Amy Herman

So if I go into a situation knowing that the way I'm looking at it is not the only way to see it, I'm going to open myself up to listening to what other people have to say about their perspective, and it will give me other insights.

People cannot, in a myriad of situations, cannot say, well, I see it this way, and that's the way it is.

That just doesn't work physiologically, intellectually, ethically.

In any way.

So by helping people hone their visual intelligence, I'm bringing them around at the risk of making a terrible pun to see that there's always more than one way to see something.

That's the whole crux of what I do.

I show people how to look at works of art because we can talk about it.

We can go back and forth and talking about what you see and what I see.

But if we have no visual ground on which to anchor these assumptions that we're making, we're saying, well, this is what I see.

I use art as the common ground.

And so I work with people across professions to look at art together to illustrate how differently we see things.

And art is not threatening.

Everybody sees something.

But we can all look at the same painting or sculpture and photography.

Ten people can look at it and we'll have nine different perspectives.

And so they come away thinking, well, if I just saw that differently from, you know, the guy standing next to me, what's happening in the operating room or the courtroom?

So I'm using art as the vehicle to hone people's visual intelligence.

It's not, it's not for many reasons.

First of all, I was just in the Louvre, I don't know, seven or eight weeks ago.

And I went into the gallery and you know, the gallery is always mobbed.