The Power of Observation: A Conversation with Amy Herman

Geoff Mitelman: I’m Rabbi Geoff Mitelman, Founding Director of Sinai and Synapses, which bridges the worlds of religion and science. And I’m very excited to be sitting here with Amy Herman, who is in the next Zoom box over. She is an author and an art historian. She wrote a book that I read about five years ago called Visual Intelligence, about art and the importance of observation and noticing things. And it was just an absolutely beautiful and brilliant book. And we got connected through her sister – through your sister Jane – and your new book, Fixed, which just came out about two months ago, I believe, right?

Amy Herman: Yes. Yes.

Geoff Mitelman: So, Amy, I’m really excited to be talking with you about the importance of art and how it can intersect with questions of science and religion. Thank you for being here.

Amy Herman: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

Geoff Mitelman: I want to contextualize this, for those who are watching and listening, of the question of art. There’s a great book, that was written maybe five or six years ago, called, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? And it’s two Jesuit priests, and they’re in conversation, and they start in a museum. They start in an art museum, and they say, “Why do we start this conversation in the world of art?” And in a lot of ways, that’s because art is a different way of thinking about and talking about questions of science and religion. I think religion is designed to be an emotional kind of conversation, in the way that art really allows us to see and experience things that we can’t necessarily articulate.

And so, I’d love for you to share a little bit of: What’s the connection, the relationship, that you see between the world of art and the world of language? So, a lot of parallels and a lot of differences as well.

Amy Herman: So many, so many. Well, thank you again for having me. And I think I’m going to start by saying that art has been a way to harness the creative spirit for millennia. As I said recently in a piece that I wrote, “this is not the time to fool with that success.” You know, it’s worked for all these years. Humankind has always been producing art, and I always think it’s the greatest chronicler of our time. Good times, bad times – people are always producing art. And one of the things that you and I talked about is the highly subjective nature of looking at art. But what I want to do is peel back those layers. When someone says, “Well, I don’t like this,” let’s talk about what we see. And the bottom line for me about art and language is that art is a set of data. To pare it down to its most objective, it’s a set of data, and each of us sees something. So, when we peel back the layers of “I like this,” or “I don’t like this,” tell me what you see. Tell me what it is that you see. And so that’s what I’ve been using – art as sort of that baseline of being able to talk about what it is that we see, what do we agree upon, and what do we disagree upon, and how we can use that as a platform to engage each other in conversation.

Geoff Mitelman: And what I love –  and we talked about this a little bit as well, thinking about poetry – that a lot of texts, a lot of liturgy is written in poetry. And poetry is a form of art, although I know your focus is more on the visual arts. But in the same way that it’s not totally subjective, there are things in a piece of art that are there, right? There are things that – “yes, this is a picture of a pear. Yes, this is a woman standing here.” And being able to say, “this is what I’m actually seeing,” and drawing that a distinction between what’s actually there, versus “What am I interpreting,” of what’s actually there. And that can be very, very hard, both for religious perspectives and also for artistic perspectives, I would think.

Amy Herman: Well, you hit on a key concept there about interpretation. And if we are looking – let’s say we’re looking at a Cezanne painting of a bowl of apples. And I would say to you, “Well, what do you think of this bowl of apples?” And you would say, “Well, Amy, I don’t think they’re apples. I think they’re pears.” Now, Cezanne is not alive to tell us whether they’re apples or they’re pears, so you and I have to engage in a conversation – and I’m going to put the word “solve” in quotes –to “solve” our disagreement. Our disagreement is “apples versus pears.” And in an ideal world, I’m going to give you the opportunity – I’m going to say, “Rabbi, tell me why you think they’re pears.” And then you’re going to say to me, “Amy, why do you think they’re apples?” And we’re each going to talk about color and shape and shadow, and one of three things will happen: I’ll see it your way, you’ll see it my way, or we’ll agree to disagree. But the two of us looking at Cezanne’s paintings of fruit gives us an objective platform to engage in a conversation that’s not threatening to either of us. Apples and pears isn’t threatening to either of us.

Geoff Mitelman: I’d love for you to share a little bit, because I know this is the work that you do, both with governmental organizations and companies. And we talked about religion a couple of minutes ago. But so many of these scientific questions surrounding, particularly, climate change or COVID, and even social facts of political realities – we argue over what are we actually seeing in the world. And we’re disagreeing about what’s the reality on the ground, let alone “How do we solve these kinds of problems?” And some of that is, when we start with this conversation of “What’s your feeling about abortion?” That’s going to immediately go into a very heated discussion. And one thing that you do, I know, is to try to lower the temperature by bringing in art and saying, “Let’s talk about these kinds of questions.” I’d love for you to share a little bit about what you do and how that works, and why art is such a great entry point, to be able to have these heated conversations.

