What Do You See

What Do You See brings together 59 emerging artists from 16 art schools to explore what art is and what it does for us—through the lens of cognition. The famous duck-rabbit image, widely known through Wittgenstein, reminds us that we never see things simply as they are; we always see them as something. It is our willingness to look—our attitude toward what stands before us—that lets the same image appear as a duck or as a rabbit. Seeing is always “SEEING AS”—an active engagement, never a mere reception—and so is art. It is our readiness to look that makes art serious as art.

Art disrupts our autopilot. It estranges the familiar and compels us to look at ourselves anew—a strange tool, if ever there was one. This exhibition works through the prediction errors that art generates, recalibrating the viewer’s cognition as the mind updates its internal model. The questions posed by these 59 artists—none yet absorbed into the institutional machinery of the art world—hold up a mirror, not to the world, but to you, the one looking at it.