Seventeen Seconds in Front of a Masterpiece

In 2001 two researchers, Jeffrey and Lisa Smith, stood in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and timed 150 visitors in front of six well-known paintings. The median was seventeen seconds. The mean was a little over twenty-seven, pulled up by a few people who stayed much longer. In 2017 they repeated the exercise, with a colleague, at the Art Institute of Chicago, and found much the same, though how people spent those seconds had changed.

Seventeen seconds is quoted constantly, and almost always as an accusation: look how shallow people are, look what the phone has done to attention. That reading is lazy, and it lets the institution off.

A museum is a machine for organising attention. It decides what is on the wall and what is in storage, which works get a room to themselves and which share a crowded wall, where the benches are, what the label says and how long it takes to read, where the route goes and how far it is to the café. Seventeen seconds is what that machine produces when a visitor walks through a long sequence of rooms, each containing dozens of objects of equal claimed importance, with no instruction except to keep moving. It is a measurement of the design as much as of the people.

Two twentieth-century inventions took that machine and ran it at scale.

The first is the blockbuster exhibition. The usual starting point is Treasures of Tutankhamun at the British Museum, which opened on 30 March 1972, was extended from six months to nine, and was seen by nearly 1.7 million people, many of whom queued for hours. A tour of the United States later in the decade drew millions more and fixed the format: a single famous name, spectacular loans, timed entry, a catalogue, and a shop at the exit.

The format is not going away, because it pays. A large loan exhibition has enormous costs: insurance, often backed by a government indemnity scheme, couriers who travel with the works, crates, climate control, design. It needs sponsorship and a guaranteed audience, and the guaranteed audience comes from a short list of names. Egypt. The Impressionists. Leonardo. Vermeer. The Louvre's Leonardo exhibition of 2019 and 2020 sold compulsory timed tickets in half-hour slots and drew more than a million visitors.

The usual complaint is that the blockbuster dumbs things down. The more precise complaint is about selection. Because the ticketed show has to fill its slots, the names that fill slots get shown again and again, and art that cannot draw a queue gets the smaller rooms or nothing. Meanwhile, in Britain's national museums the permanent collections have been free to enter since 2001, and on a busy afternoon the paid exhibition is packed and the free galleries are quiet. The museum's own collection, the thing it actually is, has become the place you pass through on the way to the queue.

The second invention is the audio guide. By most accounts the first was introduced at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1952, for an exhibition about forged Vermeers: recorded talks in several languages were broadcast round the galleries and picked up by visitors carrying portable receivers with headphones.

The audio guide is often treated as a crutch for people who cannot look for themselves. Its real effect is subtler. It decides the route, it decides the stops, it decides which twenty works out of three hundred deserve two minutes each, and it decides how long you stand at each one, because you stay until the voice stops. It is curating done by voice, and it is very effective: watch a room where most visitors carry a guide and you will see them stop, in order, at the numbered works and walk past the rest.

None of this is sinister. Every museum has always managed attention; the hang, the label and the bench are all instruments for it. The point is to see that seventeen seconds is not a fact about visitors' souls. It is an output, and it changes when the inputs change, which is why the most useful thing a visitor can do is the thing the building makes slightly awkward: choose one work, find somewhere to stand or sit, and stay with it far longer than feels natural.

Nobody needs permission to do that. It only feels as if you do.