• Dan Hill’s website
• First Blush: People’s Intuitive Reactions to Famous Art (Dan’s book, affiliate link)
• Faces of the Week blog

Cindy Ingram:
Hello and welcome to the Art Class Curator Podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator and The Curated Connections Library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delights of creativity to the messy mishaps that come with being a teacher. Whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today, take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders and let’s get started.

Cindy Ingram:
On the podcast, I welcome Dan Hill. Dan Hill is a facial coding expert with an expertise in marketing and market research, and he has written the book First Blush: People’s Intuitive Reactions to Famous Art. I found this conversation to be completely fascinating and I know that you will too. There are so many learnings here for how we look at art, how we experience art, how we help our students experience art. Honestly, it was just super fun to geek out about art and science and emotions and faces. Let’s welcome Dan Hill.

Cindy Ingram:
I am so excited to welcome Dan Hill to the Art Class Curator Podcast. Welcome, Dan.

Dan Hill:
Good morning or Good afternoon, good evening, whatever.

Cindy Ingram:
You reached out to me and shared with me your book, which is called First Blush: People’s Intuitive Reactions to Famous Art. I’m super excited to talk about this today. There’s so much like cool sciency stuff in here and research that I’m really excited to geek out about that. Can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background and experiences?

Dan Hill:
Well, first of all, I got really lucky. My mom was an interior designer and has a great innate sense of color scheme, but probably the decisive thing for me, for waking me up to my environment and to visuals was when I was six years old, my family moved to Italy. It was kind of like a reverse migration. We went from the new world to the old world. We landed in Naples. I get off the boat, I looked to my left, there’s a baby octopus hanging from a meat hook, and I basically said to myself, toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Everything was different, and I didn’t know the language at first. I went to Italian first grade in a fishing village, so I waited all day for the math unit, so I had something to do. But the great thing for me, if you got the first in the math unit, first done and all correct, you got to do a drawing in your notebook, which could occupy me for the rest of the day when I couldn’t do any of the other subjects because I didn’t know the language.

Dan Hill:
That was my innate first introduction to visuals and the power of visuals and noticing the world around me.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. Did you find, I don’t know if you remember this, but you’ve studied, it looks like most of your career studying faces. Did you notice that back then and when you were trying to learn a new language that you could interpret things based on the faces, facial expression?

Dan Hill:
Well, I had to because again, I didn’t have language. My parents sent me then into a town of 100,000 on my own to go to a Berlitz school. So I had to read faces to figure out who I could trust. When people were approaching me, offering me guidance. Well, did I want to take that advice? Was that going to get me in trouble? Fortunately, I’m around to tell the tale so I must’ve been able to figure out who was trustworthy. But the really powerful moment proved to be when we were going back home. Rather than go back out of Italy, we went up to England, and on the way we went to the Rijksmuseum, and when we went to the Rijksmuseum, I fell in love with Rembrandt. Now, this is anticipating one of your possible questions, like what art matters to you? Well, that is the first art that really grabbed me.

Dan Hill:
It was the power of the intellectual, ability to get across the emotions, the personality of people, the somberness of it. It just was so trenching for me. My mom said, “You can pick out any artwork from the museum collection you want in terms of a postcard,” and everything I chose was Rembrandt. There’s more than Rembrandt in the museum, but Rembrandt, Rembrandt, Rembrandt, and he’s of course, great for faces. Some years later, I got really lucky. A business contact in Holland, his dad was a former director of the Rijksmuseum. One day we went around the museum, he gave me all the background on the paintings and I deciphered the facial expressions in the paintings, and even though it was just an impromptu session of us together, by the time we got done, we had over 35, probably 40 people following this painting by painting eaves dropping on the conversation.

Cindy Ingram:
I love it. I have both been the one eavesdropped on and the eavesdropper in those situations. Like oh, that’s fascinating. I love it. Just along those lines of communicating through phases, I was reading a book recently. What’s the name of the book? It’s called The Stroke of Insight is about a neuroscientist who had a stroke, and she lost all of her language because the stroke was in her left side, but she said she could still really understand what people were saying or the general idea just based on her right brain interpreting the emotions of the faces. She knew who she could trust even though she couldn’t actually hear their words. So I thought that was really fascinating about faces.

Dan Hill:
Yeah, no, it changes everything. How you obviously look at an artwork if it’s representational, about photography, people testify in front of Congress, watching a movie, everything changes once you really lock it on the face.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. When did you become interested in faces?

Dan Hill:
Well, I got lucky, in 1998, someone I knew from IBM sent over an article about the breakthroughs in brain science and how much we are intuitive emotional decision makers. The killer statistic is that about 95% of our mental activity is not fully conscious. That’s the conservative estimation. They actually think it’s about 98%. So I went, wow, that is so cool and it makes so much sense. Then the question was, how are you actually going to capture and quantify and understand emotions? In doing my readings, I came across the fact that Charles Darwin came to realize that in your face, you best reflect and communicate your feelings because it’s the only place in the body where the muscles attach right to the skin. So it gives you quick, real time reactions. It conveys several different emotions, and we as human beings have more facial muscles than any other species on the planet.

Dan Hill:
Yes, I can put the dog into the painting and so on and so forth, but it’s the face of human beings that’s just the most wonderful instrument for getting a sense of somebody and what’s going on for them.

Cindy Ingram:
Oh, that’s fascinating. I never thought about that, that the muscles are attached to the skin on the face.

Dan Hill:
Yeah. It’s just a super sensitive in the moment exploration of what’s happening.

