by Mark McKinney
I saw something in the newspaper the other day where it mentioned that the average museum visitor spends 15-20 seconds looking at any given art work. This definitely seems like a very short time, but I have to admit that even though I like art and going to museums, I’m probably a quick browser as well – my excuse is that I want to see as much as I can, so I keep moving.
I found myself thinking about the oft-repeated idea that today’s kids have short attention spans, probably starting with my own generation watching MTV and seeing videos that had rapidly-changing imagery. Today’s kids also deal with many things vying for their attention: television, music, the internet, and video games, among others. As a result, many kids multitask with several of these things at the same time, and it’s nearly impossible to devote attention to any one thing for a long time.
While there’s something to be said about having multitasking skills (especially as a work-from-home parent), I saw the startling effect of giving a kid a chance to really spend time focusing on one thing and seeing the results from a prolonged attention span.
My surprise came when my 6 year old son showed me some recent art that he had made. Now I should preface this by saying that both my wife and I have a background in the arts, so my son has always been subjected to having art around the home and going to galleries and museums. However, it’s always been an exposure that is simply there for him to take or leave, we’ve never pushed him to get any more involved with art than what he feels like doing. I’d say he’s a typical 6 year old boy in that his drawings usually involve people doing things: himself playing soccer, superheroes battling bad guys, monsters (in anticipation of Halloween), and so forth.
So it was to my surprise when he showed me a landscape that he made after being asked to look at a Cezanne painting for a period of time. To be honest with you, I was shocked: it seemed to have a level of sophistication that I hadn’t seen in most of his drawings (which I like very much, by the way, even though I have an obvious bias). There was a true representation of three dimensional space (some trees in the foreground, others in the background) which was a great contrast to the flat aspect of his usual drawings. The sky varied in color from a deep purple to a blue to a very faint blue, which was quite different from his usual skies that portray the sun in the top left corner and the rest of the top of the page a steady blue.
I could go on analyzing his new drawing, but the point is clear: he had spent some uninterrupted time looking at the Cezanne painting, and he was absorbing some complicated visual ideas and was able to translate those ideas to his own paper. When I think about that statistic of 20 seconds in front of a painting in a museum, it makes me wonder what I would find if I simply spent 40 seconds, or two minutes …
I’m still a busy working parent, and my kids still pack a lot of activity into each and every day, but my son’s personal Cezanne is hanging on our refrigerator, a fresh reminder that maybe we all should slow down once in a while and really look at and think about the things in front of us.
Mark McKinney is the director of www.artsology.com, a web site which aims to teach kids about the arts (visual art, music, literature and dance) through fun games and activities. Artsology hopes that enjoyment of these games will act as a springboard to further investigation of the arts and the cultural figures and ideas contained within the site.
I saw something in the newspaper the other day where it mentioned that the average museum visitor spends 15-20 seconds looking at any given art work. This definitely seems like a very short time, but I have to admit that even though I like art and going to museums, I’m probably a quick browser as well – my excuse is that I want to see as much as I can, so I keep moving.
I found myself thinking about the oft-repeated idea that today’s kids have short attention spans, probably starting with my own generation watching MTV and seeing videos that had rapidly-changing imagery. Today’s kids also deal with many things vying for their attention: television, music, the internet, and video games, among others. As a result, many kids multitask with several of these things at the same time, and it’s nearly impossible to devote attention to any one thing for a long time.
While there’s something to be said about having multitasking skills (especially as a work-from-home parent), I saw the startling effect of giving a kid a chance to really spend time focusing on one thing and seeing the results from a prolonged attention span.
My surprise came when my 6 year old son showed me some recent art that he had made. Now I should preface this by saying that both my wife and I have a background in the arts, so my son has always been subjected to having art around the home and going to galleries and museums. However, it’s always been an exposure that is simply there for him to take or leave, we’ve never pushed him to get any more involved with art than what he feels like doing. I’d say he’s a typical 6 year old boy in that his drawings usually involve people doing things: himself playing soccer, superheroes battling bad guys, monsters (in anticipation of Halloween), and so forth.
So it was to my surprise when he showed me a landscape that he made after being asked to look at a Cezanne painting for a period of time. To be honest with you, I was shocked: it seemed to have a level of sophistication that I hadn’t seen in most of his drawings (which I like very much, by the way, even though I have an obvious bias). There was a true representation of three dimensional space (some trees in the foreground, others in the background) which was a great contrast to the flat aspect of his usual drawings. The sky varied in color from a deep purple to a blue to a very faint blue, which was quite different from his usual skies that portray the sun in the top left corner and the rest of the top of the page a steady blue.
I could go on analyzing his new drawing, but the point is clear: he had spent some uninterrupted time looking at the Cezanne painting, and he was absorbing some complicated visual ideas and was able to translate those ideas to his own paper. When I think about that statistic of 20 seconds in front of a painting in a museum, it makes me wonder what I would find if I simply spent 40 seconds, or two minutes …
I’m still a busy working parent, and my kids still pack a lot of activity into each and every day, but my son’s personal Cezanne is hanging on our refrigerator, a fresh reminder that maybe we all should slow down once in a while and really look at and think about the things in front of us.
Mark McKinney is the director of www.artsology.com, a web site which aims to teach kids about the arts (visual art, music, literature and dance) through fun games and activities. Artsology hopes that enjoyment of these games will act as a springboard to further investigation of the arts and the cultural figures and ideas contained within the site.
