Get the Picture

The evening threw into stark relief what I’d lost these last few months: the sense that anything was possible. The rules, as I knew them, did not have to apply. Art had taught me to embrace an improvlike Yes, and . . . approach to life. So many paths and possibilities seemed open. There was beauty everywhere, now that I knew how to look for it.

Only I wish I’d learned sooner to stay in the work. To slow down. To demote context and ignore the press release. To let myself focus on the physical creation of the piece and the physical feeling of standing in front of it.

Beauty was not expensive or a luxury or hard to come by. It was attention that was in short supply.

What’s beautiful depends on who we are, what we’ve encountered, where we live, and when. Likewise, the art that opens us to the chaotic stream of reality—the art we find beautiful—changes with time and with us, as we evolve. Beauty, I’d come to think, doesn’t have to have a physical form, and it certainly doesn’t have to be something we agree on. Beauty is that moment your mind jumps the curb. Beauty is the instant you sit up and start paying attention. Whatever makes that happen for you can be beautiful. Math equations. Gymnastics. Planes landing. But you have to be open to seeing it. Beauty doesn’t find you. You create beauty by looking for it, and the moment you do find it, stop and pay attention. Beauty is infinite, if you decide it can be, but you may never see it the same way twice.

The jostle we get from art can be found nearly anywhere. There is an artist in each of us to the extent that we struggle to keep our brains from compressing our experience. Art is a choice. It is a fight against complacency. It is a decision to forge a life that’s richer, more uncomfortable, more mind-blowing, more uncertain. And ultimately, more beautiful.

An Italian psychiatrist who treated more than a hundred tourists stricken with dizziness, fainting, nausea, exhaustion, euphoria, panic, paranoia, depression, and hallucination after visits to art museums and churches in Florence coined the term “Stendhal syndrome” to describe the experience of people who go to pieces while looking at pieces of art. Skeptics attribute Stendhal syndrome to jet lag, dehydration, or underlying psychiatric issues. But the fact remains that merely being in the presence of art can cause us to do strange things.

Notice. Notice the most obvious things, the most surprising things, the things that grab your eyeballs despite you. Fight the urge to see what you expect to be there; focus instead on what is there

If I’ve learned one thing in the vacuum, it’s that sometimes being forced to look at an artwork, even when you don’t want to, is life-changing.

our tendency to like things for the arbitrary reason that we’ve interacted with them more. In other words, we may celebrate pieces—and raise them into the annals of art history—not necessarily because of their appearance but because we’ve seen these works over and over and thus are now convinced they’re good.

Research shows that we like a painting less when it’s hung below eye level, prefer the bigger version of two identical paintings, and have a weird fetish for originals, to the degree that one study, which asked subjects to imagine that the Mona Lisa was destroyed in a fire, found 80 percent of them would rather see the painting’s ashes than a perfect replica.