Cindy Ingram:
When you’re having a conversation with someone, can you tell how they feel about you pretty easily by seeing how their face moves?

Dan Hill:
Yes, I can. When I first met my wife, I could tell she wasn’t too interested in meeting any guys. So I was like, I better go really slowly here, but she’s a wonderful person and she does have a signature expression, which she loves me for never divulging. We all have signature expressions. As George Orwell, the writer said, by the age of 50, a man has the face he deserves because muscle memory causes us to hold on to certain things.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. I thought leading up to this interview, I was like, oh man, my face is going to be communicating all sorts of things. I kind of got self-conscious about it.

Dan Hill:
Well, the great thing is, I’m looking at your face as we’re doing this and you’re so animated. It’s obvious you love your subject matter.

Cindy Ingram:
Yes.

Dan Hill:
The only way you can really be great at something is to love what you’re doing.

Cindy Ingram:
I totally agree. I tell that to teachers all the time when I’m talking about teaching. I’m like, “You have to really be passionate about what you’re teaching.”

Dan Hill:
Yeah, and the students will pick up on it because emotions are also contagious. What you feel conveys to somebody else in turn. Yeah.

Cindy Ingram:
Awesome. Okay. I’m thinking about sort of what you said about all the emotions being communicated through our faces. How accurate is this science? Is it really widely accepted in, I don’t know, who was excited about the science community? You know what I mean?

Dan Hill:
Very fair question. Obviously, Charles Darwin was not around for a conversation when I discovered facial coding. Fortunately, there’s a man named Paul Ekman. He was the inspiration for the Lie to Me show that was on Fox in the early 2000s, a prime time hit. He was an advisor for Pixar, for the movie Inside Out where you have the various characters who are playing one or more emotion, disgust and sadness and so forth. So Ekman had a statistic just a couple of years ago. He interviewed researchers whose specialty is emotions and being able to quantify and capture emotions. About 80% of the academic fields who are specialists in this area are onboard on facial coding. Of course, you always have people who will object or disagree, but that’s academia for you. People love to fight and squabble over things, and that’s perfectly fine.

Dan Hill:
Nothing’s infallible on the face of the earth, but one of the deep things is how universal it is. So even a person born blind emotes the same way as you or I, it is hardwired into the brain. I’ve been to more than 65 countries. I’ve spoken in over 25. Every place I go, I look for the faces and for the expressions and I see them all the time. Just yesterday on PBS, they were interviewing, someone said, “Do you really think the Chinese government is telling the truth about the coronavirus and the number of people affected?” Before the person even the answered, they showed a smirk at the corner of their mouth. A smirk says, I don’t trust you, I don’t respect you. So I had the answer before the guy ever said a word. He did not believe the numbers out of Beijing.

Cindy Ingram:
Okay. So can you explain like when you’re doing facial coding, what are the types of things you are looking at? Can you give some examples just so I can get a idea?

Dan Hill:
Sure. Let’s start with happiness. It’s the one positive emotion of the core emotions, but people do not know typically that there’s a difference between a true smile and a social smile. A social smile only involves the muscles around the mouth and the cheeks rise and so forth. But with a true smile, you get the crow’s feet. That’s probably the simplest way to describe it. You get the twinkle in the eye, because the muscle around the eye is relaxing. Let’s switch over to anger, because happiness and anger actually for most people constitute about 70% of their emoting. They are the real heavyweights. If happiness in the essence is to hug, the essence of anger is to hit.

Dan Hill:
Now, sometimes it’s constructive. You want to break through barriers. You want to make progress. You don’t want to be confused anymore. If you see this confusion look in your students’ faces, obviously you’re not quite getting across. The surest way to see anger, if it’s confusion, is that the eyebrows will knit together and lower. If it is anger like, yo, I’m not following you, I’m not going along. I’m resistant. What you’ll also see in the classroom, I’ve taught college, after all I know, the mouth will pull tight. So the lips my pressed together a bit. If it gets more intense, you get a bolt below the middle of the lower lip. That is a really reliable way of essentially you’ve, pardon my French, you’ve pissed somebody off.

Cindy Ingram:
How many emotions can you pick up? Do you have like a number?

Dan Hill:
Yes, it’s seven.

Cindy Ingram:
Seven

Dan Hill:
Happiness and anger I’ve already covered. Then you have surprise, which includes for one thing, the eyes going wide, because guess what? With surprise, you’re orienting to your environment, and as the eyes go wide and the eyebrows lift, you’re able to see better. You’re taking in more information. That’s one of the things I love about facial coding is it just makes common sense. You’re surprises, you’re like, okay, what’s going on around me? Just like in disgust. What happens, the nose wrinkles, the upper lip flares, bad taste, bad smell. It’s as if you’re revolting and trying to almost back up, but only your features are doing it for you. Contempt as the smirk. Sadness is often in drooping. You can think of a rodeo clowns, corner of the mouth going down, painted corners of the block going down, very reliable. Finally, fear, and the most reliable indication of fear is the mouth pulls wide in a kind of Egads sort of expression.

Dan Hill:
But it’s worth knowing that surprise and fear overlap in many ways on how they show in the face because human beings, generally speaking, do not welcome surprises.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. I was like, we’re fearful of surprises.

Dan Hill:
Yeah. Because a change in our setting means we’re going to have to acclimate and make some effort to make the change. On the other hand, as an artist and as a teacher, what are you trying to do? Create a lot of surprise, you want them to wake up, you want to break through the clutter, you want to grab their attention. So you have to have some edginess, but the key is to make sure the surprise exceeds the fear and to bring some happiness into the equation because everybody likes happiness.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. Oh, that’s interesting. Yes, that is so true. Yeah, our brains like the novelty, but you need to do it in a safe way.

