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“Affect often persists”
: Zajonc, “Feeling and Thinking,” 157.

As the critic Clement Greenberg quipped
: The quotation comes from Thierry de Duve,
Clement Greenberg Between the Lines
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 19.

“I think you need to give”
: See George Plimpton, “The Art of the Matter,”
New Yorker
, June 10, 2012.

Our ability to so quickly
: As a curator once told the professor of psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Paintings give the illusion that you can see them in one second.” Or less! The apparent ease of our viewing—the painting is just laid out flat there for us, and there is nothing telling us what we are not getting—combined with quick and instinctive feelings of affect, helps explain why it is not uncommon to find, in surveys of visitors, a pervading sentiment that people are “waiting”: waiting for a painting to blow them away, waiting to “get the message” of a painting. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Rick E. Robinson,
The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter
(Malibu, Calif.: J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Center for Education in the Arts, 1990), 147.

“find my first impression”
: Kenneth Clark,
Looking at Pictures
(London: John Murray, 1960), 16.

One museum study found
: See “Interpretation at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts: Policy and Practice,”
http://​www.​museum-​ed.​org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2010/​08/​mia_​interpre​tation_​museum-​ed.​pdf
.

which, as research has shown
: In one well-known study, the psychologist Alfred Yarbus had viewers—equipped with a primitive eye-tracking device—look at a painting (Ilya Efimovich Repin's
Unexpected Return
, which shows a soldier returning from Siberian exile), and then asked them questions like the following: How long had he been away? What is the socioeconomic condition of the family? Depending on the question asked, viewers' gaze patterns were quite different. It is not difficult to draw a comparison to the information that labels might provide and how that would direct viewer attention. See Yarbus,
Eye Movements and Vision
, trans. Basil Haigh (New York: Plenum Press, 1967). Also, for a good summary of Yarbus's research, see Sasha Archibald, “Ways of Seeing,”
Cabinet
, no. 30 (Summer 2008),
http://​www.​cabinet​magazine.​org/​issues/​30/​archibald.​php
.

“decide how much time”
: Hensher, “We Know What We Like, and It's Not Modern Art.”

That abstract by de Kooning
: This example was provided to me by Pablo Tinio, in his paper “From Artistic Creation to Aesthetic Reception: The Mirror Model of Art,”
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts
, 7, no. 3 (2013): 265–75.

We get caught
: See David Brieber et al., “Art in Time and Space: Context Modulates the Relation Between Art Experience and Viewing Time,”
PloS ONE
9, no. 6 (June 2014): 1–8.

Elsewhere in the Prado
: See Mary Tompkins Lewis, “The Power, and Art, of Painting,”
Wall Street Journal
, Sept. 25, 2009.

“exotic and dangerous character”
: Michael Baxandall,
Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 11.

In a study of visitors
: See Jeffrey K. Smith and Pablo P. L. Tinio, “Audibly Engaged: Talking the Walk,” in
Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience: Handheld Guides and Other Media
, ed. Loïc Tallon and Kevin Walker (New York: AltaMira Press, 2008), 75.

“a lot of people”
: Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 3.

“Even when contemplating”
: Alain de Botton,
Art as Therapy
(London: Phaidon Press, 2013), 170.

Hence the anxieties
: Ayumi Yamada, “Appreciating Art Verbally: Verbalization Can Make a Work of Art Be Both Undeservedly Loved and Unjustly Maligned,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
45, no. 5 (2009): 1140–43.

As one museum consultant
: The curator Ingrid Schaffner notes that wall labels in contemporary art can “say what the small museum won't tell,” that is, “it's okay that you don't find this pleasing, it wasn't made to be.” See Schaffner, “Wall Labels,” in
What Makes a Great Exhibition?
, ed. Paula Marincola (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 154–69.

“how unconsciously many people”
: Harlow Gale, “On the Psychology of Advertising,”
Psychological Studies
, July 1900, 39–69.

“one of the most interesting”
:
Art-Journal
11 (1872): 37.

