Looking at Art

The New York Times published an article the other day about how people look at art. Which might more appropriately say, how they don’t look at art. Over the years, and particularly at quilt shows, I’ve noticed that people (as The Times reports) kind of move quickly by, unsure about what, exactly, they are seeing or how to respond to it. If they are looking at traditional bed quilts, they get a quick ‘like/don’t like’ message from and to themselves, and then move right on, knowing that, somehow or another, that quilt has a destiny on a mattress. End of story.

If they’re looking at what is less craft (useful) and more art (not so clearly useful, or not useful at all), they usually don’t even get the quick message. It’s more as if their eyes, as their feet quickly move by, are looking to see if they ‘recognize’ the piece; looking to see if it is similar to something else they know, as if their job was to categorize it, the way you might categorize people at a party mostly attended by people you’ve never laid eyes on (A friend? An acquaintance? A stranger? The host/hostess?). And most of those art pieces are strangers, and people have no more reason to look at them closely, to engage with them, than they have to start up a conversation with the people whom they happen to see when they are riding on a bus.

So I went to spend my day at the Point Roberts Art Walk Quilt Show on Monday with some trepidation. We had put up a lot of quilts, a number of them mine, and I was going to be sitting in the same room with them, watching people walk past them at that steady pace reserved for the foreign object. It didn’t help that I read The Times article the night before the Art Walk.

But, as occasionally happens, reality proves journalism wrong. A lot of people came to see the quilts and a lot of them stopped, stood, and talked to one another about what they were seeing. One quilt (mine) with a lot of humorous text and cartoon-like pictures almost always had somebody in front of it, somebody laughing, which would only be possible if they stopped long enough to read and relate the images to the words. Others, looking at other pieces, were clearly captured by color, form, image: something that made them pause a minute, or even five minutes to see, actually see what was in front of them without worrying about whether they liked it or didn’t like it, recognized it or not, could categorize it or not. And with surprising frequency, they sought out the maker, inquiring about why the piece was as it was.

It is hard to look at something if you don’t know why you are doing it. It perhaps says a lot about the kind of people who live here in this remarkable peninsular exclave, that so many of them were not just moving through fast but were instead looking, seeing, responding, and asking for more. Speaking on behalf of all the quilt group members, it certainly made our day. The Times article was about people visiting the Louvre; maybe we should invite The Times' writer up here next year.