Standing in front of a painting I didn’t understand

The first time I stood in front of a painting I didn’t understand, I felt something close to embarrassment, an embarrassment so ordinary it was almost invisible. I was on a school excursion, wearing a uniform that still smelled faintly of the morning’s rushed toast. We’d been marched through the gallery door in a long line, like a small, conscripted army of adolescents, our teachers calling out reminders about behaviour as if we were about to enter a sacred site. Don’t touch. Don’t run. Keep your voices down. If anyone wanders off, you’ll ruin it for everyone.

The building itself did half their job for them. It had the kind of architecture that tells you, before you’ve even seen a single artwork, that you are entering a place where you are supposed to feel smaller. High ceilings. Echoing halls. Stone and hush. The air had that museum temperature, cool, controlled, faintly antiseptic, as if the building had been trained to preserve not only objects but time itself.

I remember the way my shoes sounded against the floor. Too loud. Always too loud in galleries. The sound of my existence amplified by bluestone and mountain ash, the building making me aware of my own body in a way my body, at fifteen, didn’t particularly appreciate. Teenagers want to disappear and be admired simultaneously; a gallery is not designed to accommodate that contradiction.

We moved through rooms with names that sounded like school subjects. European. Asian. Oceanic. The teacher spoke in careful, reverent sentences. The guide pointed at frames and told us what was “important.” I can still hear the word important, that educational tone that implies importance is a fact that lives in the object itself, rather than a judgement made by humans with particular histories and biases and power.

Then we entered a room of modern work, bright, strange, uncooperative. And there it was – the painting I didn’t understand, painted by Gerhard Richter.

It was large. It occupied the wall with the confidence of something that had been allowed to take up space. It didn’t offer me an easy image, no landscape I could recognise, no horses or ships or dignified portraits. It was a field of colour and shape, something that looked, to my adolescent eye, like a person had spilled emotion across canvas and then walked away without explaining themselves. There were blocks of paint that seemed either careless or deliberate, I couldn’t tell which. There were lines that looked like they might be symbols, or might be nothing.

I stood in front of it and felt… stupid.

Not violently stupid. Not humiliatingly stupid. Just quietly out of place, like someone who has walked into a conversation halfway through and doesn’t want to interrupt by asking what everyone’s talking about. I glanced at the label beside it. The label had a title that didn’t help. It had a date. It had a few sentences that sounded like they’d been written in a language designed to exclude. I read it twice and understood less the second time.

Around me, other students did what students do. A couple made jokes. One boy did the classic thing of pretending something was “easy” to understand because pretending is safer than admitting confusion. A girl next to me nodded solemnly as if she got it, as if she belonged here, and I felt a small flare of resentment – against her, against the painting, against the whole institution.

The guide said something about “breaking form.” The teacher said something about “challenging conventions.” I stared at the painting and thought, privately – is this a prank?

And that thought, small, defensive, was my first real encounter with the social psychology of museums. Because my confusion wasn’t purely aesthetic. It was not just that I couldn’t decode the painting. It was that I suspected the gallery was a place where people like me weren’t fully meant to feel competent.

Or rather – I suspected that if you came from the right kind of family, you would have been trained to feel competent here. If you had parents who took you to galleries on weekends, you would know the tricks – how to read labels, how to stand with your arms folded like you’re thinking, how to use the right words when you don’t understand. You would know that not understanding is sometimes the intent, and that the intention is not to “get” it but to stay with it.

But I hadn’t been trained. I came from ordinary life, where culture wasn’t framed as a civic duty but as a luxury. In my world, the arts existed mostly through television, radio, cheap paperbacks, school plays. We didn’t have the habit of wandering into white rooms filled with silent objects and letting them rearrange our brains.

So, I stood in front of that painting and felt a kind of social vertigo. I couldn’t locate myself in the room. Was I allowed to dislike it? Was I allowed to say it made no sense? Was I allowed to admit I didn’t understand without being judged?

In that moment, the painting became not just a painting, but a test. A test of whether I belonged.

And I failed it, at least in my own mind.

