Jackson Pollock: Number 5, 1948, detail.

  In a museum or gallery, when the painting is hanging there in front of us, we can "zoom in" anywhere, at any time, and probably find some such local formation to think about, or one that arouses some sort of emotional or visceral reaction within us.  We are able to make contact with the painting, and have a meaningful experience with it.

If the only way we could see these works was by looking through a catalog of reduced reproductions,  we would be forced to regard these paintings from afar, always as wholes.  Viewed thus, they are less interesting.  From afar, they tend to lapse into dull greynesses.   It's harder to make contact with them, to have a meaningful experience with them.  To put this another way, there is no reduced, "Reader's Digest" version of the paintings.  They are, in a sense, irreducible.  If one is unable to zoom in on the detail,  there's no point in looking at them.  In a way, the artist has forced us to look at the detail, or not to look at all.  If we try to walk away smugly, claiming to have "gotten the basic idea" or the "overall structure of the whole," our report of the "basic idea" is likely to be merely "a lot of zig-zagging drips, drops and chaos";  not a very interesting report. 

The report that we would make on EXAMPLE 1.2 might be more interesting:   "A big wobbly silver cross dominates the picture.   This is crossed by a prominent yellow streak, moving from the upper left corner down beyond the middle right edge. . . "  We could continue, talking about aspects of smaller incidental detail, and the way that the more important elements relate to the latter, and so forth.  To get a "taste of" Pollock, (in a catalog, for example), it would be much more rewarding to pick a spot like this,  and look at it zoomed-in, than to see a whole picture from afar, reduced.[1]