The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World

by Christine Rosen

Research shows that the average person visiting a museum today spends between fifteen and thirty seconds with a work of art.

Art is one of the most compelling ways of documenting human experience.

And yet, no less an authority than the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir observed, “The only way to understand painting is to go and look at it. And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.”

Spending time looking at great works of art is precisely that—a powerful form of time unmoored from the demands of the immediate present, whose interstitial moments we tend to fill by turning to our smartphones to alleviate micro-boredom.

As the critic Holland Cotter writes, “From a digital distance, you see an image. In person, in a gallery, you feel that image breathing.” This state of reverie is the opposite of the efficiency and instant review common to our digital age. It is a state of pleasant, almost dreamlike calm, which is why when we describe it to others, we often say we felt “lost” in reverie. What we have lost is the hurried, anxious sense of time passing quickly. It is why great poetry, music, and art are sometimes described as evoking a state of reverie; they leave the viewer and listener with a sense that time has been ever so briefly suspended.