What is the place of art in a culture of inattention? Recent visitors to the Louvre report that  tourists can now spend only a minute in front of the Mona Lisa before being asked to move on. Much of that time, for some of them, is spent taking photographs not even of the painting but of themselves with the painting in the background.

        One view is that we have democratised tourism and gallery-going so much that we have made it effectively impossible to appreciate what we’ve travelled to see. In this oversubscribed society, experience becomes a commodity like any other. There are queues to climb Mt. Jolmo Lungma as well as to see famous paintings. Leisure, thus conceived, is hard labour, and returning to work becomes a well-earned break from the ordeal.

        What gets lost in this industrialised haste is the quality of looking. Consider an extreme example, the late philosopher Richard Wollheim. When he visited the Louvre he could spend as much as four hours sitting before a painting. The first hour, he claimed, was necessary for misperceptions to be eliminated. It was only then that the picture would begin to disclose itself. This seems unthinkable today, but it is still possible to organise. Even in the busiest museums there are many rooms and many pictures worth hours of contemplation which the crowds largely ignore. Sometimes the largest crowds are partly the products of bad management; the Mona Lisa is such a hurried experience today partly because the museum is being reorganised. The Uffizi in Florence, another site of cultural pilgrimage, has cut its entry queues down to seven minutes by clever management. And there are some forms of art, those designed to be spectacles as well as objects of contemplation, which can work perfectly well in the face of huge crowds.

        Olafur Eliasson’s current Tate Modern show, for instance, might seem nothing more than an entertainment, overrun as it is with kids romping (喧闹地玩耍) in fog rooms and spray mist installations. But it’s more than that: where Eliasson is at his most entertaining, he is at his most serious too, and his disorienting installations bring home the reality of the destructive effects we are having on the planet—not least what we are doing to the glaciers of Eliasson’s beloved Iceland.

        Marcel Proust, another lover of the Louvre, wrote: “It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe, whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any on the moon.” If any art remains worth seeing, it must lead us to such escapes. But a minute in front of a painting in a hurried crowd won’t do that.

解析：A。根据题干中的the late philosopher Richard Wollheim和four hours可定位至原文第三段第二、三句。这两句提到，已故哲学家理查德·沃尔海姆在参观卢浮宫时，可以在一幅画前坐上四小时之久。后文对此进行了解释：他说，第一个小时是用来消除误解的，这非常有必要。直到那时，这幅画的真正含义才开始逐渐显露出来。由此可知，理查德·沃尔海姆在画作前花大量的时间是为了理解画作的真正含义，也说明要想充分地理解一件艺术品是需要时间的，故正确答案为A。

错项排除：B项利用misinterpret作干扰，原文是说欣赏艺术品的第一个小时是用来消除误解的，但这并不能说明误解艺术作品是常见的，而且这也不是理查德·沃尔海姆欣赏画作时间长的主要原因，故B项错误。理查德·沃尔海姆要在一幅画前花上四小时之久是为了了解到画作的真正含义，原文并没有提到在一幅画前花的时间越长就会越喜欢它，或者发现其价值，这些同样也不是理查德·沃尔海姆欣赏画作时间长的主要原因，故C、D两项错误。