Dan Hill:
Yeah, bring the sweet more than the sour.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. Okay, cool. So you’ve been doing facial coding for a long time and then you decided to study people’s reactions to art. Can you explain that study and how that came to be and all that stuff?

Dan Hill:
Sure. For 20 years, yes, I applied this particularly in advertising. My real love was, of course, was the imagery effective. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn’t. Now that I’m semiretired, I said, well, I have this passion for art, I want to now exercise it. The linchpin of doing the study was that I saw an article that said that in a museum, the average person looks at a work of art for about 20 seconds. I just instinctively said, “I don’t think that’s true.” The next time I was in New York, I went to the Guggenheim. I went to the Brooklyn Museum, I was in the Frick. I spent between the three places, about a day and a half, literally sitting on benches, moving around different parts of the museum and noticing and tabulating how long people looked at art.

Dan Hill:
What I found was, yes, there are moments when you really get involved in an artwork, but on average what most people did was four seconds of viewing, five seconds of looking at the name plate and one second back to the artwork. So, it was one half of what this expert had said it was. Then I said, now it’s game on. I am really fascinated and I’m going to use my eye tracker so I can follow where their eyes going. I’m going use facial coding with a little camera built into the screen so I know how they’re feeling. That’s what I went to town on, and what I discovered from both those tools was it was true. I gave people 15 seconds of viewing time. So I elongated it almost back to what the expert said. And yet, people’s true emotional and visual obsession with an artwork when they saw it on the screen, on the eye tracking screen was the first four seconds.

Dan Hill:
That was really the heart of their action. And then it started dipping away. What they did naturally in the museum very much was paralleled with what I saw in my study.

Cindy Ingram:
Oh, that’s fascinating. I think that’s totally true. I did that one time. I was doing an internship at the Dallas Museum of Art, and I was doing research. I don’t actually remember why I was doing it, but I was sitting in the gallery tracking everybody’s movements and a time. It was great fun. I’m like, I just want to be a part of this research. You put artworks up on the screen?

Dan Hill:
Yes, I did.

Cindy Ingram:
Okay.

Dan Hill:
There was 88 hour works, and granted, it’d be lovely to go around to all the museums and set up an eye tracking machine and let them see the actual piece, but simply too complicated. I didn’t have the Ford Foundation funding by study, so I needed to do it the way I could. There’s 88 hour works. This is by far the largest study ever done. The biggest I could find was 40 people looking at 12 Zurbaráns. So only one artist. I had 87 hours because there’s two Michelangelos in the study, 96 people, and they weren’t all college students. I had people as young as eight year olds to the age of 80, and I tried really hard to replicate the demographics of who goes to art museums and who loves art.

Cindy Ingram:
Did they view all 88 in one sitting?

Dan Hill:
No, no, no. It was just be too much for people. What I did is I created three trenches, so any one person saw one third of the artworks and then there was a little pause in between. Then I should say that what happened was about the nine second mark right in the middle, I gave them out loud the last name of the artist and the title of the artwork because I also want to know the impact of titles, which would be a fascinating thing for us to go to in a moment, but I got a little bit of … that was the only thing that gave a rise out to those first four seconds. Everybody slid away in terms of their visual and emotional interests, but when they got the title of the artwork and the artists last name, there was typically a little bit of a bump increase.

Dan Hill:
Not anywhere near the first four seconds, but it came back a bit. But it’s the first four seconds that’s so crucial. I often say that art, just like advertising, is like trying to land an airplane on a helicopter pad. It takes a lot of talent because you’ve got to arrest them, distract them, disassociate them from everything else around them and get them into your piece right here, right now before the game is over.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I think about myself going to an art museum and that’s pretty much what I do. What I do is I look around the room, and I used to go to every single one out of some sort of weird sense of obligation, but then now I just go in and I take a scan and then I just go to the one that immediately gives me that emotional reaction. Then once I have that, then I stop and I think, okay, well what was that? And then I analyze it a little bit more. You talking makes me think that that’s really what we should be striving for is helping the viewers know what to do next. They have the emotional reaction. Sorry, you’ve got me thinking. I’m going to have to do some thinking after this, but it really is like teaching them what to do next after they have that reaction.

Dan Hill:
Well, my wife’s an artist. One of the things we do when we go to a museum, we’ll go into a new room and we’ll say, let’s split up and we’ll give you one minute and then let’s reconvene and I’m going to guess what’s your favorite piece in this room, you’re going to guess which is my favorite piece, and then the really interesting thing is why? What was it? What arresting detail brought you into it? How are you additionally rewarded in the composition potentially? How did the title add to it, if it did? And how does it match up to other things you love? Is this a standout piece? Is it a pattern or a trend, a subject matter, a style as you pick an artist? Why, why, why, why, why?

Cindy Ingram:
So cool. Yeah, that’s really good. Okay, so going back to … I just want to like really understand what you’re doing. When your eye tracking a device then measures where in the artwork they’re looking and in what order,

Dan Hill:
It does. The key they’d introduce here is the word fixations. What they found, people smarter than me, have found out that you need about one sixth of a second to look at a particular detail for it actually register for you mentally. You can stay with it longer, but if you don’t get to that, it’s here and gone, the paper shredder that is our brain just lets it go. With eye tracking, the key output is what’s called a heat map. If you see something in red or with an orange or green, those are descending levels of your eyes went there and stayed there, and a lot of people’s eyes did the same thing. Normally, in an eye tracking study you only need about 10 to 12 subjects because there really tend to be patterns that emerge. So by my having 30 people for each tranche of this artwork, I was 3X-ing what’s typical. So it’s really solid data.

