The Duration of Art

 

John Cage -- As Slow As Possible

 On Dynaxiom 2777: "Visual art is like music with different durations depending on how long you look at it." 

Most art is looked at for under 30 seconds but can be as long as a lifetime if you look at it daily." For example, if you're at a museum and standing in front of a painting, you look at it for a couple of seconds, look at the caption card, look back at the painting--all in about 15-20 seconds. It's interesting to correlate that with music: when you stood in front of a painting sound would play using hypersonic speakers placed directly above the painting. Hypersonic speakers are very directional such that when you stand under them you hear sound and then when you step out of the zone you no longer hear sound.

When we look at a painting we're "looking" at music. It's a synesthetic experience even if you're not a synesthete. If you correlate those two things, both paintings and visual art can have a duration. But art only has a duration for as long as you're looking at it. Music has fixed durations when you’re listening to it--three minutes or five minutes– but it also has a lingering duration in your head because you can hear music not in its entirety, but parts of it. Take for example Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond which is about 6-8 minutes. Everyone can hear that in their head: they might hear the intro guitar motif, they might hear some of the verses and choruses, or just the chorus but not the piece in its entirety. Perhaps some people can in their heads from start to finish, but it won't be accurate and they won't be able to prove that they listened to it. When we listen to music together we understand time collectively.

The other thing that's interesting about art is the duration it takes to create it. Some art can take perhaps a day, some take months, some take years. When you look at the painting you can sort of say, "Well that took a long time". But you're only standing in front of it for 15 seconds and you're only "hearing" that painting for 15 seconds. But like an earworm, you can remember what the painting looked like, but like Shine On You Crazy Diamond, you can’t play it in your head from start to finish. Perhaps you can remember the painting if you read about it in an article and you remember being at the Museum looking it, or standing next to it. Similarly, in music, people can talk about it which makes the music play in your head. So there's an interesting correlation between the duration of music and the duration of art.