I moved on quickly, pretending to be bored. That’s a reliable adolescent defence – boredom is a mask for vulnerability. If you are bored, you can’t be hurt. If you care and don’t understand, you can be exposed.

I went through the rest of the gallery with the same half-present attitude – look, nod, move on. I remember some of the big colonial works further up the road at the Ian Potter Centre, because they were legible, ships, settlers, light falling on gum trees in that romantic way that always seemed to erase whatever was already there. I remember a few portraits where the subjects stared out at us with the confidence of people who expected to be remembered.

But the modern painting stayed in my head precisely because it had refused me. It was the first artwork that had made me feel the gap between “public institution” and “public entitlement.”

In The Gallery

Years passed before I returned to a gallery alone.

Not as a school group, not under supervision, but as an adult who could enter on my own terms. And the truth is – I didn’t go back for art. I went back because I needed somewhere to be that wasn’t my life.

It was one of those periods when the world feels too loud and your own thoughts feel too repetitive. A grief had arrived, not the dramatic kind that comes with funerals and casseroles, but the slow grief of change, of a relationship ending not with betrayal but with fatigue. My mind felt like it was stuck in a loop – replay, regret, rehearse. I needed to disrupt it. I needed a place where I wasn’t obliged to speak.

The gallery was free. It was quiet. It was cool in summer. So, I went.

I remember walking up the same steps, older now, wearing a jacket that cost more than my entire adolescent wardrobe had cost, and feeling a strange reversal – I looked, from the outside, like someone who belonged. No uniform. No teacher. No line of kids. Just a solitary adult entering an institution.

Inside, the air was the same – controlled, calm. But I was different. I moved more slowly. I let my footsteps be loud, I no longer cared as much. I wandered without a plan, as if I was walking through someone else’s mind.

And then, by accident, I ended up in the room with the painting again.
It was still there, larger than memory, more stubborn. The colours hadn’t changed. The forms hadn’t softened to accommodate me. It was the same object I had once dismissed as a prank.

But now I stood in front of it and felt something else entirely. Not understanding, exactly. But… recognition.

I still couldn’t “translate” it into a neat sentence. I still couldn’t point to it and say, confidently, what it meant. But I could feel what it was doing. I could feel the way it held tension without resolving it. I could feel how the colour pressed against the edges, how the shapes resisted being pinned down. I could feel, in my body, the sensation of someone trying to articulate something too complex for literal depiction.

And I realised, with a kind of startled humility, that my younger self had wanted the painting to behave like an answer. But the painting was behaving like a question. And questions, as it turns out, require a different posture. They require you to stay.
So, I stayed.

I stood there longer than I would have believed possible. People moved past me – couples murmuring, a lone tourist with a brochure, an older man with a notebook sketching details. A guard leaned against a wall with the patient stillness of someone who has watched thousands of humans try to have epiphanies.

The painting did something quiet to me. It didn’t comfort me. It didn’t tell me everything would be fine. It didn’t resolve my grief. But it pulled my mind out of its loop. It created a different kind of mental weather, one where ambiguity was allowed, even valued.

And that’s when I understood, for the first time, why public galleries matter in a way that has nothing to do with taste.

They are places designed for slow thinking.

Sanctuaries for Slow Thinking

We live, increasingly, in an environment that punishes slow thinking. Everything accelerates – news cycles, outrage cycles, scrolling, reaction, hot takes. The algorithm rewards immediacy. The social media feed is a machine that trains you to form opinions fast and move on. Even our private lives are managed through notifications, schedules, the constant demand to respond.

A gallery is one of the last mainstream public spaces where you are allowed, almost invited, to not respond quickly.

You can stand in front of something for ten minutes and not be “productive.” You can be confused. You can feel nothing. You can feel too much. You can change your mind. You can leave and come back. You can let an object sit in your head like a seed.

I started visiting galleries more after that, not for the reason that I became a connoisseur, but because I became addicted to the kind of attention they require. I began to think of them as gyms for the imagination – places where you practise the muscles that daily life neglects, patience, curiosity, discomfort tolerance, empathy.

