Part 1: Why I Don't Like Looking at Art: Before Berlin
A Pre-Trip Conversation
The other day as I was sitting at the barber, he asked me how art school was going. I told him it was fun, and that my class was heading to Berlin in a week. He asked what we would be doing there. “Looking at a bunch of art,” I said, and then added with a half-joke, “which sucks, because I don’t even like looking at art.”
He chuckled at that. "I get that," he said, pausing his clippers for a moment. "I rarely get ideas from looking at other haircuts or attending industry conventions." He explained that his inspiration comes from elsewhere—from the shapes, lines, and materials he sees in architecture and cars.
That conversation, sparked by an offhand joke just days before this trip, has prompted a necessary self-analysis. As I prepare to spend a week immersed in galleries, I am trying to build a framework to understand my own experience: a deep drive to make art, contrasted by a profound disconnect when I view it.
An Analytical Framework
My relationship with art can be understood through my primary way of processing the world: a highly analytical framework. This framework has been shaped and sharpened by several underlying factors.
First, an analytical mindset serves as a compensatory tool for aphantasia. Since I cannot process the world through an internal "mind's eye," my mind has become highly skilled at processing it through logical and verbal systems. When I look at an artwork, I am not "seeing" it with a cascade of associated images; I am immediately deconstructing it into its component parts.
Second, this analytical framework is my primary navigational system. A lifetime of navigating depression can mute the emotional reward pathway that makes certain activities feel satisfying. When emotional data is unreliable or difficult to access, my mind naturally leans on what is reliable: logic, reason, and observable facts.
Finally, this analytical approach is the engine of my creative drive. My identity as a "maker" is fundamentally about generative problem-solving. Making art, for me, is the process of working through a series of complex problems. Yet it is through the logic of this process—the act of building a system and finding a solution—that something else happens. Through that structured approach, I often find a way to access my own emotions and get to know my own human condition a bit better. The analytical act of making becomes a necessary tool for personal inquiry.
The Impersonal Puzzle
These factors, all organized by an analytical approach, explain why viewing art often feels like an unrewarding puzzle. The puzzle is not one of form or technique, but of deciphering another person’s intent. For many students, the academic exercise of deconstructing another's work is valuable in itself. For me, however, it remains an impersonal one. My reward is tied to the generative nature of my own practice; the struggle of making something new is the very path through which I connect with my own experience. Analyzing another's finished work is, by its nature, a deconstructive act. It is an inquiry into a process that is already complete and belongs to someone else.
Dialogue as a Generative Process
This entire dynamic of disconnection changes in a collaborative context. A conversation introduces a live, generative process where the goal is no longer to passively deduce another's past intent, but to actively build a shared understanding in the present moment. The dialogue itself becomes the engaging activity. It transforms my role from a passive observer into an active participant. Through this exchange, I can also borrow from the emotional response of the person I’m with; their experience becomes a bridge to an understanding I can't reach alone. This is the only context where my analytical approach feels not just useful, but vital and rewarding.
Conclusion: A Hypothesis to Test in Berlin
This analysis feels like the closest I’ve come to a coherent explanation. My inspiration is found not in the formal qualities of external objects, but in the human condition—something I explore through conversation and my own internal, generative process.
This leaves me with a question as I head to Berlin. Knowing all this, what will it be like? To enter a gallery not with the vague pressure to feel something I can't, but with a clear map of my own internal landscape. Will this self-awareness change the experience of disconnection, or simply give it a name? This is the hypothesis I intend to test.
