1. The question
This post concerns encounters with works of art, buildings, and cityscapes. We shall refer to all of these as works. And encounters with works shall mean being in the physical presence of the originals and perceiving them in the ordinary, direct, way, although perhaps with the aid of magnifying glasses or binoculars.
Many works repay repeated encounters. But many other works are waiting to be encountered for the first time. Our question is this. When a choice has to be made, what reasons might one have to choose repeated encounters with works already encountered over encounters with works not already encountered? (For brevity, we shall simply speak of repeated encounters and new works.)
In order to make the question a serious one we shall be concerned exclusively with works of great merit, such that there would be a real cultural loss in never encountering them. And when we use the term "works" without qualification, we shall mean works of great merit.
Within the category of works of great merit, we shall not think in terms of an order of merit. The number of truly outstanding works is small enough that one could get round most of those within one or two given artistic traditions, without having to miss out on too many other works of great merit within those chosen traditions. So not establishing an order between works of great merit will not limit thought along our lines. And to encounter the truly outstanding works within a large number of traditions would be too ambitious for anyone, unless perhaps one were never to encounter most of the other works of great merit within many of those traditions and thereby deprive oneself of a full understanding of the context of the truly outstanding works.
When one happens to live near works already encountered, there is only a very modest trade-off between repeated encounters and encounters with new works. But when works already encountered are in city C at some distance from one's home, and other works equally worthy of attention are in many other cities, also at some distance from one's home, from city C and from one another, there is a more serious trade-off. The extent of art and the brevity of life together mean that repeated encounters in city C will require forgoing even single encounters with new works in some of the other cities.
There may even be a serious trade-off when city C contains many new works, so that encounters with them can effortlessly be combined with repeated encounters in city C and the result might seem to be be a full life of artistic appreciation. This is because some artistic traditions may be far better represented by works in other cities, so that drinking one's fill in city C would still leave significant gaps in one's experience. Even if one only had a taste for a particular broad category of art, such as the art of Western and Central Europe or the art of East Asia, there would be many traditions and sub-traditions to explore. And a broad appreciation of those traditions and sub-traditions would enhance appreciation of particular works.
In what follows, we are only concerned to explore our question. We do not mean to put a returner to previously encountered works in the dock on a charge of irrationality. Choices like this are both unimportant to the rest of us and none of our business. We merely wish to investigate the reasons a returner, or another person who prefers new works to repeated encounters, might have for their choice. And we are concerned with personal benefits to the individual, rather than with what someone who might make a serious contribution to the discipline of the history of art should do for the sake of making such a contribution. We shall therefore not issue any prescription, or even try to reach an overall conclusion.
We shall investigate reasons to choose returns or to choose new works under two headings, the magic of the original and intellectual benefits. References are given at the end of the post.
2. The magic of the original
Take a work of great merit. There is something magical about being in the presence of the original. Photographs available online would not be enough. And repeated encounters would allow at least some magic to be experienced again and again.
This may be so, but would the renewed experience be the most worthwhile use of one's limited time? Or would it be better to move on to new works, simply on the ground of available magic (quite apart from the intellectual benefits of encountering a wide variety of works). After all, the magic is not a single magic of works in general. It is a different magic in relation to each work. Relatedly, experiencing the magic in relation to several works does not diminish the magic in relation to the next work one encounters.
By far the largest dose of magic is likely to come from the first encounter. What is really special is to have been in the presence of the work, rather than to have been in its presence several times. To acknowledge this is not to fall into the vulgarity of "been there, done that, tick". Rather, it is to note that what is special about the original, as opposed to a perfect copy, is something intangible, a direct connection with the work's creation and subsequent history, and with the tradition within which the work originated (on tradition see Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", section 4). The direct connection is something to be felt rather than observed. And the most significant experience of any feeling is very often the first experience of it.
(On different causal connections and their effects on the worth of experience see Bertamini and Blakemore, "Seeing a Work of Art Indirectly: When a Reproduction Is Better Than an Indirect View, and a Mirror Better Than a Live Monitor". The studies reported there did however involve hypothetical rather than actual encounters with a work or with a reproduction, and they made the assumption that the original work would not be encountered in our sense at all. Our assumption is that some works have been encountered for the first time, and that new works can either be or not be encountered. In no case do we consider the option of only seeing photographs of a work or only having indirect perception without at some time actually encountering the work itself.
