Art Perception in the Museum: How We Spend Time and Space in Art Exhibitions

Abstract

Aesthetics research aiming at understanding art experience is an emerging field; however, most research is conducted in labs without access to real artworks, without the social context of a museum and without the presence of other persons. The present article replicates and complements key findings of art perception in museum contexts. When observing museum visitors (N = 225; 126 female, M(age) = 43.3 years) while perceiving a series of six Gerhard Richter paintings of various sizes (0.26–3.20 sq. m) in a temporary art exhibition in January and February 2015 showing 28 paintings in total, we revealed patterns compatible to previous research. The mean time taken in viewing artworks was much longer than was mostly realized in lab contexts, here 32.9 s (Mdn = 25.4 s). We were also able to replicate visitors spending more time on viewing artworks when attending in groups of people. Additionally, we uncovered a close positive relationship (r2 = .929) between canvas size and viewing distance, ranging on average between 1.49 and 2.12 m (M = 1.72 m). We also found that more than half of the visitors returned to paintings, especially those people who had not previously paid too much attention at the initial viewing. After adding the times of returning viewers, each picture was viewed longer than had been estimated in previous research (M = 50.5 s, Mdn = 43.0 s). Results are discussed in the context of current art perception theories, focusing on the need for the ecologically valid testing of artworks in aesthetics research.

Viewing Art in Different Contexts

“…In summary, while our measures of viewing distance are arguably noisy, our findings suggest the strong mediating role of the painting style, with the pattern of results obtained for the non-Indigenous paintings similar to that reported by Carbon (2017). The significant negative correlation between the amplitude spectrum slope and mean viewing distance across all paintings seem to suggest that the participants tend to move away from the patterns that have greater presence of high spatial frequency information and/or greater degree of spatial variegation.…”

“…Our eye gaze measures in the gallery condition revealed that on average participants made 44.24 fixations per painting with an average total fixation duration of 12.44 s and fixation length of 0.270 ms. Although the total fixation duration observed in our study is shorter than the average viewing times reported in earlier studies (Locher et al, 1999(Locher et al, , 2001Smith and Smith, 2001;Brieber et al, 2014Brieber et al, , 2015Carbon, 2017), our values include fixations only and do not reflect the total duration that the participants might have spent in front of paintings. There was also a significant effect of painting style with higher number of fixations and longer fixation durations for non-Indigenous compared to Indigenous paintings.…”

“…The average mean viewing distance across all paintings was 1.37 m, with the shorter average viewing distance for non-Indigenous (1.24 m) compared to Indigenous paintings (1.4 m). There was also a positive relationship, although only for the non-Indigenous paintings, between the painting area and viewing distance, as observed by Carbon (2017). With Indigenous paintings, there was a negative relationship between viewing distance and Shannon entropy coefficient.…”

“…Moreover, Clarke et al also found that viewing time increased with the projection size but there was no effect of either stimulus size or viewing distance on ratings of how pleasant or interesting the artwork appeared. More recently, in a real art gallery setting, Carbon (2017) confirmed a high positive correlation between the artwork size and viewing distance: the larger the artwork, the greater the viewing distance observed.…”

“…Finally, characteristics of the presentation context include physical and cultural aspects of the museum, display/hanging, frame, lighting, art labels, furniture, movement, viewing distance, viewing time and museum fatigue. While all of these factors might be contributing to differences between art experience in museum and other contexts, to date, the majority of them have remained underexplored (Bitgood et al, 2013;Minissale, 2013;Tröndle et al, 2014;Carbon, 2017).…”