When I have previously visited museums, which mind you has been very rarely, I never knew quite what to look for and generally just cruised through the floors without paying much attention. This Friday, I went with a mind full of purpose. For one, I had to be very vigilant when it came to the paintings because our grade depends on it for our future essay. I also looked at the paintings differently however, in part because I wanted to recruit the new skills that I had read about in our weekly assignment. The first chapter in Ways of Seeing introduces the reader to the conception of relative perception, which I found very interesting because it intuitively made sense. To test this, I asked my friends what they thought of certain paintings and realizing that they looked at things differently than I did.

On the other side of observation, the online reading introduced a very objective way of thinking about art. The online reading promoted thinking about the time period that the art piece was created, as well as trying to find an objective way to determine the definition of art. I wasn’t too successful in understanding how the time period affected the paintings that I observed, but I was able to look at some of the exhibits differently by realizing that they are considered artistic depictions in one form or another at a particular time.

Glenn Collaku