Amy Herman: Yeah, art has provided – I work in a lot of, I’m going to say, difficult professions. I work with people in critical missions, crisis intervention, first responders, people that have to make split-second decisions. And although I don’t do what they do, I want to give them the tools to do what they do better. So I often look at art as a tool that we can use for de-escalation. And one of the core concepts is the idea of saying what you see before saying what you think.

And the example that I’m going to give you happened about – oh, it must have been ten years ago. I was at a law enforcement conference, and no one in the audience knew each other. And I put up a painting by Thomas Eakins of a man playing a cello. And he was an older man with a long beard, and he was sitting in the chair playing the cello. And I said to the audience, “Who’s going to tell me, what do you see in the painting?” And a woman raised her hand – and, I couldn’t make this up, I couldn’t believe this happened – she raised her hand, and I had some answers in my head that I was expecting – “a white man, a beard, a cello, a chair.” And she raised her hand, and she said, “The man in your painting is Jewish.” And I was sort of taken aback, because I couldn’t see how she got to that conclusion. So I asked her – I said, “What did you see in this painting that led you to the conclusion to say that this man is Jewish?”

And she said, “You know, in World War II, the Nazis put Jews in concentration camps.”

I said, “Yes, they did.”

She said, “And sometimes they had chamber music groups.”

I said, “Yes, they did.”

She said, “So that when the Red Cross came through, they could see that everything was okay.” And I needed to stop her. I said, “You need to stop.” I said, “There’s a man sitting in a chair with a cello. Who’s talking about Nazis? Who’s talking about chamber music? Who’s talking about the Red Cross?” And she got very angry with me. And she said, “You asked me what I thought of when I saw your picture.” And I said, “Actually, I didn’t. I said, ‘what do you see,’ not ‘what do you think?’”

And it’s one of these ways to deescalate a situation, because she was going off on some crazy tangent. And of these hot topics of abortion and climate change and the political landscape, rather than jumping to talk about what we think, let’s use art as that template to say, “Hold on, before you tell me what you think, tell me what you see.”

Geoff Mitelman: Mhm. I think one of the interesting things about art, and about its interpretation also, is that we always come at images and language with preconceptions. We can’t totally be a blank slate. And one of the hard things about art is, we don’t know what’s going to be important until it actually comes in. Right? And that’s one of the challenges of language – you don’t know if something’s true or not until someone tells it to you. And generally, once we hear it, we think it’s true. So how do we try to separate out these questions of being able to say, like, “What do I see?” – as much as it can be, a neutral observer – versus coming at it with our own history and baggage and perspective. How do we disentangle those things?

Amy Herman: It’s a good question. And we start with the premise that visual images are very powerful. That’s why I’m lucky enough to be working in the art world. They’re very, very powerful. And when we recognize the power of art and channel them into ways to help us see, not only the way we see, but help how others see more effectively – and the example I’m going to give you, when you said “we all come to looking with preconceived ideas and notions,” it’s called bias. We come to everything with a bias. And not all biases are bad, but we approach everything with a bias.

So, the exercise that I do in my class is I put up a portrait of George Washington and a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and I call them #1 and #16. We just keep it simple: “Look at number one, number 16.” And we talk about the differences between the photograph of Lincoln and the painting of Washington. And then I take down Washington, and I put up the formal portrait of Barack Obama. I don’t say a word. And I look at everyone in the audience and their faces change. And I say to them, “This is not a political discourse. This is not a partisan session. I don’t care if you like Barack Obama, you hate Barack Obama, or you’re completely indifferent, but every single person in the room has a personal experience living under the administration of Barack Obama. And so when I put up a painting, you have skin in the game. You have a personal stake in the game.”

And then I go back to Washington and Lincoln. If anybody lived during the administration of those two men, I want to know what they’re eating for breakfast, because they shouldn’t be here, right?

And then I go back and I switch it to Obama, and I say to them, “The way you view Obama is going to view how you look at Abraham Lincoln. It’s just the way it is.” And that’s what bias is. When you have a personal experience, it puts a lens over how you see everything else. And it’s this very sort of clear-headed way to explain bias – the personal versus the not-personal. None of us know what it was like to live under the administration of Abraham Lincoln or George Washington, but we all have skin in the game with Barack Obama, whatever our feelings are. And so, to recognize that we all go into discussions and disagreements and meetings, all with bias – as soon as we recognize that, it automatically deescalates, because we know we’re all coming from different places, and we have that filter to put the conversation through.

Geoff Mitelman: And there are ways to be able to talk about these kinds of questions, of, we can disagree about something with artwork because it’s not as charged, right? You could certainly put up artwork that is going to evoke emotional responses – as art, I think, is meant to do. But you can also talk about it, of being able to say, “Let’s simply say, what do we see in our visual field right now?”