See also Newman and Bloom, "Art and Authenticity: the Importance of Originals in Judgments of Value". That paper is concerned with the relative values of originals and copies. But the authors do identify the importance of the artist's physical contact with the original, which they call contagion. One could extend the importance of contact to cover the chain of contact from artist to viewer that would at the very least be seriously weakened by the substitution of a copy for the original, even though the chain all the way from the artist to the viewer of a copy would still be causal. One reason for the weakening would be that the proximate human producer in the chain would be a mere copier, rather than the creative artist.)
While the first encounter is likely to give the largest dose of magic, there may also be significant additional magic to be enjoyed on repeated encounters. This is particularly so when features of a work at a higher level than its detail are of great significance. Works on a large scale provide examples. Some paintings and sculptures, and many interiors, buildings, and boulevards and cityscapes, impress partly by their size. How did the creator keep control of such a large work and create a harmony that endures as one moves from the whole to small parts and back again? Scale creates its own magic, and repeated encounters will allow the enjoyment of doses of magic that were not available on the first encounter. Likewise genius of composition or the fit of a work with other works, for example within a sequence of works intended to be displayed together, can be a source of significant magic on repeated encounters.
Even aside from such considerations specific to particular features of works, there might be fresh magic on second or later encounters with the same work which was of a different nature from the magic on the first encounter. There might for example be something like the special feeling of greeting a friend already known, which is not a weaker version of the feeling of encountering someone interesting for the first time.
We therefore have ample reason to allow that often, neither all nor nearly all of the magic will be given by a first encounter. There is good reason to encounter works of great merit more than once. So there is a trade-off between repeated encounters and encounters with new works.
If magic were all that mattered, one might seek a rule of thumb that would maximise the total magic enjoyed by a given individual over his or her lifetime. And we would want to allow different rules for people with different characteristics. But magic is not all that matters. We should also consider the intellectual benefits of studying particular works of art.
3. Intellectual benefits
Encounters with works may bring not only magic and pleasure, but also intellectual benefits. Even if one is not going to make a significant contribution to the discipline of the history of art, one's brain may be exercised and one's understanding of humanity and history may be enlarged. How does this affect the trade-off between repeated encounters and encounters with new works?
One might think that the intellectual benefits of repeated encounters could easily be replaced by the benefits of studying photographs available online. Study of a work may even be better done in that way, because one can zoom in to a work of art and get closer than would be permitted in a museum, or can study a building's upper reaches in a way that would not be possible from the ground. This would tilt the balance in favour of encountering new works rather than repeatedly travelling to view works already encountered.
However, when large scale plays a significant role, pictures online will fail to capture how the scale has been handled. And the same is true of small scale. An enlarged reproduction of a miniature does not fully reflect its nature. This may argue for repeated encounters with original works.
There may also be benefit from studying a work in its presence. One gets to exercise the brain to see what one can notice without the benefit of zooming in or otherwise manipulating the image. And one can see the work as its creator expected it to be seen, within the technological constraints of its time of creation. Thus one may come to appreciate how the creator overcame any limits on perception imposed by those constraints. Again, we have an argument for repeated encounters.
There is also a connection between intellectual benefits and magic. It is a feature of many works of great merit that there is always more to be seen, in the detail, in higher-level features such as the composition or the lighting, or in the way in which the artist worked. Even someone who is not a professional art historian can see enough to be able to write whole essays that explore works in such ways. (See for example the essays in Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art.) And there is a certain magic in getting the experience from the original. The artist reaches out to the viewer and the channel of transmission is the original work alone, with no stage of reproduction being involved. To the extent that this is so, repeated encounters may be amply justified by the attraction of further study.
References
Barnes, Julian. Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art. London, Jonathan Cape, 2015.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". In Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York, NY, Schocken Books, 1969.
Bertamini, Marco, and Colin Blakemore. "Seeing a Work of Art Indirectly: When a Reproduction Is Better Than an Indirect View, and a Mirror Better Than a Live Monitor". Frontiers in Psychology, volume 10, article 2033, 2019, pages 1-12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02033
Newman, George E., and Paul Bloom. "Art and Authenticity: the Importance of Originals in Judgments of Value". Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, volume 141, number 3, 2012, pages 558-569. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026035
