Ever want to know how someone else sees that work of art you love? What is it that catches their eye? What am I missing that others notice? Well, we wonder the same thing too, and decided to try something simple and fun that can give us all a peek at what makes up our first impressions with a work of art.

First Impressions is a new social tagging experiment by the IMA that asks you to click on the first thing that catches your eye as you look at a series of artworks. We’ll collect all your clicks, and at the end of a short set of images, we’ll show you where you clicked – and where everyone else clicked too! The image to the right shows what that will look like. The colored areas show you where others have clicked with the darker red areas being really popular clicks. Your click will be marked with a green icon.

What can you notice? Did you select an area that others also tagged as their first impression, or did you see the work differently? Were there areas of the image that others noticed that you missed the first time through? Are there any areas of the image that everyone missed altogether? These are the types of questions the museum asks all the time too. We hope that “First Impressions” provides a fun way to share that with each of you too.

We’ll be pulling together special sets of art works every-so-often as they relate to different things going on in the museum or the art world as a whole. We’ll always tell you about them on the IMA’s blog and will let the clicking run for about a week. Make sure you get your chance to give us your “First Impressions” before time is up!