Slow Art Day: Leaning Towards a Different Way of Looking at and Loving Art

Slow Art Day is the annual event in more than 240 museums and galleries around the world with a simple mission: help more people discover the joy of looking at and loving art. This year participants show up on Saturday, April 27 at one of the participating museums and then look slowly, 5-10 minutes, at each of five pre-assigned works of art.

Why focus on slow? When we look slowly at art we make discoveries. One of the most important discoveries we make is that we can see and experience art on our own. And that's exciting. It unlocks passion and creativity and helps to create more art fans. At Slow Art Day, we like to say that we are in the business of making more art fans: by helping people discover their own ability to look at and love art.

I came up with the idea while looking at Hans Hoffman's Fantasia for an hour during the 2008 Action/Abstraction exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. It was such a different experience to look at that one artwork for an hour that I decided that slow looking was the "secret" that would transform the visitor experience for the typical museumgoer like myself who was not an expert and didn't have the training in how to look.