Dan Hill:
Then the interesting thing is there’s a lot of things that get, not even a light green, which means it’s peripheral vision. You’re probably taking it in, but if your eyes aren’t focusing on something, it’s really not going to have any mental power behind it. So, it’s making a passing impression, but it’s just not going to be the key.

Cindy Ingram:
I know it’s probably really different depending on the artwork, but is there an average number of fixations that happen in one art viewing experience?

Dan Hill:
The range is quite incredible over the artworks. The best of them had over a thousand for their subjects, the worse had as few as 200. Some people, if they really got turned on by something, they might be here and gone. I threw into some of my presentations, Fragonard’s, The Swing, where you have the woman on the swing and two guys are flirting with her. I just took one person who loved this artwork piece, obviously, because this person had about 40 different fixations all bouncing around in the 15 seconds. So basically every second, every time they had a sixth of a second, they were onto something new in the artwork, the eye was just dancing across the piece.

Cindy Ingram:
Okay, so you’re measuring where their eye moves, which I think is really cool information.

Dan Hill:
And for how long and in what order.

Cindy Ingram:
How long in what order. Was there anything in the research that really stood out to you? Besides, oh, you said the Fragonard, but …

Dan Hill:
Well, a couple of really important things I think for anybody, whether they’re teaching it or just appreciating art or trying to create art. One is the power of faces. I’m not saying that just because I’m a facial coder or because I love Rembrandt, it’s because I saw this for 20 years in market research where I did work for more than half the world’s top 100 companies who are marketers. So I had a lot of experience over a lot of countries, and the same thing in this study. If there is a face or faces in the artwork, it’s going to seize about 70% of the gaze activity, 70%. It is an absolute vampire in terms of sucking the blood of everything else in the artwork. The same thing happens emotionally, but let’s stay with the visual. The next key thing is if I’ve got four seconds, my God, what’s the most valuable real estate?

Dan Hill:
I really got to know this. What I found is yes, there are different patterns by all means, but if you had to take an average, people come up through the middle, the lower middle. So they take the foreground and they comp through the middle, and then probably because we’re a culture, we’re not usually reading Hebrew, we’re going to move left to right. The top right corner is the third place that gets picked up. So lower, middle, upper middle, move to the right corner, and then you start the dance to the other three corners. But you probably don’t normally get there. I made them sit for 15 seconds. That’s longer than they normally are going to look. So I call the other three corners, except for the top right corner, outer Mongolia, because they probably just aren’t in play.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. That’s so funny. I was at a museum in London and it was this painting, Bronzino is the artist and I can’t remember the name of the painting, Cupid something or other. I have seen this painting over and over again. Well, that’s our history books example. I’ve even probably put it out on PowerPoints in front of students. I was, at the museum, I looked at it, and there is a dragon in the painting, in the background. The woman turned into a dragon, and I was like, how many times have I seen this artwork, and I have never once noticed that the main character is half dragon? It’s true. Yeah, we just focus on the main stuff and we don’t look all the way around it.

Dan Hill:
No, we don’t, and that’s one of the things I learned from the study actually, is the subtle details. In academia, we love to revel in the subtle, subtle details, a chance for the teacher to point out some unusual aspect, which is great and very legitimate, but I’m telling you the person in four seconds, they probably don’t get there.

Cindy Ingram:
Okay. I’m getting some key takeaways here that I’m going to have to start writing down. I can go back and listen to this, but I’m going to write something out really fast.

Dan Hill:
Sure, by all means.

Cindy Ingram:
I’m learning from this. Okay.

Dan Hill:
Well, for instance, the slipper in Fragonard’s The Swing, I mean, there are two men who are pulling the rope as she’s on the swing. Quite honestly, I’m sure they’re hoping she’s going to flip away more than a slipper. They would like her to flip a bit more, but the slipper, just flung into the air and most people did not notice the detail.

Cindy Ingram:
That’s interesting.

Dan Hill:
Even though, narratively, that’s almost the linchpin of the whole dynamic of what’s going on. The same thing. You want to take a really bold example and it also tells you the power of the face, go to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. Well, they’re touching fingers. This is the moment of giving the spark of life. People didn’t go there because in part I think you had flesh tones that gets an off white background. So you didn’t have color contrast, but they actually went to God’s face.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, I remember that when I was looking through the book, that most of the attention was right there.

Dan Hill:
Yeah. I think this is Michelangelo being really bold. I can think of all sorts of artwork where you’ve got Jesus and Virgin Mary and so forth. I can’t think of a single other artist who is so bold to put God into the artwork and so directly. So you want to know who’s God, what does God look like? How is God feeling? God wins.

Cindy Ingram:
I love it. Okay, so this is so fascinating. Okay, so you measured the eye tracking and then you also measured emotional response. Can you tell us how do that?

Dan Hill:
I did. With coding, there are 23 different facial expressions. I alluded to a few of them, the lips pursing together, the nose wrinkling, the eyes go wide, etc. There are 23 expressions that correspond to those seven emotions I introduced earlier. Some of the expressions just go to one emotion, some go to two or three emotions for instance. What we have, and the eye tracking company in Sweden actually put a small camera into the lower right corner of their eye tracker because of me. I said, “I’m a facial coder, it’d be lovely if you would do that for me,” and I said, “Yes, we will,” because we think about the people who will be interested as well. What it means is I had to take that video, put it through a studio where I have a software system that allows me to slow motion freeze-frame, replay the video so I can see what is on the looks of the people looking at the artwork.

