Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin
for less than 5 seconds
by Philip Hensherin dailymail.co.uk
The basic fact about art is that you, the viewer, decide how much time you're going to give it. Other art forms give you no choice. A symphony is going to take up 40 minutes of your time; a film two hours; a play perhaps three or four hours. But you can choose whether to look at a painting for ten seconds or ten minutes. That's a good measure of how interested you are by it. We wondered whether there was a difference between the amount of time people were prepared to give a classic painting, and to modern art.