379. Shifting Opinions

Confronted by a new artwork, we automatically form an opinion of it. If the work gives us a positive feeling or at least attracts our attention, then we tend to judge it favourably. Sometimes we like the work so much that we share our opinion with others, so that they can see it and confirm our judgment. We might not think about the work any further and it eventually becomes nothing more than a fond memory.

When we encounter the same artwork many years later, we might be surprised to find that our opinion of it has shifted. We remember it in a way that it no longer seems to appear. This discrepancy causes us to wonder how we could have arrived at our previous judgment, when the work before us now seems so different.

But all that has happened is that we are seeing the artwork in a new context. The work is the same as before, but we are now different. We are more experienced than we used to be and also more aware. We are sensitive to a wider range of possibilities, not just in this artwork, but in all art, and in the world in general.

The artwork that hasn’t changed appears to us in a totally different way. It now has a complexity it did not seem to possess before. In place of the singular feeling it once evoked, it now brings nuanced layers of emotion to the surface. The artwork seems to carry so much more of life than we previously realized.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that we now like the artwork more. It can easily be the case that by seeing more, we find something in the work that activates one of our aversions, making us want to look away. But even this response can be valuable. An artwork can teach us something about the world at large and the artist that created it, just as well as it can teach us something about ourselves and the attachments that drive our opinion of it.