Amy Herman: That’s right. And one of the things that naturally comes to mind – and again, I don’t say this as an incendiary subject, and I don’t say it – again, all of my sessions, I work on all sides of the aisle. I work with members of Congress. I work with both political parties. I work on all sides. But just the approach – that we’re approaching the anniversary of what happened on January 6th. We all recognize that something happened on January 6th. We all agree on that. But how we envision and how we discuss what happens is all based on our perception of those events. And when we step back and we try to look objectively at footage, it’s almost impossible.

But if we really try, and say, “Okay, let’s talk about what we see and what occurred,” and step back from our feelings that occurred after the fact, it, again, enables us to de-escalate and think about what we’re looking at objectively. And that’s where the inspiration came for my book, because I realized, pre-pandemic, that everything was broken (now everything’s even more broken than it was before), and that we needed a template. We needed an objective template, because whatever we were doing wasn’t working, and we needed a new way to think about fixing problems.

Geoff Mitelman: You know, one of the things that I’m curious to talk about is the role of creativity. And one of the guests that we had a couple months ago is a friend of ours, Professor Stuart Firestein, who wrote a great book. He’s a biologist at Columbia, and he wrote a book about Ignorance and How It Drives Science, and another book about Failure: Why It’s So Successful. And he talks about that we have an image of science, for example, as “I have the hypothesis, and then I’m going to prove that it’s true.” And he said, “That’s not the way science works. Science comes in with ‘I don’t know what the question is going to be. I’m going to create something that hasn’t been done before.’”

And art, by definition, is something that has never been done before. And there’s a communal element of it, right? There’s the artist – of what the artist had in mind when they created it – but they’re also doing it for an audience who’s going to experience it and interpret it in different kinds of ways. So where does the role of creativity and the artist, or the person who creates that piece of art – how does that connect with the people who are going to see it ten years later, 50 years later, 2,000 years later? We don’t get to talk with Cezanne. We can’t talk with the authors of the Torah. We can’t talk with Isaac Newton. But they still influence us here today.

Amy Herman: I think the common ground, especially when it comes to science and when it comes to art, is you have those Venn diagrams intersect on the area of inspiration. If there’s a problem in science, we have to solve the problem. I mean, here we have this virulent pandemic – we have this terrible pandemic, and so we’re racing to get to vaccines. The inspiration for the vaccines is that so many people were dying and so many people were sick.

In terms of art, the inspiration is – it’s the beauty of the human spirit. Artists are inspired. But I break the book down into three basic sections, and it’s analogous to problem-solving and creating a work of art. “Prep, draft and exhibit.” And we prepare – how do we prepare? How do we put those materials together to put a draft together? How many sketches do we have to do? How many things do we throw away? How many things do we change? Do we listen, [does it] influence us? And then how do we present our results to the world? How do we hang the painting in a museum? How do we roll out a vaccine?

And so, the intersection of science and art – it’s really not that far-fetched. There’s inspiration on both fronts. And the template that I follow through the book is the creation of Géricault’s painting, the Raft of the Medusa, from 1819. And it chronicles this terrible, terrible incident that happened in France in 1816, where a huge ship ran aground off the coast of Mauritania and 150 people were thrown onto a raft, and the boat was going to tow the raft, and who was thrown on the raft had to do with socioeconomic and class. And basically, they cut everyone off, and the raft was adrift – 147 people on the raft over 13 days. There were only 15 survivors.

And Géricault decided to paint a painting of this raft at the moment it was rescued. And it was a political calamity for France. It was current events – it wasn’t history painting. And it mirrors so much of what’s happening in our world today. We have all these things that are broken. And that incident was the creative inspiration for Géricault to monumentalize that in this – it’s 23 by 16 feet – it’s huge – and to create a painting that memorializes this terrible event.

So I think good can come from bad. And there’s a template in following how the artists create, where they get their inspiration, and how we can solve problems.

Geoff Mitelman That’s very interesting. I like this idea of presenting and exhibiting. It was – prepare, draft, exhibit?

Amy Herman: Draft and exhibit. Three sections of the book.

Geoff Mitelman: And there’s an analogy, too, of industry and commerce right now. What do you print? Like, it’s wonderful to have a great idea, versus how is it actually going to be responded to in the marketplace, both the commercial marketplace and the marketplace of ideas?

Amy Herman: And we also have to think about all the complexities of our marketplace. When the pandemic started, and my father asked the very simple question, “Why are there no paper towels in Shop-Rite?” And I explained to him about algorithms, how the pandemic changed every – I shouldn’t say paper towels – Clorox wipes. The pandemic changed the algorithm. Everybody bought Clorox wipes. And it takes a while for the market to respond to that.

