I agree with Chez. The way most people look at images (not just photographs) in a gallery or museum setting is to go in and out and alternate between overall view and interesting detail. I find it strange that that even is controversial. It\'s not prescriptive; it\'s simply descriptive of what people do empirically.
Of course if the overall view doesn\'t even engage the viewer, or if the viewer is otherwise distracted, this doesn\'t happen. But when it does, it\'s good to avoid obvious \"pixellation\" up close simply because it\'s jarring and disengages the viewer from the image.
(If you are doing conceptual art and purposefully want the viewer to notice the limits of the medium, etc., that\'s another matter.)
And about how many Americans go to museums (which is of course irrelevant to how those who do go look at images), I think it\'d a stretch to call it \"a very small minority\":
There are approximately 850 million visits each year to American museums, more than the attendance for all major league sporting events and theme parks combined (483 million in 2011). By 2006, museums already received an additional 524 million online visits a year just from adults, a number that continues to grow.
