Art, a Matter of Mind

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In our modern world of smartphone cameras and Instagram, our connection with art is often distilled down to a single digital picture smaller than our fist. But what do we lose by collapsing our multidimensional world into a tiny, flickering, 2D image? Even when we encounter individual works of art in a museum or gallery, the average time Americans spend looking at a work is between six and ten seconds. How, in our culture of increasing distraction, might we truly connect with the beauty around us? What drives our connection to art? What neural processes underlie our ability to slow down and reflect?How does this intricate interplay of mind and experience inform our aesthetic response?

Join art collector JoAnn Gonzalez Hickey, curator Mardee Goff and neuroscientist Flux on an intimate journey into the mind of the observer to answer this radically topical question. In an interactive discussion of the neural processes that underlie human perception and experience, paralleled by a look into the value systems that have been instilled by the art world over time, the audience is invited on a tour from simple visual understanding to the generation of a complex human connection. Focusing on a selection of works on paper from the collection of JoAnn Gonzalez Hickey as a basis for exploring what drives our individual connections to art, the conversation will encourage and challenge us to really look at a work of art with the hope of bringing awareness to how and why we connect to art.

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