So, when we’re trying to solve problems, we have to take all of that into our drafting. How does Shop-Rite solve the problem? We don’t have a shortage of Clorox wipes, it’s that the algorithms have shifted. And how do we respond? And how do we take all that into consideration when we’re trying to solve our problems?

And so, I want to lay out a very simple template of how can we use art, which is ubiquitous, and take away the elitist factor – you don’t have to have an art-history degree. You don’t have to know anything. How can we use this as a model, not only to solve our own sort of family disagreements, but the world writ large? How can we look at much bigger problems and think about solving those as well?

Geoff Mitelman: Well, one of the things that I find both challenging and inspiring about art, and I think this actually may have been brought up in your book – so I may be quoting you, but my copy of your book is in my office in the city, where I haven’t been in two years. But one of the things about visual art is that you see everything at once, and your eye can look at different parts of it in one way or another, versus a story or something written, where it’s sequential. And that, I think, creates an interesting dynamic of “What am I responding to?” If you’re reading it or hearing it from a story perspective, you know, “Here’s the beginning, and it’s going to lead to the middle, and then at the end.” At least if it’s a good story, you’re going to know that it’s going to start and then it’s going to end in one place. But when you see a piece of art, it’s all the stimuli at once. And so, you’ve got to make the decision – sometimes consciously, sometimes not – of “How am I going to respond to that?”

So I know that one thing that you also do is: How do you help people articulate and translate some of the visual into the verbal? And I’d love for you to talk a little bit about how you translate that, and where you see the challenges are of turning visual into verbal.

Amy Herman: You’re teeing me up perfectly to explain the title of that book. The title of my book is called Visual Intelligence. And what visual intelligence is, in my definition, is the idea that we have so much stimuli that we can’t possibly process everything that we’re seeing. I mean, I live in New York City. If I processed everything that happened on my one-block walk to the grocery store, my head would explode. So how do we distill the information that we see to absorb what really matters?

And so, I use art as, again, the model to be able to do that, because the only thing I’ll differ with you, what you said before, is when we look at a painting, we don’t necessarily see everything. It’s a matter of time – it’s how much time you spend with the painting. If I say to you, “You have five minutes to look at this painting and discuss it with your partner,” as opposed to “For the next 20 minutes, you’re going to stand in front of this painting,” you’re going to see very different things, because I’m giving you artificial constraints. And that happens – you sit with your colleagues, “all right, we have an hour-long meeting, and we have to solve this problem. Let’s put everything on the table.” If you had a week to solve the problem, you’d have many more options available to you. So, visual intelligence is this model, to say, “Okay, this is the information that’s in front of me, and I give you this template in how to prioritize it.”

And it really comes down to four things – four simple A’s, I call them.

First, you assess the situation. You look at the whole thing, you put parameters around it and say, “Okay, what am I looking at?”

Then you analyze it. you say, “Well, what’s important here? What are the major things that I see? What do I get rid of? What do I retain?”

Then you articulate it.

Then you tell somebody what it is that you’re analyzing, what it is that you see, and then you act. You make a decision.

You assess, you analyze, you articulate, and you act hundreds of times a day. But if we break it down into those four very simple pillars, I don’t want to add to anybody’s plate. Everybody has enough to do. But if you think about it in those four very digestible parts, all right, let’s just step back and agree. “What are we looking at here? What’s the problem?” And then we talk about, “What are the priorities? What are your priorities? What are my priorities?” Then let’s articulate them to each other, and then let’s make a decision.

That’s the process. By using a work of art to sort of give you a framework to how we can look at everything, because we can’t process everything. If I’m going to the grocery store to get three bottles of seltzer and my neighbor stops me and starts talking about something else, I have to remember, “I’m going to the store to get the seltzer. I can talk to her for a few minutes, but I have to remember where I’m going and why I left the apartment in person.”

Geoff Mitelman: Well, and I think that a lot of what’s happened in the pandemic, and I know I’ve felt this way, is my attention span has gone down.

Amy Herman: Welcome to the club.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, right? And I actually remember in reading your book a few years ago, of looking at – there’s a picture of a painting or a photo of a painting, and saying – “Spending three or five minutes – that’s hard.” It’s hard to look at one piece for three to five minutes and like, “Okay, now I’ve got it, I’ve got it. I’ve got it,” and then like, “Oh, wait.” And then I read afterwards, like, “Oh, wow, I missed a huge amount here.”

Amy Herman: Right. And if you take that idea, and you think about what you missed when you’re looking at the painting, what happens when you talk to your child when they come home from school, and you say, “Okay, well, what happened today?” One ear is listening to the answer, and one ear is thinking, “I have a deadline at 5:00.” What are you missing? What are you not hearing?

