How to Look at Art When You Feel Like You Don't Get It

Episode 0008: Jonny Hoffner - Good > Safe

Jonny Hoffner of Paper Antler Photography and Good Lion Golf on 17 years of wedding photography, building two creative businesses, and why good doesn't have to mean safe.

You’re standing in front of a painting. It might be in a museum, a gallery, a friend’s apartment, or just something you found online that you can’t stop looking at. And a quiet little voice says: I don’t get it.

Maybe you feel like there’s something you’re supposed to understand that you don’t. A code you weren’t given. A vocabulary you were never taught. A way of seeing that other people seem to have, and you don’t. So you move on, a little faster than you wanted to, because standing in front of something you don’t understand starts to feel embarrassing.

Here’s what nobody tells you: that voice is wrong. You’re already looking. You’re already doing it. And the people who seem like they “get” art more than you do? Most of them are doing the same thing you are. They’re just more comfortable with not knowing what it means.

Why knowing “how to look at art” matters

Art gets gatekept in ways that other forms of engagement don’t. We don’t generally tell people they need credentials to appreciate music, or to enjoy a novel. But visual art has accumulated an institutional layer over the centuries, a whole scaffolding of museums, critics, theory, and price tags, that makes it easy to believe you need permission to enter.

You don’t.

The art world has a lot to answer for here. The white walls, the hushed tones, the explanatory text written for nobody, the docents who speak in a register that seems designed to make you feel like you’ve missed the point. All of that is real, and all of it is separate from the art itself.

What gets lost in the gatekeeping is something simple: looking at art is fundamentally an experience, not an exam. It happens in your body before it happens in your mind. You feel something before you can name it, and the naming is always secondary. The art world has just spent a long time trying to convince you it’s the other way around.

What “getting it” actually means

Here’s the thing about feeling like you don’t get it: there is no “it” to get.

Most serious artists and critics will tell you this directly if you ask them. Art isn’t a puzzle with a solution. A painting isn’t encrypted information waiting to be decoded. Even work that carries specific historical references, or that operates within a tradition you don’t know, is not inaccessible to someone who hasn’t studied art history. It might be richer for someone who has that context. But it is not closed off to someone who doesn’t.

What changes when you know more about a work is not whether you can engage with it. It’s the texture of the engagement. You have more threads to pull. More questions to ask. More ways in.

But the way in is always the same for everyone: your actual response, in this moment, to this thing in front of you.

That response is not wrong. It’s not less valid than a critic’s response. It is, in fact, the only response you have access to, and it is the starting point for everything else.

How to actually look at art: a practical approach

1. Slow down before you do anything else

The single most useful thing you can do in front of a piece of art is wait. Don’t immediately look at the title card. Don’t pull out your phone. Don’t look around to see how others are reacting. Just look.

Give it two minutes. That sounds short, but it’s longer than most people actually spend with any individual piece in a gallery or museum. In two minutes, your eyes will move around the work. Things will catch your attention. Something will bother you or please you or confuse you. You’ll notice more than you expected to.

The reason to do this before reading the label is that labels load you up with answers before you’ve had a chance to form your own questions. Once you know the title, you’ll see the painting through it. Sometimes that’s useful. But first let the work ask you things on its own terms.

2. Start with what you notice, not what you feel

“What do you feel?” is how a lot of art education approaches this. And it’s not a bad question. But it can also feel like a test, especially for people who don’t trust their emotional responses to be “appropriate.”

Try this instead: just describe what you see.

Not what it means. Not what it reminds you of. Just what is actually there. Colors. Where the light comes from. What’s in the foreground versus the background. Whether things feel heavy or light. Whether the edges are sharp or blurred. Whether there’s a lot happening or very little.

This is not a lower form of engagement. It’s actually what careful looking looks like. You’re building a vocabulary for the specific thing in front of you, one observation at a time. By the time you’ve described a painting out loud or in your head, you know it differently than you did when you started.

3. Notice what pulls your eye and what pushes it away

Your attention is not random. Where it goes, and where it resists going, is information.

