A single artwork can permanently retrain how a viewer perceives the ordinary world

Evidence

Some museumgoers who had seen the piece came back to tell them that afterward everything outside had looked different from what they were used to. Specifically, the de Young is not far from the San Francisco Botanical Garden, and those who visited it directly afterward found that Hockney’s piece had trained them to look a certain way—a notably slow, broken-up luxuriating in textures. They saw the garden anew, in all its kaleidoscopic beauty. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 364

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Phenomenology restores the unnoticed richness of everyday experience — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 147; Art changes the world by puncturing everyday ideological reality, not by winning battles