The method

How you look

The governing question is not "do I like this?" but: What have other people found in this picture, and what would help me see it? Everything below is a way of giving a picture enough time and enough context that the answer can show up.

The three clocks

Every planned look at a picture has three phases. The times are minimums, not targets. The pictures you love already get fifteen minutes, so the point is to give the same courtesy to pictures that do not yet pull you.

• Thirty seconds in silence, before you read the label. Stand where the painter expected you to stand, about the diagonal of the canvas away, and take in the whole thing. Note the first thing your eye went to and the first word that came to mind. Do not read the label yet; it will frame the picture for you, and you will never get the first look back.
• Three minutes of inventory. Say to yourself, in words, what is actually there. Project Zero's routine "Looking: Ten Times Two" does this mechanically: list ten things you see, then look again and list ten more. The second ten is where the picture starts to open. In a crowded Bosch-like picture this comes naturally. For a Kandinsky it is the whole exercise, because the inventory is of colours, edges, weights and directions rather than objects, and naming them is the only way to notice them.
• Ten minutes of questions. Pick two or three from the question bank below, and write one line for each. The lines are the point: a year of these lines is the programme.

What the research adds

• Read the label after the thirty seconds and before the ten minutes. Knowing something about a picture measurably raises how much people appreciate it. What it costs is the first look, which is why the label comes second. But it comes.
• Prefer context that makes you work. Elaborative titles, and problems to solve, raise appreciation; purely descriptive labels lower it, to below the level of no label at all. A pair of pictures is a problem; a caption is a label.
• The modern rooms need more reading, not less. Context effects are smaller for abstract work, and a guided tour is the best-evidenced single intervention for contemporary art. The museum's podcast Rom for rom (room by room), its lecture series Kunsten er nå (art is now) and the festival tours are method, not garnish.
• "I could have painted that" is a named stage, not a verdict. Both developmental schemes (Parsons, Housen) place the preference for realism and detail in the middle; the later stages add reasons rather than abandoning the taste. Expect gradual change, visit by visit, not a conversion.
• In Norwegian the three clocks have names: Mørstad's beskrivelse, karakteristikk, tolkning (description, characterisation, interpretation).

The question bank

Rotate these. Never ask all of them of one picture.

• Making. Where is the light coming from, and does it obey the rules? (Caravaggio's never does: it is theatre light.)
• Making. Find the three largest shapes. Cover each with a hand in imagination: what collapses?
• Making. Where did the painter spend the most hours, and where the fewest? Is the difference deliberate?
• Making. What is painted thinly, and what thickly? Get close, then step back: at what distance does a brushstroke become a thing?
• Making. Is there a passage you could not have painted at any age? Describe what it does.
• The period eye (Michael Baxandall's term for the skills and habits a picture's first viewers brought to it). Who paid for this, and what did they want it to do: be something to pray in front of, impress a guest, keep a face, sell a landscape of a country that was inventing itself?
• The period eye. What would the first viewers have recognised instantly that you have to look up? (A saint's attribute, a fjord's name, a fashionable sleeve, a Düsseldorf teacher's palette.)
• The period eye. What did they not have? No photographs of these mountains, no cheap colour, no electric light.
• The period eye. What is the picture arguing with? Almost every picture in the museum answers an earlier one.
• The chain of viewers. Where has this canvas been for 150 years, and who stood here before you? (The object pages carry the exhibition history, and the acquisition line says who gave the picture and when.)
• The chain of viewers. What did Norway need this picture to be in 1848, in 1905, in 1945? Has it stopped being that?
• Honesty. Where does your attention leave the picture, and what exactly is it refusing to look at?
• Honesty. What would someone who loves this picture say you are missing? Write their sentence the way that person would say it, not your own.

Pairs beat singles

Kumu in Tallinn worked on you because it hung the same subject in Russian, German and Estonian hands side by side. The National Museum does the same, less explicitly: Dahl next to Friedrich (room 043), two fjord paintings decades apart, Krohg's and Munch's sick child, Backer's and Kielland's light. Many visits are therefore built around one pair. The question for a pair is always the same: What did the second painter decide that the first did not?

The rules for the modern rooms

Pictures painted after 1900 say nothing to you at a glance, and a glance is exactly what they get. Three changes, used only for the modern rooms:

• Give the picture the same thirteen and a half minutes. Most of the "I could have painted that" feeling comes from too little time in front of the picture. You have never stood ten minutes in front of a Kandinsky. Do it once, with the inventory routine, before deciding anything.
• Ask the historical question first and the aesthetic one last. Your way into any work is the people. For Picasso's Guitar (room 068) the question "what did a guitar made of flat planes mean in Paris in 1912, to a man who had just watched photography take over likeness?" is both answerable and interesting. "Is it beautiful?" can wait a year.
• Read one defence before the visit, written by someone who loves the work. Not an introduction, a defence: Robert Hughes on cubism, Kirk Varnedoe on abstraction, the Munch Museum's own curators on Munch. Then go and check their claims against the work. You are allowed to conclude that they are wrong, but only after checking.

Two permitted endings

Two sentences can end a visit to a modern picture: "I now see what they see, and I do not share it" and "I see nothing yet; try again in six months." Both are written down with a date. Only "a glance was enough" is not allowed.

After the visit: bringing the picture back

Nothing is written down in the gallery except the picture's ID (a photo of the label is enough). The notes are written from memory afterwards, and that is deliberate. Retrieving a picture from memory strengthens it more than re-reading notes would, and for pictures you repeat, recalling them again usually brings back more, not less.

• On the train, the same day. For each picture that got the full time: close your eyes and describe it for two or three minutes, as if to someone who has never seen it. Where did the light come from, what was in the corners, what were the hands doing, which colour are you least sure about? Speak it into a voice note, or write it.
• Then compare. Open the picture. Note the gap: what you placed wrongly, what you invented, what you had not seen at all. The gap is the note, and it is also what you will see first next time.
• Write one line per picture, and a page if you have more to say.
• One follow-up per visit, chosen from the visit's plan: a chapter, an episode, a documentary. It should close a question the picture raised.
• Come back. Look again at pictures you saw more than three months ago. A repertoire of pictures you return to is what changes taste, not a reward for taste having changed.