Dan Hill:
I’m playing detective basically. What I’m looking for is, first and foremost, engagement. Do their muscles move? Actions peak louder than words, the actions. I’m looking for subtle little expressions of the face, or sometimes not so subtle if it’s a huge smile, for instance. So I’m looking for engagement. What’s the volume of the emoting? And then I’m looking for which particular muscle movements, which tells me which particular emotions are happening for people.

Cindy Ingram:
Okay. Yeah, you had on your … there was charts that had both engagement and appeal. Engagement is just that they’re emoting at all. And then appeal is …

Dan Hill:
Well, let me answer for you.

Cindy Ingram:
[laughs] I’m trying to answer.

Dan Hill:
It’s perfectly understandable. Engagement is you’re turning them on. It’s arousal, it’s going to be memorable, it’s going to be motivating. Appeal is really positive versus negative emoting, because happiness is the only positive of our core emotions. Because emotions have an evolutionary role. They make us alert to danger like, oh my God, something bad’s happening, how am I going to deal with it? Happiness is almost like a luxury emotion. We’re fortunate enough to be happy for a little bit and then I have go back to the struggle to make a living and all these other things that go on. So anger and fear and sadness and disgust and contempt are negative emotions. Surprise is basically a neutral emotion. Is the surprise a good surprise? I got a new car for Christmas. Is it a bad surprise? I got a new car accident on the way home from work. Which one is it?

Dan Hill:
It can tilt either way. If you get to the far right side of positive appeal, that means there’s lots of happiness. For instance, people of course, loved Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. They love the painting in its own right, and they probably love it because it’s familiar. It’s like coming home. There’s Mona Lisa, I’m waiting to see Mona Lisa. Now I get to see Mona Lisa, but that does not disqualify negative emotions. They have every right to exist. They may be what I call being on emotion, that you’re trying to, the emotional response that fits the nature of the artwork. One of the most heartbreaking pieces in my study was by a photographer named, last name of Carter, a South African, and he has a photograph called Famine in Sudan.

Dan Hill:
And it’s a young boy and there’s a vulture sitting just a few feet away waiting for the inevitable outcome. Carter committed suicide with a year and a half of doing the photograph. It’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking to look of the photograph, and when people looked at it, they had a negative response. Does that mean it’s a bad artwork? By no means. It means it got home what it was trying to get home. People had a strong reaction and it’s a negative reaction, and that’s appropriate.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. Did you find with most to viewers that they did have plenty of strong emotional responses of … I don’t know how I’m wording that question. Does that question make sense to you?

Dan Hill:
No, it does. Because I’m looking for engagement level, I’m looking for fixations level. I have 88 artworks works. They’re all great artworks. You’re up against … it’s like an all star game of baseball or basketball to be in this study. It was so painful to have to choose what was going to be in there. I felt like I was Noah loaded the ark, two by two. Matisse didn’t make it into the study. I love Matisse, but in the end I was looking for themes and ways to kind of group the artwork and so there was no Matisse in the study by chance. So yes, there were some things like for instance, Hopper’s Nighthawks, I really like the painting. I like hopper, but it was just a little too monochrome for people in color scheme.

Dan Hill:
You can’t really see the faces all that well, they’re a little bit smaller, a little bit turned obliquely in terms of the angle. And so that didn’t necessarily capture people. Let’s go the opposite extreme. Tracey Emin’s My Bed. Most people won’t know this piece. I did not know this piece till I got ready to start picking out elements, but I really wanted to move into contemporary art as well. I didn’t want this just to be famous art, like old dead white guys necessarily. I wanted variety. I wanted female artists, I wanted artists of color, and I wanted contemporary works. I started looking around. I went, wow, this is a really interesting piece. And it was my overall winner. It created the boast fixations and the most emotional engagement, and Emin’s My Bed is the bed that she basically harbored in after romantic relationship ended.

Dan Hill:
She lived in this bed for, I’m going to say three weeks, five weeks. By the side of the bed is the empty cigarette card, the empty vodka bottle, the nylons that she shed, the luggage in the corner if she could only get herself out of bed where she might go away on vacation to get away from it all, get away from the heartache, and people could really relate to this because beds are so powerful. We’re likely born in a bed. We might quite possibly die in a bed. We make love in a bed, we sleep in a bed or we might just lounge in a bed. We might read in bed, watch TV in bed. It has so many associations for us, and people can relate to it across the age range that I had here. And that just makes so much sense. So it’s contemporary, it’s an installation and people just went for it big time.

Cindy Ingram:
That’s awesome. Yeah, I remember that from the book. There’s no faces in that one.

Dan Hill:
No faces, but there’s a storyline we can relate to and there’s an object because a lot of installation pieces did really well. If you had to choose a single genre that did well, it was what I would call the ready mades or the installations where you’re using chairs like a Chinese artist did. It could be the urinal, the notorious urinal that Duchamp used, but it was things that are for people’s lives. And again, they can relate to it. This is important as a teacher. I remember one time I thought I’d given a great lecture, but I had a student who always sat in the back of the room, rarely talked, sometimes came late to class. Of all days, this is the day he finally talks to me, but he doesn’t really talk to me. He said, “Great lecture Professor Hill,” and he raised his hand over his head, like, this all went over my head. Thank you very much, you lost me. So if the artwork can’t come home to people and can’t come home fairly quickly or at least striking an initial cord. You’re kind of talking to yourself, sadly.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I went to a museum this last weekend. I went to the high museum in Atlanta and there was a really cool exhibit, but all of it, I could tell there was all sorts of deep meaning, but it wasn’t readily available to me. I would have to really sit and think and process. At my state, I was like, I’m not in the mood to do that right now. So I totally didn’t get any of it, but if he had used maybe some more universal objects.

