That's easy.. some art will appeal to some people and they will spend more time with that piece.. otherwise.. "masterpieces" that don't appeal to you are just road bumps to go find the stuff you like.
How many "masterpieces" are in the Met?
The great MET website has a search feature that tells me t
here are 53,370 pieces of art on display of their total collection of over 450,000 pieces. No idea if borrowed or travelling collections are part of this.
Lets just guess that 5% of those are "masterpieces".. that means that 2,668 of the paces on display are "masterpieces". Not counting the time to walk from one to another, eat, drink, visit bathrooms.. it would take 20 hours to spend 27 seconds on each of those.
Suppose it was only 1% are masterpieces.. it would take 4 hours (again, if you did nothing else and moved instantaneously between pieces).
So, given that not everyone is a fan of a style of art or a particular "masterpiece" and the MET is so large with so much to offer, this is not surprising.
Then you have to look at it from a number of visitors standpoint and people that can fit in a room in front of a masterpiece. They saw over 7 million visitors over 365 days last year.. that's just over 19K a day. If we go for that 1% are masterpieces figure.. then that's 533 masterpieces. That's 36 people per masterpiece... hmm.. oh.. that is eminently doable.
But I have no idea where the 27 seconds comes from.. I know Skillet would know. He probably counted it as part of his work there. Lets say the Mona Lisa toured and you had to handle those 19K people filing by it every day. In practice it would be more on some days. It is open 10-5:30.. 7.5 hours... 27,000 seconds... that's 1.4 seconds per visitor.
So it is an odd thing to think about.. 27 seconds per masterpiece.
Here's an odd thing I noticed about paintings that I was drawn to. They make me "dizzy".. not actually dizzy.. but my eye is drawn to so much of it that it moves around and around. That crosses many genres.. some Pollocks did it.. many Van Goghs.. he is my favorite. Mondrians do it.. a lot do it... to me that separates good composition from bad.. pretty simple.. but just because the composition is good and it is well done doesn't mean I'd like it or want to spend a lot of time with it.
To take that to the extreme.. this does it in spades.. but is it a masterpiece? I know I wouldn't want to spend even 27 seconds on it