Jennifer Doyle
Introducing Difficulty: Hard Feelings

As a spectator to performance art, I might have a high tolerance for blood, nudity, and noise, but I seem to have a lower tolerance for work engaged with more ordinary forms of relational intimacy, for the things that “feel” like life and therefore cut too close.

Emotion can make our experience of art harder, but it also makes that experience more interesting.

Does a feeling come from inside the spectator or from the artwork? Does an artwork represent feeling? Whose: the artist’s or the viewer’s? Does a work make feelings? How?

…it can be hard to have intense feelings in museums when those feelings go against social protocol. In an art gallery, anger, tears, arousal, and certain kinds of laughter may appear to signal the disintegration of composure, naïveté, and a lack of class. In such spaces, as much as we are encouraged to be moved by works of art, we are also encouraged to remain cool.

What you enjoy, how you enjoy it, and how you express that enjoyment can reveal a lot about who you are and where you come from.

Museums and art galleries are like schools: they are spaces in which we encounter culture, usually on someone else’s terms.

As Jennifer González writes, “The museum as a whole, as an ideological home, does not welcome us equally.”