And that’s the first deeper theme of public collections – they are a shared memory and a shared argument about what’s worth preserving.
Memory, at the level of a nation is curated. It is shaped by decisions – what gets collected, what gets displayed, what is explained, what is buried in storage. Public galleries and museums are not simply warehouses of objects. They are institutions that decide, materially, what a society will remember.

This speaks to why walking through a museum can feel like walking through a moral autobiography of the state. You see what has been valued. You see what has been romanticised. You see what has been omitted. You see, in the gaps as much as in the displays, the politics of preservation.

As a child, I didn’t think about this. I thought museums were just “facts.” Dinosaurs, gold rush, explorers, old tools. Galleries were just “art.” Paintings, sculptures, things rich people liked.

But as an adult, you begin to notice the narrative structures. You begin to notice who gets to be the protagonist. You begin to notice whether the museum speaks in triumphal tones, look what we built, or whether it makes room for discomfort, look what we did.

And in Australia, that question is unavoidable.

Contemplating Unavoidable Questions

To live here is to live in a country where the foundational story is contested. Not academically contested, but emotionally, politically, spiritually contested. We are a young nation-state built on an ancient continent. Our public institutions sit on lands with tens of thousands of years of story, law, song, and custodianship. The museum and the gallery cannot be innocent in that context. They are either complicit in the old, sanitised narrative or part of the slow work of truth-telling.

I have watched galleries and museums begin, unevenly, imperfectly, to shift. To complicate. To place First Nations art and knowledge not as a “section,” not as a token corner, but as foundational. To commission and acquire works that speak back to colonial myths. To include language that admits violence. To label objects differently. To consult communities. To ask harder questions about provenance – how did this object arrive here? Who consented? Who lost?

Sometimes this shift is courageous. Sometimes it is tentative. Sometimes it is clumsy. Institutions are not nimble creatures. They move slowly because they are built from committees and budgets and risk management and the constant fear of controversy.

But the direction matters.

Because galleries and museums are places where a society can practise telling the truth to itself.

Not through slogans. Through objects. Through stories. Through the arrangement of evidence.

I remember standing in a museum exhibition once, years after my first encounter with the modern painting, and seeing, beside an object, a simple notice acknowledging that the display included material connected to deceased Indigenous people, and that some visitors might wish to exercise cultural protocols. It was a small sign, carefully worded. To some, it would be invisible. To others, it would be a recognition – the institution admitting there are laws and cultures older than its walls, and that the public is not homogenous.

That sign, small as it was, struck me as a kind of moral hinge.
Because it suggested something profound – the museum was not the only authority in the room.

That’s what decolonising a collection is, at its core. It’s a redistribution of authority. It’s the institution learning to speak less like a conquering narrator and more like a participant in a conversation with living communities.

It threatens old certainties. It triggers defensive reactions. It raises questions that institutions used to avoid by hiding behind neutrality.

Which brings me to another theme – who feels entitled to walk into these spaces, and who feels intimidated.

It’s easy to say a gallery is “for everyone” because it is publicly funded and, often, free to enter. But “for everyone” is not only a matter of price, but also a matter of atmosphere.

The atmosphere of a gallery can be welcoming or excluding. It can signal, subtly, who belongs. Architecture does this. Signage does this. Staff behaviour does this. The tone of labels does this. The presence or absence of people who look like you does this. Even the café menu does this. Even the gift shop does this, with its quiet assumption about what people can afford.

If you have grown up with cultural capital, if you have been taught that art spaces are yours by default, you walk in with ease. If you have grown up without that training, you walk in with caution. You worry you’ll do something wrong. You worry you’ll look stupid. You worry you’ll be judged.

I know this because I have lived both versions, in a way.

As a teenager, I felt like a trespasser. As an adult with some social polish, I sometimes feel like a member. But even now, I can feel the old adolescent caution flicker back when I enter a particularly grand institution. The part of me that still expects someone to tap me on the shoulder and say – Excuse me, are you meant to be here?

That feeling matters because it shapes who uses public culture. If people feel intimidated, they don’t come. If they don’t come, institutions become socially sorted. They become spaces for the already-confident. They become less public, even if they are publicly owned.

Hence why outreach and education programs aren’t optional extras. They are the mechanism by which entitlement is distributed.

