And if You Gaze Into the Garbage Pail, the Garbage Pail Also Gazes Into You (The Library of Disposable Art, #6) by David Macpherson

Author:David Macpherson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: trading cards, collect them all, stickers, The Three Hour Gaze, Art Appreciation, Things made to gross our your parents
Publisher: David Macpherson
Published: 2020-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

We Avert Our Gaze

And that was it. I do not know if I learned anything more about myself from doing this, other than I am someone who does have the ability to stare at Garbage Pail Kids for multiple hours at a sitting. This is not something I would put on a resume.

The original notion of the Three Hour Gaze was to instill patience into a Harvard student taking an art history class. Was my patience rewarded by some unknown truth? I don’t think so. It was interesting getting lost in the cards.

Sometimes they were ugly and then they became familiar and from familiarity the images became pleasant to gaze upon and then all of a sudden the damned things were ugly again.

I love going to art museums. I will go by myself and wander around for an hour. I am pretty fast at a museum or a gallery. I will find one or two pieces that really speak to me, if I am that lucky. There are times where nothing in front of me engages me at all. I look at it for three to five seconds and move on.

But a work will engage me and I will want to linger. To look at it full on. I start the conversation. Why are you so interesting to me? What are you saying about me? What are you saying about others I know, or the ground I walk on? I will move to the side of the painting and then wander to another direction and listen to it from a new slant.

With all that said, I might be with the piece of art for four or five minutes. It’s enough time to start a friendship. Sometimes I might go back to piece later in my trip of the museum. I am there to see if it has changed, or if I have. This might be another three minutes. I have spent eight minutes tops looking at the thing and I consider myself sated.

It gets more troublesome when you are with someone else. When you are with friends or, worse yet, on a date in a museum, Times of interest will always vary. The person you are with wants to linger and you are so done with this Renoir cat and you want to get Magritte or Rothko. But then you get to a good one and you still are ready to boogie to the next painting. This is why early dates are so difficult, because we all have different lengths of art gazing.

I remember when my wife and I were just together and we went to stay with a couple who were friends. They took us to a good little museum. The show was European Movie Posters of American movies. It was a terrific show, but our friends didn’t believe we liked it because we were done looking at the show in twenty minutes while our friends were still going from poster to poster. “How could you like an art show if you are done with it so quickly?”

That’s the question isn’t it.

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