Geoff Mitelman: Right. I think that’s a huge problem, at least politically, because we, and I think one of the challenges of social media in a lot of ways is that we are able to talk a lot, but there are very few people who are actually able to listen. And I think that becomes really difficult of being able to say, “Let me be fully present here.” And that’s very hard. One of the wonderful things about art museums is that they tend to be, or they’re supposed to be, on the quiet side. They’re supposed to be more – at least a lot of the traditional art museums – on a general level of contemplation and reflection. If you so choose, you can spend 45 minutes looking at a particular piece of art.

Amy Herman: Absolutely. And I think I encourage people to talk in art museums, to talk about what it is that they’re seeing and that idea of being present. One of my mentors has a wonderful line. He says, “We have two ears and one mouth for a reason. We should be listening twice as much as we’re talking.”

And I’m going to apply this to a real-world circumstance that I learned about during the pandemic. I had a long conversation with my sister about this. I learned about the concept of vigil volunteering, and I love the concept so much. The vigil volunteer is someone who volunteers in a hospice so that no one ever has to die alone, and volunteers specifically go to a room where a family can’t be for distance reasons, or they just left, so that no one dies alone.

But the flip side – and this is what I encourage people to do – it’s not so much for the dying patient to have a presence. That’s very important, too, and for the family to know that there’s someone. But for the person, the volunteer, to be present in the moment for themselves and the patient – it gives you an opportunity to collect your thoughts, to be in the moment, because you have offered to be a volunteer for the person whose life is ebbing away.

And it’s this beautiful idea of serving two purposes. You’re making sure that no one is alone when they die, but you’re also learning to be present in the moment. It’s not something you can do on your phone. You have to be there.

And so, the reason I bring that up is because one of the things that I talk about in visual intelligence in this book as well, is the idea of what we’re not doing. It’s called the pertinent negative. “What isn’t happening? What didn’t we hear?” And when you are a vigil volunteer, you’re not engaging in conversation; you’re not doing anything other than being present. And sometimes when we’re looking at a painting, I’ll say, “All right, you just told me what you saw, but what didn’t you see in this painting? What did you expect to be here that wasn’t there?”

Geoff Mitelman: And as you’re talking, I’m thinking about a couple of different elements in Judaism. One is, obviously, thinking about Shabbat, where, six days a week, we’re supposed to be productive and generative, and Shabbat is supposed to be a day of not doing things and being able to be present. And we had Tiffany Shlain, who’s an author, who wrote a book called 24/6.

Amy Herman: I love it. That’s great.

Geoff Mitelman: And the importance of having a text – Shabbat. A lot of Judaism also, there are all the mitzvot, all the commandments that are designed of the things that we’re supposed to do. And there are a whole host of mitzvot that we’re not supposed to do. And also, the limitations actually can be incredibly powerful. And there are musicians there’s a musician named Joey Weissenberg at Hadar, and it was an interview with him maybe ten years ago of doing music, and he’s not using any kind of instrumentation, no guitars, only drums. And he said that actually allows – the restrictions actually allow – a lot more opportunities, because otherwise we’re just bombarded, of, “I could do this, or I could do that, or I could do this,” say, “no, these are your rules.” These are the guidelines. And then you could actually be creative in that kind of way as well.

Amy Herman: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly what I’ve tried to do, to lay the foundation, to think about looking at art, to sort of set those parameters. But now in this next iteration of my work, in the last five years – I’ve combined that foundation with the concept of tikkun olam. How can we repair the world? How can we fix what’s broken? Because it’s our obligation to do that. How can we take this newfound presence, this new way of looking and thinking about repairing our world?

Geoff Mitelman: Well, I remember we had a great conversation last week, and we talked about this a little bit as well, of “What is actually fixable?” And I shared that my children had a daycare, which they absolutely loved, and they had their mission statement, which was “empowering women,” which was fantastic, and then “eliminating racism,” which is a very noble goal – and I think absolutely impossible. Impossible. We talk about a lot of very wonderful, lofty goals. We want to solve gun control, we want to repair our planet and eliminate and stop climate change. And I think sometimes when we think about these big, grandiose goals, we become stuck, and we say, “I can’t do anything,” when in fact, we might not be able to eliminate racism, but we can definitely take steps to become less racist – to be more aware of who we are and our dynamic with others. So how do we take these gigantic problems and turn them into things that can actually be fixed – where we can say, “Yes, this thing was broken, and now we are able to at least temporarily, hopefully, fix it here”?

Amy Herman: I think what you say is true. Nobody wants to ever counter a lofty goal by saying, “You can’t do that.” Nobody can empower all women, or nobody can eliminate racism. But what I think it does is it inspires the dialogue. It enables us to talk about it. And talking about it is the first step of being able to.