“Certainly, compared with its rival”
:
New York Times
, Nov. 12, 1871.

Hardly anyone replied
: See Erika Michael,
Hans Holbein the Younger: A Guide to Research
(New York: Routledge, 2013), 327.

“antique appearance”
: Fechner collected the results of his study in the document
Bericht über das auf der Dresdner Holbein-Ausstellung ausgelegte Album
(Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1872). Thanks to Sophie Duvernoy for translation assistance.

Fechner's work, which became known
: See, for example, Jay Hetrick, “Aisthesis in Radical Empiricism: Gustav Fechner's Psychophysics and Experimental Aesthetics,”
Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics
3 (2011): 139–53.

“Everybody knows that he”
: The Fechner quotation is referenced in J. E. V. Temme, “Fechner's Primary School Revisited: Towards a Social Psychology of Taste,”
Poetics
21, no. 6 (1993): 463–79.

Critics noted that his studies
: Subsequent studies have found various forms of statistical bias; for example, while there might be a weak “population wide” preference for a certain rectangle, when you drilled down to the individual level, people had quite strong—and quite varied—preferences. See I. C. McManus, “Beauty Is Instinctive Feeling: Experimenting on Aesthetics and Art,” in
The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology
, ed. Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 179. McManus writes, “Some people do like rectangles, but there is no special status for the Golden Section rectangle.”

And how did you know people
: This point comes from Richard Padovan: “The general preference for figures between a square and a half and a square and three quarters could equally be due simply to the subjects' familiarity with similar shapes in such everyday things as playing cards, window panes, books, and paintings.” See Padovan,
Proportion: Science, Philosophy, Architecture
(London: Taylor and Francis, 1999), 312.

After Fechner, many have objected
: The philosopher Rudolf Arnheim, for example, charged that by making it a matter of “preference,” the practitioners of experimental aesthetics “neglected everything that distinguishes the pleasure
generated for a work of art from the pleasure generated by a dish of ice cream.” Fechner's studies of rectangles, even if they seemed to reveal some preferences, could tell
what
people liked; they could not tell
why
. Most studies, Arnheim charged, “tell us deplorably little about what people see when they look at an aesthetic object, what they mean by saying that they like or dislike it, and why they prefer the objects they prefer.” See Arnheim, “The Other Gustav Theodor Fechner,” in
New Essays on the Psychology of Art
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 45. Even one of the field's most prominent advocates, the psychologist Daniel Berlyne, who picked up the experimental aesthetics torch in the early 1970s, observed that “experimental aesthetics has had a long but not particularly distinguished history.” Berlyne,
Studies in the New Experimental Aesthetics
(Washington, D.C.: Hemisphere Publishing, 1974), 5.

Artists, Zeki has argued
: As with Fechner, there are suggestions that neuroaesthetics tries to reduce the complexity of art to simple metrics, like “beauty,” whose relevance in contemporary art is suspect. For example, an interesting study of gallery visitors who were hooked up to a device that measured galvanic skin responses, heart rate, and other physiological measures while people looked at paintings found that a work like Andy Warhol's
Campbell's Soup Cans
, while rating low on “aesthetic value,” nevertheless generated higher-than-average physical responses. “We assume that the reason is the work's broad popularity and that the encounter with the ‘original' may cause these strong effects.” See Martin Tröndle and Wolfgang Tschacher, “The Physiology of Phenomenology: The Effects of Artworks,”
Empirical Studies of the Arts
30, no. 1 (2012): 79–117. Another critique is that the findings of neuroaesthetics are too obvious. For example, the art critic Blake Gopnik wrote, “To discover that kinetic art is an art of motion, and that it triggers motion sensors in the visual cortex, or that the Fauves were colorists, and (guess what) made art that especially triggers color sensors,…adds almost nothing that wasn't already obvious about these movements.” Quoted in Arthur P. Shimamura and Stephen E. Palmer, eds.,
Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 145. Neuroaesthetics, others have argued, “may be killing your soul.” Philip Ball, “Neuroaesthetics Is Killing Your Soul,”
Nature
, March 22, 2003.

