Picture of a Zen garden by Alejandro Forero Cuervo (via Flickr) in Delray Beach, Florida
My godmother gave me a book for my twelfth birthday. I don’t remember the author; the only thing I remember is its title “L’Art de voir” (The art of seeing, the book was in French), and the cover, which had a delicate line drawing by Raphael. My French was not fluent then, my knowledge of art pretty non-existent, but the book left a lasting impression.
As these works go, it was a pretty conventional survey of western art. But its main premise was that there’s an art to seeing. You need to know how to look, and what to look out for. This required background knowledge about the artists and their period. Perhaps, more importantly, you also must be able to feel moved by art. You have to allow it to let it change not only your feelings, but the very way you perceive the world.
Think of Oscar Wilde’s observations about fog and impressionism. In his 1891 essay The Decay of Lying he argued that people at some point began to really see “fogs and lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and that turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge”. This was due to art movements at the time, such as impressionism, which aimed to capture the evanescence of fogs,
At present people see fogs, not because they are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we know nothing about them. They did not exist until Art had invented them.
Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying
Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway by JMW Turner, 1844
Art also allows you to see moral dimensions you might not have been aware of, such as optimism, hope or resolve. A dramatic instance was recounted by Bill Murray, who said in an interview how Jules-Adolphe Breton’s The Song of the Lark helped him to gain a new outlook on life as he was contemplating suicide. If the peasant girl on the painting, (who had so few prospects) can live another day, then so could he.
When I visited the MoMa for the first time in my life in May 2021, I spoke to a woman as I stood in the room with the cutouts that together form Henri Matisse’s Piscine (Swimming Pool). She said she had lived in NYC her entire life, and had known this particular room since she was a girl. Sometimes, she would visit the MoMA for the sole purpose of seeing the Matisse (apparently it was out for conservation/repair during some point). Now, she would simply sit inside the room to experience it. “If you listen carefully, you can hear the splashing sounds the swimmers make.”
So, I sat down next to her on the bench and listened, failing to grasp its significance, failing to feel the atmosphere of the swimming pool, but I could definitely see that she could do it and felt somewhat envious she was still able to feel so moved by art.
The idea of art as transformative is prominent in Japanese zen (karesansui) gardens. As Julianne Chung writes, these gardens are meant to evoke the sense of water without water, through carefully raked patterns of gravel that is harmoniously balanced with other landscaping elements, such as rocks and plants. Chung interprets zen gardens as a form of non-verbal moral testimony. Gardens are an expression of the moral self-transformation of their creators, and can be used by spectators to effect their own moral self-transformation, too.
As I reflected on the woman at the MoMA, zen gardens, and Bill Murray’s transformative experience, I realized how long ago it was that visual art moved me this way. What happened?
I can still find paintings, sculptures and other visual artworks beautiful, but they do not shatter me as they did before. They do not move me the way music still does, or philosophy. They never strike me as sublime anymore. Maybe I should look longer? A recent study that measured the gaze of visitors who looked at great artworks (which did not include glances but actual minimum looking times) found that visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chicago Art Institute spend a mere 30 seconds looking at great artworks. This includes reading labels and making selfies. The time is the mean, the mode is even lower (at 10 seconds). There is a large standard deviation. But still, this amount of time looking at artworks is rather low. Is 30 seconds of your time enough to feel transformed?
Before I came to philosophy, I wanted to be an artist, or perhaps a conservator in a museum. L’art de voir sparked an enduring interest in art. I saved up money so I could go and see Rome when I was eighteen, and I majored in art sciences with a specialization in non-western art. I was surrounded by art, quite literally because I took a part-time job as a guard at the Museum of Fine arts in Ghent. Over several summers and weekends, I stood watching the visitors.
It was a job that involved a lot of standing. It was quite boring, and the pay was minimum wage. However, with all that time (and given that chatting with other museum guards or reading was strictly forbidden, even if there were no visitors), I had ample time to observe the artworks in the rooms assigned to me. Over weeks, they became almost like friends or acquaintances. They had their own mood and personality, but they could also subtly change with the way the light slanted through the skylights, or change their aspect if it was crowded or only a few people strolled in the room.
One such paintings was Leon de Smet’s Interior (1911). He was a local artist from Ghent, I think not well known outside of his home town. This particular work is heavily influenced by impressionism. It features a cool, abstract, rather grand interior as you would have in the fancy houses of the haute bourgeoisie in early 20th century Ghent. The flowers are neatly arranged, the table is spread, the paintings and sculpture reveal the taste and social aspirations of the owner.
On the couch to the right, almost blending in their surroundings, sits a pair of lovers who kiss passionately. They are reduced to being almost abstract features of the environment, yet they are also very human and alive, a contrast I found hard to explain or put into words, but still moving nonetheless.
Regardless, as I was looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night that day in the MoMA I was again reminded that I had lost the sense to feel genuinely moved by art, somewhere along the way. Maybe because I did not continue to work in art as I had anticipated, or maybe it would’ve happened anyway, in which case it is lucky that I decided to continue into philosophy?
Wondering freely 