Dan Hill:
Yeah. No, we need a way in. We need a way in, and the longer you’re in the museum, the more you need it. One of the things I did is a little sub bar that said, let’s see, even just over 30 pieces, if the amount of emotional engagement declines, and it did by about 8%. In most museums, unless they’re like the Guidhall of London and so forth, there are a lot of pieces in those museums. So, we do need some help and we need more help as museum fatigue sets in in going through a collection.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, and too, it makes me think that these big museum people try to see everything. So like, well, I paid this money or whatever, I want to go and see all of it, but they’re actually doing themselves a disservice by doing that. They’re going to end it being too exhausted to remember the highlights I think.

Dan Hill:
Yeah. No, I think the best thing they could, is quite honestly, take a lunch break and then come back or maybe a lunch break, a coffee break and another coffee break. If they’re so enthralled, they’re going to stay there long time. Just recognize your limits.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, I did go to that exhibit at the end and I had already had several quality emotional experiences by that point and I was kind of done I think.

Dan Hill:
Yeah. No, we all have a limit someplace somewhere.

Cindy Ingram:
Okay. So you said that they loved Mona Lisa and I saw that in the book about like you had in the book charted all the spots where people liked the most. The hands were not at all … People didn’t care about the hands, I thought that was really interesting. Can you tell us what people’s reactions were to Mona Lisa?

Dan Hill:
Well, they really went for the face because da Vinci was the original facial coder, quite honestly. He and Michelangelo really got into, I know it’s a little grotesque, into dissection of bodies. In Michelangelo’s case, you really focused on the torso. He was most on the body. It’s probably why his statue of David is so great, but da Vinci went the opposite direction. He went for the face, he got obsessed with the facial muscles and how they move and what emotions they show. There was probably nobody who was that good on facial anatomy as da Vinci for another 200 years. All the ways in which he’s a genius, even before Darwin could get there, da Vinci got there, of course. da Vinci always does everything. I think Mona Lisa is fascinating because there’s multiple emotions on her face.

Dan Hill:
The real disservice is when we talk about the Mona Lisa smile and we kind of acknowledge, usually that’s a world wary smile or some such thing, but actually there are five different emotions going on in Mona Lisa’s face. There is a smile. It’s very faint smile. There’s also a smirk. I think the smirk could very well be because she was of higher social status. She was the life of a wealthy merchant in Florence. da Vinci was born illegitimate and a painter, and he’s famous now, but he wasn’t necessarily so famous then. In fact, when he left Italy to go to France, he took Mona Lisa on the back of a mule out of the country on his way up to Paris. She shows both contempt and a smile. Then she shows anger. The lower eyelid is straight, tout with some tension to it.

Dan Hill:
I imagine this could be because he was a perfectionist. It took him four years to do the basis of the work for Mona Lisa. Michelangelo got the whole Sistine Chapel ceiling done at the same time, four years. She may have gotten annoyed with the perfectionist she was sitting in front of. Then the mouth pushes upward, the lower chin pushes upward, which is a sign of anger and disgust and sadness. All of this is happening on her face, and I think it’s that complexity that just fascinates us. It’s that talent for facial coding that he originated really and brought home in the painting.

Cindy Ingram:
That is so cool. I was also really fascinated by the emotional reactions of Munch’s, The Scream, and also the Arnolfini Portrait where the emotions of the viewers don’t match the emotions in the painting. Can you talk about that?

Dan Hill:
Yeah, I was fascinated by both of them, and I’m half Norwegian. Of course Munch’s, The Scream had to be in the study no matter what. The reaction was low grade happiness. When I look at happiness, I put it on four levels. The weakest level is what I call acceptance, the begrudging smile as in, that’s the worst joke I ever heard, but at least you’d tried to humor me, and that’s basically the reaction people had to Munch. I don’t know why they had it necessarily, but this is my surmise so that they can make some sense. One is that the imagery has been co-opted, has been co-opted twice over. One is home alone. The promotional materials use this as a knock off. So we’ve got a whole different context for it suddenly.

Dan Hill:
The other one is, are these plastic dolls, as people may know, that you can have in the corner of your office at home imitating the street like my God, office politics, my boss is driving me crazy. That’s out and out humor. But I also think we’re in a different era. We’re in a much more cynical era. For Munch, it was a pure distillation of, he suffered from acrophobia depression. His family did the long winters in Norway, all of it, but this was a very heartfelt scream. But for us, the blood red sky, sorry, just too much maybe, can’t go there with you.

Cindy Ingram:
That makes me wonder too, that a lot of this would be different if they were faced with the actual painting, because we’re used to seeing it on a screen. We’re used to seeing reproductions of it. I think seeing it in person, which I’ve never gotten to see that one in person, but that the way Munch did the textures and the size and all of that would maybe then take them out of that, oh, I recognize this. This is famous. I like this too. Like, oh, I can feel this.

