Viewing an artwork can retrain how people see the everyday environment afterwards.

Evidence

When I talked to docents at the de Young about Seven Yorkshire Landscapes, they mentioned something interesting. 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: This is a concrete instance of Odell’s core thesis that attention is a trained skill, connecting to Deep Listening’s ear-training and to John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing’ argument that perception is learned and alterable.
• ADDENDUM: Contributes the empirical anchor supporting the ‘attention as world-constituting’ claim the reader needs to defend Odell against the withdrawal misreading.