"Looking vs Seeing," by Minneapolis artist Dani Roach.
On average people spend less time looking at art than they waste staring at stop lights. Visitors to the Louvre museum in Paris, for instance, devote an average of 15 seconds in contemplation of Leonardo's "Mona Lisa," one of the world's most famous paintings. And much of that time is probably spent jockying to snap a photo of Mona over the heads of other visitors in the scrum that always masses in front of her.
The same is true elsewhere. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art found that people spent an average of 17 seconds looking at a typical painting. In Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum researchers said it's 30 seconds (but then everything takes longer in L.A.) Compare that to the time fishermen spend watching for a bobber to jiggle or hunters to scanning the sky for a flight of birds.
The longer you look the more you see. Such is the idea behind Slow Art Day, an international effort to encourage people to really see stuff in museums and galleries. Participants are invited to look at particular works of art for 10 minutes each and then to share observations about what they noticed, thought or wondered as they looked. Some people sketch or take notes, most just gaze.
This year, Groveland Gallery in Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum are participating in Slow Art Day on Saturday, April 9.
Launched in 2009, Slow Art Day is the brain child of Phil Terry, the CEO of Creative Goods, a corporate communications consultancy. He was a lousy looker, uninterested in art until he had an epiphany.
"My wife kept dragging me to museums," he told ARTnews magazine. "I didn't know how to look at art. Like most people, I would walk by quickly."
Then one afternoon, for whatever reason, he found himself gazing at a Hans Hofmann abstraction in the Jewish Museum in New York. He noticed drips and glazes, took in the colors and shapes, wondered about the artist and his pals, imagined that Hofmann might have influenced Jackson Pollock. Or not. It wasn't a research project, just thoughts inspired by close looking.