I always talk about bite-sized pieces. I always think of, “this is what parents do.” You never want a kid to choke, so you’re always cutting up food into little pieces. But eventually they have to learn to chew bigger pieces and swallow them. And that’s what we all have to do. But on difficult topics, if we can provide the means to break it into bite-sized pieces – that’s why looking at a single work of art or looking at a sculpture and talking about it gives you entry into talking about something that’s not necessarily easy to talk about or even makes you uncomfortable.

And I’ll give you another example. I’d mentioned to you that I went to Paris at the beginning of October. And the reason I went is because the artist, Christo, he and his wife, Jean Claude, they wrap things, they wrap buildings, and they wrap gates –  yes, they did The Gates in New York. And Christo’s last project was to wrap the Arc de Triomph – you know, this huge arc in the middle of Paris, it’s like our Washington monument. And then Christo died. And I thought, “Well, what are they going to do now?” And they decided to honor his wishes, and posthumously, they were going to wrap the Arc de Triomphe. And I said, “I’m going to go to Paris to go see this, because it was Christo’s last project, and I wanted to see it with my own eyes.”

Well, the reason I tell you this is I was very fortunate. I work with French national police, and through the French national police, I was able to go to the top of the Arc de Triomphe. And I saw Paris. I saw it from the top of the Arc, and it was wrapped. And I was lucky enough to be there when they unwrapped it, because, like all of Christo’s projects, they’re up for two weeks. And so I was there as the wrapping came down, and I saw the Arc de Triomphe emerge from the wrapping.

And the Parisians were joyous after our forced seclusion. People were gathering and they were looking. And I realized, if you can wrap the Arc de Triomphe – even from the grave, because he’s not alive anymore – and it can come out of its wrapping unscathed, nothing is immutable. We have the power to change things. And my family, my sister, they were so said, you know, going to Paris and seeing this, that they got me this little tiny gold Arc de Triomphe that I wear around my neck. It’s like this little reminder to me that there’s nothing, that nothing is immutable. And even though we have these intractable dilemmas, everything, if we approach it the right way and we wade through the red tape, we really can solve these problems, but we have to break them down. And I had to take that first step and say, “You know what? I’m going to go see this. I’m going to get on a plane and I’m going to go.” Because the pictures were wonderful, the footage was great, but seeing it with my own eyes reaffirmed for me that there’s really nothing that’s immutable. Everything can be changed.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, I think that’s such a powerful lesson. When we talk about religion, we’ve had a couple of conversations in our previous guests of thinking about God. And very often, at least in a lot of Western and more Christian contexts, they think of God as immutable. But we can also think of God as a process, and always changing. And there’s a dynamism that’s there, of what can come out of these kinds of conversations. And I think that’s been a real challenge in our political discourse, which is, once somebody sticks their stake in the ground,” I am not going to retract from this promise. I’m not going to retract from this policy here,” and it creates more and more gridlock, as opposed to being able to say, “Wait a second, what are your values here? What’s driving you to be saying these kinds of questions even though they don’t agree with you? Let me at least try to see where you are coming from, because if we’re not able to even do that, there’s no conversation.”

Amy Herman: Well, one of the things that I like to encourage in the dialogues about art, and that I’ve incorporated into both books, is the idea of conversation stoppers. By saying, “I don’t agree,” or “I don’t like that,” or “I don’t know,” that shuts the conversation down. Instead, if you don’t agree with somebody, you can say, “Well, why do you think that? Or how did you get there?” I always say, “Turn a period into an ellipsis; ask why, and say, ‘You know what? I’m not there with you, but I want you to walk me through so I can see how you got there.” And so, if we can just open the door – because there are going to be people that draw lines in the sand, and they dig their heels in, and we’re not going to get anywhere if we do that as well – so, to open the door, and art gives us the perfect vehicle to do that, because it’s just not threatening. Nobody’s threatened by looking at a Picasso. Nobody’s life is on the line when we’re discussing what you see versus what I see. And if we take those skills – for some reason still unbeknownst to me, why they transfer so readily, but they seem to.

Geoff Mitelman: To one of the challenges that I think exists too – and this came up a little bit in the chat, and I want to link to a question here – which is, I think a lot of museums and a lot of school systems are eliminating docents, they’re eliminating guides. There are challenges of eliminating art classes in schools. And I’m curious as to… there’s obviously going to be a short-term loss when those things happen, but I think there’s going to be an even bigger long-term loss. So, what do you see as needed to be able to try to ensure that there is art education at all different ages and all different levels here?

Amy Herman: This is a very large conversation because museums across the country are reacting to what we were talking about earlier – diversity and inclusion issues. And they feel that by having docents or having certain guides, you’re showing people the only way to interpret works of art. So rather than broadening those interpretations, they say, “Let’s just do away with those interpretations and let people interpret unto themselves.” And to a certain extent, that’s fine. But people that go into an art museum – some people want guidance, some people want to know, “Well, I don’t understand this. Can you show me a way to interpret it?”

