In yesterday’s New York Times, Francesca Paris and Larry Buchanan challenged their readers to take on the difficult but deeply rewarding task of simply looking at James Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Silver, pictured above, for ten uninterrupted minutes. “Focus is a skill,” they note; “we’ll help you practice.” They base their experiment upon an assignment that Jennifer Roberts, an art history professor at Harvard University, gives her students. Roberts, however, asks her students to choose a work of art and look at that work alone—for three full hours!
Spending time with the painting, Paris and Buchanan tell us, reveals some of the painting’s mysteries. But the real point of the experiemen was not that; rather, “it was just to get you to notice at all. With focus and with resolve, they tell us, “you might have slowed down. Your attention could then have been rewarded. Small discoveries, little pieces of information, ideas or even new sensations or feelings might have started to emerge. If you try this exercise again, with this painting or another, you might even form lasting memories of the artwork, and think of it when you see something similar in the real world.”
Professor Roberts recommended they use this nocturne for their experiment. To my mind, she could not have chosen a better one.
For the full article—if you can get past the paywall—see https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/20/upshot/attention-experiment.html.
Or, if you’d like, you can spend ten minutes with this Whistler—right here.