Listening to the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D-major by Brahms takes twenty-two minutes. It varies a few minutes depending of the soloist and conductor, but the duration is fairly constant. Reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy takes many hours. The duration varies a lot depending on the reader's pace, but reading literature, just as listening to music, takes a considerable amount of time. Looking at a work of visual art, on the other hand, typically takes less than a (...) minute. This may be an exaggeration, but museum studies show that visitors to an art museum usually spend only a few moments in front of the individual work of art. Jeffrey K. Smith and Lisa F. Smith found that visitors to the Metropolitan... (shrink)

The psychological effects of aesthetic education have often been discussed, and major studies such as Michael Parsons’s inquiry into art understanding show that the development of understanding works of visual art is influenced by education.1 His findings show that the way people talk about art can be structured in five stages of development according to the model of Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. He believes that the understanding of art, just like general cognition, is based on mental maturation but (...) that some kind of education is necessary to acquire the different skills of the understanding of art at each stage of development. Parsons’s study does not include educational strategies, but his .. (shrink)