a role. After the statues, the landscape paintings are looked at the least in both scenarios. Portraits are then viewed a bit longer, closely followed by historical paintings.
A fifth factor is style. There are indeed some landscape paintings with a much higher viewing time compared to others, but they are stylistically very different. Within these, there are paintings by Klimt and Van Gogh, but also by the rather unknown Austrian artist Jaschke that people even spent more time with than with Van Gogh.
In his painting “On the Danube Embankment”, Jaschke uses a pointillist technique and can be understood in the widest sense together with Klimt and Van Gogh as a post-impressionist. This means that colours are getting more vivid, and that the actual style of painting is as important as what is actually depicted. This also explains why more recent portraits and historical paintings by Klimt are looked at the longest, as the ornamental value is becoming more and more important.
The sixth and last factor is ambiguity, going hand in hand with symbolist images. This is the case for Segantini’s „Evil Mothers“ which is rather unknown but still achieved to be the longest looked at painting after “The Kiss”.
This leads us back to the question at the beginning: Why is this painting looked at significantly longer than the one on the left-hand side by Carl Moll?
There are many factors determining the potential of an artwork to become an eye-catcher, which are inherent to it, such as size, genre and style. Of course, one shall not ignore the huge impact of the visitor’s background and the curatorial setting, which has been already pointed out in previous papers on this study. However, the identification of these factors allows us to some extent to predict if an exhibit will be looked at less or more in comparison to the others.
If for example you look at Segantini’s painting from far away, it seems just like any winter landscape. If you go a bit closer though, probably attracted by the brightness and the size of the artwork, you will discover a woman breastfeeding a child up in the front tree.
You will then probably be irritated by the title “Evil Mothers” that you read on the label next to the exhibit and look at it again and search for some more hints. This is when you might discover that the mother in front is not alone but that there are other creatures hidden in the trees in the background.
Intriguingly enough, most of the viewers did not mention this image with strong words such as beautiful or horrifying, but could not really find words for it apart from describing it as different, special, and somehow interesting. This notion of “interesting” implies a minor or non-cathartic feeling, as currently explored by Sianne Ngai. [3]
A non-cathartic feeling means that there is a situation of suspended agency, which is grounded in ambivalent or even explicitly contradictory feelings. It is an aesthetic category and an objective property of an artwork at the same time, which cannot be resolved like strong categories as for example anger or the sublime which ultimately lead to aggression or to respect. This contemporary category of the interesting is a starting point of my PhD project and object of further studies.
The study “Belvedere Before and After” was a first attempt by the CReA Lab to combine quantitative and qualitative data to draw a more holistic picture of how we experience art. To pick up the two premises from the beginning: Firstly: Yes, artworks are agents that have the ability to actively attract the attention of the viewer. And secondly: Yes, the attraction potential of single artworks is to some extent measurable and can be expressed in numbers such as the average viewing length captured by eye tracking or the number of mentions in subsequent interviews.
The next challenge will be to make use of the newest eye tracking technology in the museum setting, in order to gather even more accurate data such as areas of interest inside of the artworks. This is the case in a museum study that we conducted in June 2022 at the Leopold Museum together with my colleagues Anna Miscenà and Zoya Dare, using Tobii Pro Glasses and collecting data of 234 participants. [4] The analysis of this study might be able to find fresh and more detailed answers to the inherent properties of eye-catching artworks in the museum.
[1] Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History. “Belvedere Before and After.” CReA Projects, 2019. https://crea.univie.ac.at/projects/belvedere-before-and-after/ (last accessed: 17 September 2024).
[2] Smith, Jeffrey K., and Lisa F. Smith. “Spending Time on Art.” Empirical Studies of the Arts 19, no. 2 (July 2001): 229–36. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2190/5mqm-59jh-x21r-jn5j.
[3] Ngai, Sianne. Our aesthetic categories: Zany, cute, interesting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
[4] Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History. “MuVE Project.” CReA Projects, 2024. https://crea.univie.ac.at/projects/muve-project/ (last accessed: 17 September 2024).
Author
Carola Korhummel is a museologist. Her research and teaching focuses on the intersections of everyday culture, consumer aesthetics and digital art practices. Since 2021, she works as a researcher at the Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History at the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna.
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