So, what I tell people to do, in the face of diminishing resources, educational resources, for the arts – because people say, “Well, what importance is there in the arts?” – I think, for our sense of critical inquiry, they’re so, so important. I tell people that when you walk into a museum and you see a work of art for the first time, before you run to read the label (the label is very important), look yourself, and see what strikes you about the work of art. What did you notice? What do you like? What don’t you like? What do you find compelling?

And only after you do that analysis with yourself, then read the label. Because if you read the label first, you’re going to look for what somebody else tells you to look for. And I think that’s the problem museums are experiencing now. They feel that the docent’s way (and often the docents are socioeconomically very different than their audiences) is perceived as the only way to see the art. And that’s certainly not what anybody believes, but that’s the perception. So, the idea of how we look at things, but also with guidance, and nothing is going to be purely objective ever, especially when it comes to art. So, if we go in thinking that art is the height of creativity and the height of subjectivity, let’s talk about what we see, and let’s take each of our interpretations. But right now, people are really banging heads about what to do with art interpretation.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, and what was also brought up, too – and I think this is also, I think, a challenge that people are starting to be able to reflect on over the last four or five years, which is sort of a self-perpetuating, led by heterosexual, cisgender white men, trying to be able to broaden “What is the literary canon that we’re going to have? What is the artistic canon that we’re going to have?” How do we engage people in learning about other cultures and making sure that – also Daniel Ruttenberg, Rabi Daniel Ruttenberg, who’s on Twitter, said, “One of the wonderful things about that’s important to have representation in art and music is not just for someone to be able to, ‘Ah, I can see myself in that story,’ but for other kids to be able to, ‘Ah, other people can be the star of the story as well.’” And I think that’s…

Amy Herman: That that goes hand-in-hand with the recognition that we’re not going to dispense with the canon. I mean, I fully recognize, I’ve been studying art history for years. My study of art history has been largely Western art. It’s been white western art. And I recognize that. Is it still valid now? Do we need to stray from the canon? Absolutely. We need to stray far and wide, and bring in art from all over the world. It doesn’t devalue the canon. It just means that the canon is so limited and that we can’t teach it in those very linear, white, European terms. It doesn’t mean the art of Michelangelo isn’t important anymore. It means that other work is equally important, and we have to bring it in. So, let’s make this a broader world, instead of throwing things by the wayside and saying we’re going to do away with the canon. No, let’s not do away with it – let’s broaden it, let’s make it bigger. Let’s add to it. And that’s going to take time and it’s going to take patience, but it takes people the ability to go from this [having blinders on], to this. And that’s why I want to use art as the vehicle, because it gives us this wonderful template to think about what is the canon in your world, what’s been accepted, and how can you grow from it and build upon it. And art gives us this wonderful, wonderful way to do that.

Geoff Mitelman: And as you’re talking, I’m thinking about the interplay of religion and art, and particularly Christianity and art. And I’m wondering of how much of our view of God or angels – or for those who are Christian, who just celebrated Christmas, the images are very – I wanted to use the word “intentional” – colored by what the art has been over a couple of thousands of years. And I think, that’s being able to say, “I recognize that this is an image that was a representation of itself at that time,” but that now, however many hundreds or thousands of years later, I can engage with that in a different kind of way.

Amy Herman: Absolutely. And, you know, my own example of that is, growing up with a Jewish education, I didn’t learn about the New Testament. And the only way that I learned about the New Testament was through the visualization of art. I learned about the Gospels, and I learned about the saints, and I learned about angels, because there’s this whole body of Western art that I had to master and learn to get a degree in art history. And so, learning it through an academic discipline, sort of separated from the religiosity of it, made me appreciate the spirituality in its own creation. But I was also able to step back and understand about commissions and patrons and how money plays a role in the commission of art. So I learned about that as well.

But it also opened my eyes to see that the idea of the visualization of God and spirituality – that is universal. It’s just the narratives and the iconography that we use to do that. And it’s been eye-opening. And when I was in Paris, I saw my favorite Rembrandt in the whole world. It’s about this big, and it’s the subject of the Supper at Emmaus, when Jesus reveals himself to have come out of the tomb, and there are two disciples at the table, and there’s a servant in the background. And Rembrandt does this incredible tiny little painting, and it’s Caravaggio-esque, and it has this white light, and Jesus is in profile. And then 20 years later, Rembrandt does the exact same subject – this very subdued, Jesus sitting at the table with the two servants. And I thought, how could the same artist depict the same subject in two such different ways? Welcome to the human mind. We all look at things depending on our external circumstances. We all see things differently.