School excursions, for all their awkwardness, matter because they introduce kids to these spaces early. They teach them that a gallery is not a private club. They normalise the idea that your curiosity is allowed to roam among expensive objects.

But school excursions alone aren’t enough. Because some kids go once and never return. They go once and the experience confirms their outsider status. They go once and the language feels alien. They go once and the teacher’s reverence makes them feel stupid for laughing. They go once and they decide galleries are “not for people like us.”

So, the institution has to work harder than simply opening its doors.
It has to communicate, actively, that confusion is welcome. That you don’t need prior knowledge. That you don’t have to “get it.” That your response can be personal, messy, emotional.

The most powerful gallery experiences I’ve had as an adult have not been the ones where I felt clever. They’ve been the ones where I felt changed. And being changed does not require expertise. It requires attention and permission.

Which is why, in contemporary Australia, museums and galleries can be some of the first places where kids from poor backgrounds see their curiosity taken seriously.

I’ve seen it happen. I’ve watched school groups from disadvantaged suburbs enter a gallery like a swarm of nervous energy, teachers trying to contain them. I’ve watched those same kids become quiet in front of an object that speaks to them. Not for the reason that they’ve been trained to respect “art,” but because something in the object touches something in them.

It might be a portrait where the subject’s eyes feel alive. It might be an installation that looks like their own chaotic bedroom. It might be a piece of Indigenous art that uses symbols and colour in a way that resonates with something they can’t articulate. It might be a historical artefact that makes the past feel like a real place rather than a textbook.

I remember watching a kid, maybe twelve, stand in front of a large work that dealt with displacement and home. The teacher was talking, but the kid wasn’t listening. He was staring. His face had that rare expression children get when they are being mentally pulled forward. Like the world has suddenly become larger and more complicated, and they like it.
He turned to his friend and said, quietly, “I didn’t know you could do that.”

That sentence, I didn’t know you could do that, is the sound of possibility opening.

Public galleries and museums do that. They enlarge the imaginable. They tell you that human beings have always made meaning, always argued with the world, always tried to represent what is hard to say directly. They show you that your own confusion is part of being human.
And they do it without asking for your credit card.

That matters, because private culture is everywhere now. You can buy curated experiences at every price point. You can pay for exclusive exhibitions, VIP openings, “immersive” shows designed for Instagram. There is nothing inherently wrong with private culture. But a society that relies only on private culture becomes a society where the imagination is stratified by income.

Public culture interrupts that.

It says – this, too, belongs to you. This, too, is part of your inheritance.

I think often now about that first painting, the one I didn’t understand. I’ve returned to it many times. Not always on purpose. Sometimes I find myself in its room by accident, like returning to an old argument.

I still don’t “understand” it in the way my teenage self wanted understanding. I can’t reduce it to a summary. And I’ve come to see that as a kind of gift.

Because the painting has taught me something about public galleries that I didn’t learn from school guides or labels – the whole ideas is not to master the object. The whole idea is to let the object work on you.

Some days it works, some days it doesn’t. Some days I stand in front of it and feel nothing but mild irritation. Some days it hits a nerve. Some days it feels like a mirror. Some days it feels like a refusal. It changes because I change. The object stays. I move through time.

That’s what a public collection is at its best – a set of objects that outlast you, waiting for you to become the person who can meet them.
This is the very reason why the “public” part matters. If galleries were private, if access were restricted, if you had to be wealthy to return again and again, then this slow relationship with objects would become a privilege. You would only have one chance, maybe, to be touched. One chance to be rewired. Public galleries make rewiring available across a lifetime.

Arguing About What Matters

There’s another element I’ve come to appreciate – museums and galleries are places where the nation argues with itself about what matters.
We tend to think of argument as something noisy, parliaments, protests, talkback radio, comment sections. But argument also happens quietly, through curation. What is shown. What is hidden. What is framed as “heritage.” What is framed as “contemporary.” What is framed as “art.” What is framed as “artefact.”

A public gallery is a set of arguments in physical form.