“exploring the potential”
: See George Walden, “Beware the Fausts of Neuroscience,”
Standpoint
, April 2012,
http://​www.​stand​pointmag.​co.​uk/​node/​4367/​full
.

So Mondrian, for example
: Writes Zeki, “When we view one of Mondrian's abstract paintings in which the emphasis is on lines…large numbers of cells in charted visual areas of our brains will be activated and responding vigorously, providing a line of given orientation falls on the part of the field that a cell with a preference for that orientation ‘looks at.' ” See Semir Zeki,
Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 114. Interestingly, it may not matter how you look at a painting by Mondrian to excite the right effect. One study found that his work
Composition
was preferred more in three other orientations than the original way it was meant to be displayed (although subjects were much better at guessing the proper orientation of other modern paintings). See George Mather, “Aesthetic Judgment of Orientation in Modern Art,”
i-Perception
3, no. 1 (2012): 18–24. Another study took a number of Mondrian images and rendered their lines as oblique, rather than horizontal and vertical (using “lozenge”-shaped frames to avoid a corrupting influence of the
frame's orientation). Here people much preferred the original paintings (though as always there could be a familiarity effect—people know what Mondrians are supposed to look like). See Richard Latto, “Do We Like What We See?,” in
Multidisciplinary Approaches to Visual Representations and Interpretations
, ed. Grant Malcolm (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004), 343–56.

It is not unthinkable
: See Zaira Cattaneo et al., “The World Can Look Better: Enhancing Beauty Experience with Brain Stimulation,”
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
9, no. 11 (2014): 1713–21. Interestingly, similar effects have been found with food. In one trial, an “electrode-equipped spoon,” which comes with lights as well, was used to “augment the perceived intensity of the flavor.” See Aviva Rutkin, “Food Bland? Electric Spoon Zaps Taste into Every Bite,”
New Scientist
, Oct. 31, 2014.

We even seem able
: See Joel S. Winston et al., “Brain Systems for Assessing Facial Attractiveness,”
Neuropsychologia
45 (2007): 195–206. As the researchers note, “Indeed it appears that actually attending to facial attractiveness appears to diminish activity in at least some reward-related areas. One possible interpretation of these results is that the reward value (or perhaps aesthetic value) of a visual stimulus is diminished when trying to evaluate it. Clearly further behavioural and neuroimaging research is needed to elucidate this seemingly paradoxical effect.”

When people look at painted
: See Dahlia Zaidel,
Neuropsychology of Art: Neurological, Cognitive and Evolutionary Perspectives
(New York: Psychology Press, 2013), 167.

“visual shock”
: See Zeki and Ishizu, “ ‘Visual Shock' of Francis Bacon.”

“to
something unusual
”
: Michael Peppiatt,
Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), 153.

“It is unnatural”
: For an elaboration, see Dahlia Zaidel and Marjan Hessamian, “Asymmetry and Symmetry in the Beauty of Human Faces,”
Symmetry
2, no. 1 (2010): 136–49.

The left side of the face
: See, for example, H. A. Sackeim and R. C. Gur, “Lateral Asymmetry in Intensity of Emotional Expression,”
Neuropsychologia
16 (1978): 473–82.

Artists, indeed, might have sensed
: See I. C. McManus, “Turning the Left Cheek,” in
Consciousness Regained: Chapters in the Development of Mind
, ed. Nicholas Humphrey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 138–42. James Schirillo has questioned the innate nature of this preference. “In modern society,” he writes, “the right side of a woman's face is typically judged to be more attractive by both men and women alike.” So during the era of painters like Rembrandt, people might have actually preferred right-cheeked portraits but deferred instead to social norms (the right cheek, he suggests, might express “prowess, dominance and status,” which might have been deemed threatening in female subjects. See Schirillo, “Hemispheric Asymmetries and Gender Influence Rembrandt's Portrait Orientations,”
Neuropsychologia
38, no. 12 (Oct. 2000): 1593–606.