And so, you have these two paintings by Rembrandt of the same really loaded scene from the New Testament, and yet they’re completely different. So art gives us a way to understand – we don’t always see things the same way, even through our own eyes. We don’t see things the same way.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. And I think that’s one of the challenges also. And one of the beautiful elements of art is something that we talked about at the very beginning, which is at least my feeling – and you are much more of an expert than I am –  but art, in a lot of ways, is designed to predominantly evoke an emotional response more than anything. It’s designed to be able to put something that we couldn’t articulate, and it’s supposed to create something that we may not even be aware of on a subtext. And I’m thinking of art very broadly, from music and poetry –I’m defining art very, broadly. I love writing, and I love speaking, and I tend to read a lot of nonfiction more than fiction. But there’s something that is incredibly valuable that can’t necessarily be expressed in words. And trying to say – religion and science, people say it’s almost like the distinction between art and science. You can’t say these artistic pieces are designed to be an accurate representation of the origins of the universe.

Amy Herman: Right. And when something is otherworldly and spiritual, things affect people very differently, the way art does. When someone says, when I saw my first Mark Rothko in 1986, it took my breath away – in class, it took my breath away. I couldn’t believe that a human being had created that painting. And I was standing at the Art Institute of Chicago with one of my professors. We were standing in front of a Rothko, and the guy behind us said, “Oh, I could have done that.” And my art history professor turned around, had the most wonderful response. He said, “Yeah, but you didn’t.”

And I thought, that’s the perfect response, that something can take someone’s breath away, and other people can say, I could do that. And so art and spirituality, sometimes the liturgy, the music, affects people very differently. And giving ourselves license to recognize that we see things differently, we experience things differently, I think can pave the way not only to encouraging dialogue, but eventually to fixing the problems.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. And I think that’s such the key element of so many of the arguments that we are having today. And this is from actually a guy named Tim Urban, who has a great Twitter account called “Wait, But Why? Normally, there’s what is what we want and the strategy. And ideally, you want to be the arguments about the strategy of, like, “let’s argue about this.” Maybe we can argue about “What should we be doing?” But now we’re actually at a place in America right now where we are arguing over what are we actually seeing, and what are the facts on the ground. And we need to be able to almost go back to first principles and being able to say, “What are the elements where we can all say, yes, we are seeing the same things.” We can then disagree about what we do about it. We can disagree about the strategy, but let’s have a shared reality here. And I think that is still doable. I think that there are –

Amy Herman: It is, but it has to happen in real time, when people don’t have time to reflect and say, “I’m going to go in with this point of view and I’m going to tell them what I think of this.” It’s: What do we see when we see it? And to be able to that in real time. Again, not to promote art, but it gives us the opportunity. When it’s new and fresh to everybody, we can say what it is that we see standing in front of the painting or looking at it in a book together. But when we have time to reflect and bring know when that woman told me the musician was Jewish, “What are you talking about?” It’s what she thought, not what she saw. And so we have to give ourselves that opportunity. And I hope that I can give people the template.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, Amy, your books really do that wonderfully. So, thank you so much for not only the books that you’ve written, but your time here this afternoon. They’re absolutely wonderfully, beautifully written, and the images are wonderful as well.

Amy Herman: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It’s really a pleasure. And in this forced seclusion, it’s so nice to be able to engage. And I see we have a couple of questions. I hope I answered them. I hope we got to some of them. So, thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Geoff Mitelman: Thank you. I want to make sure your social media account, your Twitter, I had it. But tell me again.

Amy Herman: It’s at @amyhermanaop.

Geoff Mitelman: “Art of perception,” right?

Amy Herman: That’s “art of perception.” And then my website is artfulperception.com.

Geoff Mitelman: So I encourage everyone to be able to follow her and go to her website, and if you work for an organization or a company, to be able to bring her in and talk about some of these kinds of questions.

Amy Herman: Thank you. I really appreciate it, and I hope you enjoy the book when you get it. I look forward to talking to you about it after you read it.

Geoff Mitelman: I’m excited to get that. Hopefully it’ll arrive within the next couple of days, and I’m excited to pick it up and start reading it.

Amy Herman: It’s definitely on its way. So stay well.

Geoff Mitelman: Thank you. And for those who are watching, you can follow us on Twitter – I’m @RabbiMitelman, or you can follow us on @SinaiandSynapses on both Facebook and Twitter. Our next guest is going to be actually, believe it or not, my rabbi, Rabbi Annie Tucker, who is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Israel center of White Plains. She’s been involved in three synagogues. She’s worked as an assistant, and then a senior rabbi, and then at TIC. And all three synagogues were involved in our project Scientists in Synagogue. So we’ll be talking with her about how she as a rabbi thinks about the importance of science in her education. So we hope you will join us. And Amy, thank you again for taking the time with us here this afternoon.

 

Amy Herman: Thank you so much for having me.