Interacting with Works of Art - With and Without Computers

Almost all direct access to fine art in the western world is now provided by museums and most museums work hard to help people enjoy their collections. The principal source of enjoyment is obviously the collection itself; but putting paintings on walls is equally obviously, not the end of the story. This paper is about interactive multimedia and its role in helping people to enjoy works of art. An art museum, at its simplest, presents us with an opportunity to look at paintings and sculptures. For some this is one of life's great pleasures, for others it can be puzzling and frustrating. As a visitor said in a recent museum survey "I know that there is something important here but I don't know what it is and I don't know how to find out." According to Kenneth Clark, two minutes is the minimum amount of time in which it is possible to appreciate a painting. But what is the puzzled museum visitor to do in these two minutes? What, in general, do we do when we stand in front of a work of art? We believe that what happens can usefully be described as an interaction between viewer and object-the viewer frames a question and then investigates it on the work in front of him. For example, what colours has the artist used? How is the composition arranged? Asking these questions the viewer investigates, the work responds, and so on. In these terms, learning to enjoy looking at paintings and sculpture is a process of acquiring a repertoire of good questions to ask and interesting hypotheses to test. The puzzled museum visitor in the survey may in effect be short of mental experiments-he or she needs ideas for things to do. For the moment we are more concerned to establish the usefulness of this account than its absolute truth or falsity, but note that something along these lines is implied by the arguments in E.H. Gombrich's 'Art and Illusion' (Phaidon, 1961)-particularly the material on the theory that making comes before matching. The interrogative interaction which we described above takes place entirely in the imagination of the viewer. So if we want to help people learn to appreciate art we have to help them develop their imaginations. What means are at our disposal?