Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell

by Arden Reed

Overview

Americans, on average, spend between six and ten seconds with individual artworks in museums or galleries—hardly time enough. But how, in our culture of distraction, might we extend attention? Slow Art models sustained ways of looking, through encounters with various media both present and past—including photography, painting, sculpture, “living pictures,” film, video, digital and performance art—even light and space. Works by Diderot, Emma Hamilton, Oscar Wilde, Jeff Wall, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Andy Warhol, and Richard Serra, among others, shape a new and distinct aesthetic field. But rather than a collection of objects, slow art is participatory—it directly engages beholders to bring artworks to life. Against current orthodoxy, Arden Reed argues that, for contemporary viewers, the contemplation of slow art is akin to religious practices during the ages of faith.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520300583
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	03/05/2019
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Arden Reed (1947–2017) was Arthur and Fanny Dole Professor of English at Pomona College. He wrote on the visual arts and literature, and his publications include Manet, Flaubert, and the Emergence of Modernism and Romantic Weather: The Climates of Coleridge and Baudelaire.
 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Video Examples
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Marking Time

PART I: DRAWING OUT SLOW ART

1. What Is Slow Art? (When Images Swell into Events and Events Condense into Images)
2. Living(?) Pictures

PART II: EPISODES FROM A SHORT HISTORY OF SLOW LOOKING

3. Before Slow Art
4. Slow Art Emerges in Modernity I: Secularization from Diderot to Wilde
5. Slow Art Emerges in Modernity II: The Great Age of Speed

PART III: SLOW ART NOW

6. Slow Fiction, Film, Video, Performance Art, 1960 to 2010
7. Slow Photography, Painting, Installation Art, Sculpture, 1960 to 2010
8. Angel and Devil of Slow Art

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Reed seeds his profundities throughout Slow Art in example after example, weaving them into compelling histories that get you thinking about art in new ways."

The Santa Fe New Mexican

"It has an interesting point to make when it comes to the relationship between stillness and motion, layering and adding dimensions as well as approaching art from a “slow” angle instead of the artwork itself necessarily carrying such qualities. What seems to be a fad and neologism, is actually based on a concept that harks back to ancient times yet what is exemplified in the book is that it is inextricably with our current state of affairs and the future."

Scene Point Blank

"...what in another writer’s hands might have been a dry academic treatise turns out to be a lively ramble through high and low culture, touching on the likes of Diderot, Goethe, David Foster Wallace, Susan Sontag, Sleeping Beauty, the Countess de Castiglione and Andy Warhol."

Wall Street Journal

"...what in another writer’s hands might have been a dry academic treatise turns out to be a lively ramble through high and low culture, touching on the likes of Diderot, Goethe, David Foster Wallace, Susan Sontag, Sleeping Beauty, the Countess de Castiglione and Andy Warhol."

Wall Street Journal