How gallery visitors only viewed work by Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin for less than 5 seconds

Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin

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.

Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin

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.

Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin

We wondered whether there was a difference between the amount of time people were prepared to give a classic painting, and to modern art.

Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin

We chose Tate Britain for a scientific experiment. Its collection of British art includes both the historic great masters  -  such as Whistler, Hogarth, Sargent  -  and recent famous names including Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread.
The explosion of interest in art in recent years has focused on fashionable young artists, doing outrageous things  -  exhibiting their unmade bed or a dead shark, or persuading people to sprint from one end of the Tate to the other at two-minute intervals.

Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin

These things easily get into the newspapers, and are famous among people who aren't even interested in art. These days, Turner and Constable seem less exciting than these celebrity artists. Could the classics stand up in a simple test of people's interest?