And because these arguments are physical, they have a different effect than words on a screen. You can’t scroll past them as easily. You have to move your body through the narrative. You have to stand in front of the evidence. You have to confront scale and texture and presence.

This physicality is part of what makes museums and galleries so valuable in an era of digital flattening. Online, everything becomes the same size – tragedy and memes share a feed. A masterpiece is a thumbnail. A cultural object becomes content. The internet is extraordinary, but it is also levelling in a way that can make deep attention harder.

A museum or gallery reintroduces scale. A painting can be bigger than you. A sculpture can occupy the room. An object can carry the weight of centuries. You feel, in your body, that this is both information and presence. Presence changes how you think.

It also changes how you remember. We remember experiences with our bodies. A day in a gallery, if it hits you right, leaves sensory residue – the cool air, the echoing halls, the way light falls on a surface, the hush that makes your thoughts audible.

That residue matters because it becomes part of your inner library. A reference point you can return to when language fails.

I have had moments in galleries where I felt a thought rearrange itself without my permission. A portrait that made me reconsider an era. An Indigenous work that made me feel, viscerally, the arrogance of colonial narrative. An exhibition about migration that made me see my own family history as part of a longer stream. A children’s display that reminded me that wonder is a form of intelligence, not a childish phase to be outgrown.

And I have had moments where nothing happened. Where I walked through rooms and felt bored. Where I felt the institution’s attempt at significance land like corporate branding. Where I felt the gap between curatorial intention and human experience.

Those failures matter too, because they remind you that public culture is made by people, with biases, with limitations, with budgets, with political pressures. Museums and galleries are not immune to mediocrity or fashion. They sometimes chase trends. They sometimes get it wrong. They sometimes preserve things because wealthy donors want them preserved. They sometimes avoid controversy to protect funding. Public institutions are always in tension with the politics that sustain them.

Which is why funding and public support matter. When galleries are underfunded, they become more dependent on private donors and corporate sponsorship. That changes what gets shown. It changes whose tastes matter. It changes the institution’s willingness to take risks, to tell hard truths, to commission work that might offend.

The public gallery, to remain genuinely public, requires a public that defends it. Not defensively, not with cultural snobbery, but with a clear-eyed understanding that public culture is part of democracy. It is part of what allows a society to reflect on itself, to contest its narratives, to expand its imagination beyond market logic.

I sometimes think of museums and galleries as the opposite of shopping centres. Shopping centres are designed to make you consume quickly, move efficiently, respond to desire. They are not built for ambiguity. Their purpose is transaction.

Galleries are not transactional spaces, or at least they shouldn’t be. They ask for a different kind of behaviour – slower, quieter, more receptive. They make you practise being a citizen of a shared cultural world rather than a consumer of personalised content.

I left the gallery that day, the day I returned as an adult, feeling oddly steadier. Not healed. Not fixed. Just… slightly rewired. My grief hadn’t vanished, but it had been moved into a larger frame. My mind had been pulled out of its loop and reminded of something that modern life tries to erase – that humans have always struggled to make sense of experience, and that sometimes sense is a form of attention.

I walked down the steps into the city’s noise and felt, for a moment, a kind of gratitude that surprised me. Not gratitude for the painting as an object, exactly. Gratitude for the fact that the painting was there at all, waiting. That it belonged to a public institution rather than a private collector’s lounge. That it could be encountered by anyone, by a bored teenager, by a grieving adult, by a tourist, by a kid on an excursion, by someone seeking shelter from heat, by someone looking for a reason to feel their own mind expand.

That availability is a choice made by a society. It is paid for. It is defended. It is threatened whenever budgets tighten and culture is treated as expendable. But it is also one of the best proofs a society can offer that it believes the public deserves more than survival.

A public gallery or museum is, in the end, a declaration that human curiosity is not a luxury item. That memory belongs to everyone. That argument can be held without violence. That kids who grew up without cultural capital are still entitled to wonder.

And if you want to know why these institutions matter, you don’t need to be an expert. You just need to remember what it feels like to stand in front of something you don’t understand, and to realise, slowly, that what matters is not to be clever, but to be changed. Even quietly. Even against your will. Even in a room that once made you feel small.