A few starting points for looking longer, questioning more closely and finding your own route through art.
Give the work a moment before deciding what it means. Notice scale, colour, rhythm and the way it meets its surroundings. Description can be a useful first step: it slows down the urge to arrive at an answer.
There is room for a first impression and for changing your mind. Looking again is part of looking.
A work can carry connections to a place, a time, a community or another work. Those connections need not reduce it to a single explanation. They can expand what becomes visible.
Follow a reference that interests you. Return to the work with that new perspective, and notice what it adds rather than what it settles.
A choice of material affects more than appearance. It changes weight, touch, durability and the ways a work can be made, moved or encountered. The material may support an idea or challenge it.
Imagine the same work in another material. What would be lost? What would become newly possible?
Not every work offers an immediate point of entry. A question can be more useful than a quick judgement. Ask what the work makes you notice, what it withholds and what it asks of your attention.
You do not have to like everything you find worth thinking about.
See the work.
Follow the question.