Split Second: A Curator’s Reaction to the Results

I’ve had a lot of time to mull over the results of the Split Second, so here are a few of my thoughts—roughly one week before the Split Second exhibition closes. Please bear in mind that I don’t bring any expertise on Sociology or Psychology or Statistics to the picture.  What I do bring is many years of experience working with Indian art and with people who are looking at Indian art for the first time.

The original intent of the Split Second experiment was to measure people’s reactions to works of art as they encountered 1) objects that varied in degrees of complexity and 2) viewing situations that varied by time of exposure or degree of engagement. In theory the experiment could have used almost any type of art, and participants would have behaved in the same ways whether they were looking at Japanese prints, or Goya etchings, or Plains Indian ledger drawings.  After looking at the outcome I have to say that I’m not totally sure that we would have gotten the same patterns of response for different genres or traditions of art.  I think the fact that we used Indian paintings affected the outcome and here’s why:

First let me say that I wasn’t one bit surprised that people liked the objects better after they were given some information about them. My first experience of Indian art could best be described as “love at first sight” but I know that was unusual. The vast majority of people can’t get comfortable with an image of a guy with an elephant head and extra arms  —no matter how gorgeous—until they know why he has that head and what those extra arms mean.  When we ask visitors what they liked or disliked about installations of Indian art they almost always assess the quality and quantity of the information we offered first and then talk about the beauty or selection of the art as a very secondary concern. I am pretty sure that this is not the case when the same people are asked their opinion of displays of Western art, particularly paintings.

I have to wonder whether there would have been a marked difference in reaction to the same object in informed versus uninformed viewing experiences if we had used American still life paintings or French landscapes.  I think that the unfamiliarity of Indian painting—which I cited as a good quality for the project in my last blog—led to more dramatic results in the informed/uninformed section of the experiment.

The other place where I think our use of Indian paintings affected the data was in the complexity issue. I was initially really surprised that complex images rated as highly as they did in the split second viewing.  Advertisers know that you can grab people’s attention in an instant using big, bold graphics and a simple message.  I would have thought that the more brightly colored images with less going on would have rated higher because people could take them in quickly.  But the opposite was true.  Straight-forward, easily legible images like this one didn’t do very well at all (in fact it was among the least popular)…

Nayika Awaits Her Lover (Rajasthan, Bikaner), 1692. Anonymous Gift, 81.192.3.

…while very complex images with more than one focal point fared very well despite the fact that there was no way people could take in all the info in 4 seconds. Here’s an example of one that did really well:

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