Is there a part of the image you keep returning to? Is there a corner that makes you uncomfortable, or that you keep avoiding without knowing why? Is there something that feels unresolved or off, that your eye wants to fix?

These are not aesthetic failures on your part. They’re responses. They tell you something about how the work is constructed, and they tell you something about what you bring to it. Both pieces of information are interesting.

4. Let yourself be confused without rushing to resolve it

Confusion is not a signal that you’re doing it wrong. In front of a lot of serious work, confusion is the appropriate starting place.

Art that resists immediate understanding is often doing something deliberate. It’s holding a contradiction, or presenting something that doesn’t resolve neatly, on purpose. That’s not a deficiency of the work. It’s an invitation to stay with something longer than comfort allows.

If a piece bothers you in a way you can’t quite name, that’s worth sitting with too. What is it, exactly? Is it the subject matter? The way it’s made? The feeling it seems to be after? Getting specific about the confusion is itself a form of looking.

5. Ask questions instead of forming conclusions

Conclusions shut down the experience. Questions extend it.

What’s happening here? Who are these people, if there are people? What’s the relationship between this color and that one? Why is so much of the canvas empty? Why is everything so crowded? What’s just outside the frame?

You don’t need answers to these. The questions are the activity. They’re a way of staying in the work instead of moving past it.

6. Connect it to something you already know

Art doesn’t exist in a separate category from the rest of your experience. A painting about grief is talking about something you know. A photograph of a particular kind of light is capturing something you’ve also stood inside. An abstract composition might remind you of something from your actual life that you’d never thought of as visual before.

These connections are not mistakes. They’re not you projecting onto the work. They’re the work doing its job. Art reaches toward something in the viewer. When it finds something, that’s the encounter.

7. Come back to the title

Once you’ve spent real time with the work, the title or explanatory label becomes more interesting than it would have been at the start. Now you have something to compare it to. Does the title confirm what you were seeing? Does it redirect you? Does it open up a question you didn’t know to ask?

This order matters. The label is context, not the experience itself.

8. Let yourself like or dislike it

This sounds obvious but it’s something a lot of people suspend when they enter a gallery. They feel like they’re not qualified to have a preference.

You are. You’re the only person experiencing it through your particular set of years and encounters and sensory responses. Your dislike of a celebrated piece is not embarrassing. Your love of something that isn’t considered important is not naive.

Preference is not the same as evaluation. You can dislike something and recognize that it’s doing something interesting. You can love something and know it isn’t asking much of you. Both of those responses are worth having.

What you’re actually doing when you look at art

Every person who stands in front of a piece of art brings their whole life to it. Every piece of art a person has ever seen. Every emotion that visual pattern has ever triggered. Every association those colors or shapes carry for them specifically.

The art can’t know any of that. But the encounter between the work and the viewer is where art actually exists. Not in the painter’s intention. Not in the museum’s collection. Not in the critical record. In the moment of looking.

You are not outside of that. You are, in fact, the other half of it.

You don’t need credentials to engage with art. You only need time, curiosity, and the willingness to feel something without immediately categorizing it. That’s not a consolation. It’s an accurate description of what looking at art actually requires.

The people who seem like they get it are mostly just more practiced at staying in the discomfort of not knowing. That’s a learnable thing. You just have to keep doing it.

When you want to go deeper

Looking carefully is its own practice. If you want more context, it’s available. Knowing something about the period a work was made in, or the tradition it’s working within or against, does add texture. Art history is genuinely interesting once you’re coming at it as a way to understand things you’re already curious about, rather than as a prerequisite for having an opinion.

But that’s a second step. The first step is just: look. Stay. Notice. Ask.

You don’t need to earn the right to be in the room. You’re already there.

Takeaway

The discomfort of standing in front of art you don’t understand is the experience, not a sign you’re doing it wrong. Art is designed to create exactly that pause where your automatic interpretive machinery doesn’t immediately resolve what it’s encountering. That space is where something real can happen.

You don’t need anyone’s permission to be in it. You just need to slow down, stay a little longer, and trust that your actual response, whatever it turns out to be, is exactly the right starting place.