WORDS BY NICOLE JUNKERMANN
Entrepreneur, investor and longtime patron of the arts, Nicole Junkermann has spent much of her life learning how to look. In this guest essay for 1883, Nicole Junkermann argues that in a culture built for speed, the most rewarding thing you can do with a work of art is to give it your time. In her own words.
There is a particular silence that only exists in front of a painting. Not the absence of sound, exactly, but a kind of settling, the moment when the noise in your own head finally quiets and you are simply looking. I have chased that silence for most of my life, in galleries and studios and the quiet corners of the art world, and I have come to believe it is one of the more valuable things a person can learn to find. I have also watched it become harder to reach.
We look at more images than any generation in history, and we see less. A great work of art now arrives most often as a thumbnail, thumbed past on a bright screen somewhere between a message and an advertisement. We register it, we might even admire it, and we move on in less than a second. The image survives the journey. The encounter does not.
Why Nicole Junkermann still chooses the room
I understand the appeal of the scroll. It is generous, in its way. It has put the contents of the world’s museums in the palm of your hand, and there is something genuinely wonderful about that. A young person in a town with no gallery can now see, in an evening, more art than most people saw in a lifetime a century ago. I would never wish that away.
But a photograph of a painting is a little like a recording of a conversation you were not part of. It tells you what was said. It cannot give you what it felt like to be in the room. Scale disappears. Texture disappears. The strange, physical fact of a human hand having moved across that surface, sometimes centuries ago, disappears. What is left is information, and art was never really about information.
What slow looking asks of you
The remedy is almost embarrassingly simple, and almost impossibly hard. It is to stand in front of one thing, and to stay. Not to photograph it, not to caption it, not to move briskly along to the next name on the wall, but to give a single work more time than feels comfortable. Five minutes. Ten. Long enough for your first, lazy impression to wear off and something truer to arrive underneath it.
The first thing you notice, when you try this, is how strong the urge is to leave. We have trained ourselves, without meaning to, to treat attention as something to spend as quickly as possible. Standing still feels almost transgressive. Stay anyway. Somewhere past the discomfort, the work begins to open. You start to see the decisions inside it, the changes of mind, the places where the maker struggled and the places where they flew. You are no longer consuming an image. You are keeping company with another mind.
The luxury Nicole Junkermann keeps returning to
We talk a great deal now about luxury, and we usually mean things. I have come to think the real luxury of this moment is attention, because it is the thing we are all quietly running out of. To give something your slow, undivided regard has become rare enough to feel extravagant. And there are few better places to practise it than in front of a work of art, which was, after all, made by someone who gave it their slow, undivided regard first.
The real luxury of this moment is attention, because it is the thing we are all quietly running out of.
NICOLE JUNKERMANN
This is also why I care so much about the artists working right now, today, in studios you have never heard of. It is easy to revere the art of the past, safely agreed upon and hung behind glass. It is harder, and to me far more interesting, to look closely at the new and the unproven, and to back it before the world has decided. Every artist we now consider essential was once a young person hoping somebody would stop, and stay, and really look.
Where this leads
None of this requires an expensive education or a particular kind of taste. It requires only the willingness to slow down and the humility to keep looking after you think you have understood. You can begin in any gallery, in front of any work, this weekend. You can begin, honestly, in front of something you are not even sure you like, which is often where the most happens.
I keep a running note of the exhibitions and works that have made me stop in my own art writing, but the writing is only ever a nudge back toward the real thing. Art does not live on a screen, or on a page, or in an essay like this one. It lives in the meeting between a made object and a person willing to give it their time.
In a culture engineered to keep us moving, choosing to stand still in front of one beautiful, difficult thing is a small act of resistance. It is also, I think, one of the great quiet pleasures still left to us. All it asks is that you stop, and stay, and look.
Nicole Junkermann is an entrepreneur, investor and patron of the arts. She writes about art and culture at nicolejunkermann.info.