Dan Hill:
Yeah. No, I think it’s possible, but I would say that the Carter photograph, for instance, with the vulture, they did feel that and there was a lot of anger and sadness going on with that. I do think the co-opting had a lot to do with it also because we’re in a very right political environment to try to put it politely, and the scream has been used many times by cartoonists to reflect on what they think the other side is making them feel like, oh my God, this is crazy. We’re all out of control here. It’s a very current image in our culture. That’s one of the realities is, and I know as someone who’s been a poet and an essayist, you create it and then frankly it leaves your control.

Dan Hill:
It is also very much about what your audience makes of it. If they happen to go there, they happen to go there. Now, the other one you mentioned was the Arnolfini. This is the famous wedding portrait. Very ancient piece. You have an older gentleman and a younger looking woman who is looking down and is also evidently quite pregnant. This time we had a lot of contempt reaction, which is, if trust is the emotion of life in business relationships, contempt is its opposite. I don’t trust you, I don’t respect you. This case, I was so freaked out that I took the results over to an art school of my wife studies and I caught a bunch of artists, particularly female artists having to be around the lunch room at noon. And I said, “You got to help me out here. What is happening?”

Dan Hill:
By the time I got done with the discussion, it made a lot of sense to me. Some of them said, “Well, we’re in the Me Too movement. Frankly, he looks older, more powerful. His body language kind of is a bit haughty. He’s holding court over her and we don’t like that. We’re reacting against this. We have an adverse reaction to that setting because they don’t look like they’re equals. Other people said, “Well, I got to be honest. I’m a little more traditional and I don’t think you should be pregnant on your wedding day.” So, it didn’t work to them for a different moral reason. Between those two I went, huh, that makes a lot of sense. And I had my own reason, which is the guy looks a bit like Putin, Vladimir Putin. Yeah, I was like, that’s not who I’d be marrying.

Dan Hill:
But the reaction was while looking at her, that’s actually what spurred the reaction. I think it’s those two things. She really looks uncomfortable to be there. There is some speculation now that this was actually taken after her death, that she died in childbirth. So, the sad sadness, just possibly, has something to do with, not this guy she’s marrying, but what actually befell her as a fate.

Cindy Ingram:
Oh, I didn’t know about that one.

Dan Hill:
Yeah.

Cindy Ingram:
Cool. Another artwork that surprised me was Guernica by Picasso. In the book you said that it had the most dramatic eye tracking results in terms of people moving their eyes around, but that it had very little emotional engagement.

Dan Hill:
Yeah. I think that ties into another theme of the book. I went through and I did pick the artworks by theme. One of them was what I called conflicts and struggle. The Carter piece that I alluded to with the vulture, is one of those instances where it did manage to get an emotional response, but in a number of cases, including Guernica, it’s just like, I don’t really want to go there. I don’t want to take that on. That’s a really interesting dynamic because a lot of contemporary art is much more aggressive than older art. It’s more in your face, it’s more struggling for and seeking a reaction. It means that there probably has to be a little bit of sugar with the salt because people just … it’s almost like a roadside accident. You’re fascinated in a way, but then you also kind of want to look away because, God forbid, I’m the one in the accident.

Dan Hill:
I think there’s something about human nature wanting to preserve ourself, not be too emotionally taxed by something. So, the subject matter is taxing, and then the complexity is taxing. It’s a large piece. There are a lot of things going on. People don’t like to work that hard. I think one of the advantages the Carter piece had was radical simplicity. This one is the opposite. A friend of mine said, “You have to remember, Dan, a lot of people are until workers.” Until five o’clock, until the next job, until retirement, so on and so forth.

Dan Hill:
Human nature is, if we had our druthers, we would be like house cats. We would sit around most of the day and then say, “Yeah, I’m hungry now.” Making people work too hard in art appreciation or anything else is a possible danger. If you don’t mind, I’ll add to this just a little bit. When I’ve trying to study both advertising and art, I’ve always looked for what’s a theory of what’s going to succeed. What will get visual attention, will get emotional attention. There’s a man named William Wundt who was the contemporary of Freud, they together founded modern psychology. Wundt has what he calls Wundt’s curve, how are you going to grab people?

Dan Hill:
What doesn’t grab people is you play it totally safe. You make it really simple and really familiar and you’ve given them applesauce. What an ad agency, I found in my experiences and sometimes an artist will do is, they go way to the opposite end. They make it really complicated and it’s really novel and now you’re working really hard to put the whole thing together and people just give up. The sweet spot is to give them away in, either it is novel but simple or it’s familiar but it’s complex. You give them a way in and then you twist it. You give some extra layer of intrigue through either the complexity or the novelty to make up for the familiar and the simple. That’s how you get the apple pie.

Cindy Ingram:
I love that. That is so cool. I can apply this to so many things in my life. That’s so cool. Okay. You got me thinking again. I was taking notes.

Dan Hill:
Hopefully, I got your feeling too.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. I don’t know, that was like a mic drop or something that I just lost all train of thought, so that’s cool. Okay. How do you spell that psychologist name, Wundt.

Dan Hill:
W-U-N-D-T. William Wundt.

Cindy Ingram:
Got it. Okay. I want to look at that later, because I’m in the business of finding stock photos sometimes. I’m like, this is all very applicable to my stock photo finding for my website.

Dan Hill:
I think I missed one of your questions earlier, which was about hands. I’d like to go back and make sure I cover it. in Mona Lisa, they don’t really look at the hands, they are to the face and I just kind of ran with the face. But unfortunately, yes, limbs, torso, Michelangelo’s David was an exception, but in many cases they didn’t even particularly go there. They even didn’t even go there with nudity. It’s amazing how often nudity, male or female, was not as captivating as the face. Take Rodin’s The Thinker, for instance, you’ve got massive legs that are protruding towards you if you’re facing the sculpture piece, but they went to the face. If you take Parmigianino, I love his self portrait in a convex mirror.

