Do you truly see animals at the zoo? A while back, on a visit to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Santa Monica, I overheard a tour guide say the average time spent looking at a work of art in the museum is five to ten seconds per piece. At first this shocked me. At the time I was standing entranced next to Van Goghs Irises. I envisioned museumgoers not even breaking their stride as they blew past. Then I realized it was the seer syndrome. Sadly, most people who came here were seers of art, not observers of art. As it turned out, this was the guides point as well.
Unfortunately, in this case seer is not as the word implies. In fact, it is the exact opposite. Where most of us picture a seer as psychic or as someone with unique visionary knowledge and wisdom, the seers I am referring to are the tourist-like seers. They are a painfully dominant subspecies in our culture. Tourist-like seers go to the zoo to see the animals. And, they certainly do. They glance at each beast, getting no more out of it than if they had stayed at home and thumbed through the Big Picture Book of Animals their kids had been given for Christmas.
Too often these days we use our zoos and museums as...