Dan Hill:
Well, front and center, and I told you the lower foreground is a really powerful way to capture people. That’s where you see his hand. He is emphasizing the fact that he’s an artist. He uses his hand to draw and to paint, but people bounce to the face yet again. In fact, the Munch painting was one of the few instances where they didn’t go to the face. They went to the blood red sky that they thought was a little too much. It sent them over the top. The other time they didn’t go to a human face was Chagall’s I in the Village, where they went instead the horse’s face. So the face still won, it just wasn’t the human face.

Cindy Ingram:
Okay. For all of you who are listening and who are just dying to like go through every single artwork, the book has amazing illustrations of all of this stuff by topic, there’s gender, there’s line and color and all of these things. I encourage you to check it out because I have been really enjoying it and I want to go back and even dive in more after we talk because I’m just like so fascinated. I think that that is a good stopping place for our conversation. Although I want to ask you, when it comes to helping teacher, because I help teachers teach from works of art and help their students appreciate art and connect with art, can you think of any of the lessons from your research that are especially applicable that we maybe didn’t cover?

Dan Hill:
Yes, absolutely. Color. There’s a neurological study that I just was alerted to recently at Columbia University discovered yes, faces beat out bodies because we want to know how they’re feeling, so identity from the face comes ahead of those, but they also found that color came before form, that we quickly have an emotional vibe in response to the color scheme. In my book, I went through very carefully to identify what colors could do well. I don’t think this will surprise people necessarily, red was the most engaging, it caused the most emotional response. Blue was the most appealing. We like a blue sky day, we like a nice calm Lake, so on and so forth. A lot of the browns and blacks and tan color scheme, that’s so much a part of the renaissance in the 18th century doesn’t do as well for us in a modern palette.

Dan Hill:
White is kind of a middle ground. It can struggle a bit. Although there was a wonderful use of white by Norman Rockwell, I want to say defense from hunger, but that’s not quite the title, but it’s at Thanksgiving time and the family’s gathered around to have the Turkey and it’s white, on white, on white basically, and yet he pulls it off. He really pulls it off. Green falls back. Green does well in terms of eye tracking duration because you have nature and you can look at all the elements of nature. But people get to nature slowly. It doesn’t usually make your four seconds, and emotionally green, it’s kind of like a nowhere color. It performed as poorly or more poorly than anything other than the black, brown color spectrum.

Cindy Ingram:
That’s fascinating. That’s cool. Okay, so in the show notes we will put a link to your book as well as pictures of some of the artworks that we’ve talked about today and to your website. Is there any other place that our listeners can connect with you online?

Dan Hill:
I think the website is the perfect way to start. That’s danhill.sensorylogic.com. But I do have, if you go there, you’re going to see, I also have a blog series called Faces of the Week. It’s often about politics, but I try to do it on a nonpartisan basis as best I can. But politics is a blood sport. There are lots of emotions that are invoked, but I also go to the Academy Awards and I’ll do some sports stuff and whatever else captures my eye in a given week. I think that’s something they could enjoy as well. They can find me. I’m out there.

Cindy Ingram:
I really enjoyed your blog today too. I got lost in it because you would circle the different parts of the face and what they were doing, what the conversation was.

Dan Hill:
Yeah, and I think for an artist or an art teacher, yeah, this stuff is all around us in the culture.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. It’s awesome. All right, so my last question, which I ask everybody, and you already kind of answered it at the beginning, so I’m going to give you a chance in maybe another artwork or you can reiterate your first one, but that is, what artwork changed your life?

Dan Hill:
Well, I’m going to take the artwork that most struck me recently. I was in the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. I loved the large oversized table and chairs called Under the Table, because it’s so large in scale that you as a human being pass underneath it as if you’re in a world of giants and you are the midget or the child. I’d like to think that if we’re really going to be honest with ourselves, we’re all still children, and we’re all still children in part because of the very premise of the book, which is our emotions dominate. We are not as rational, we are not as grown up, we are not as conscious of how we respond to the world we might imagine.

Dan Hill:
For me, I saw the at the corner my eye when I turned a corner in the museum and then I just kept walking back and forth underneath that, just imagining myself in a room where the giants are eating lunch and I was going to try to have to find a way to survive. I found it just so captivating and I’ve been sharing that with some friends on Facebook and so forth, artists and other people, and it’s been trending a little bit. I just loved the piece.

Cindy Ingram:
Awesome. Cool. I’ll look that up and will also post and link to that in the show notes as well. All right, well thank you so very much for this conversation. It was totally fascinating, and I’m sure that everyone listening felt the same way.

Dan Hill:
I had a great time. Thank you so much. You’re very kind.

Cindy Ingram:
Thank you.

Cindy Ingram:
Thank you so much for listening to the Art Class Curator Podcast. Help more art teachers find us by reviewing the podcast and recommending it to a friend. Get more inspiration for teaching art with purpose by subscribing to our newsletter, Your Weekly Art Break. Recent topics include the importance of seeing art in-person, famous and should be famous women artists and 21 days of art from around the world. Subscribe at artclasscurator.com/artbreak to receive six free art appreciation worksheets. This week’s our quote is from Émile Zola. He says, “If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you. I am here to live out loud.” Thanks so much for listening. Have a wonderful week.

Thanks for listening! Have an idea for an episode topic or think you may be a great guest for the show? Click here to send us an email telling us about it.