The season that removes the hurry
Collecting, at heart, is only looking that has been kept up over a long time. Everything else about it is administration. And of all the months in the year, July is the one that most obviously removes the reason to hurry. The rooms are emptier. The calendar is thinner. Half the people who would ordinarily be somewhere are elsewhere, and the ones who remain are moving at the pace the heat allows, which is slow. Whatever else the season takes away, it hands back time in front of things.
Nicole Brachetti Peretti has come to treat mid-July as the year's best stretch for unhurried looking, and the reason is almost embarrassingly practical: there is nobody standing behind you. A room with four people in it is a different instrument from a room with forty. You can step back without apologising. You can come close again. You can stand at an angle nobody would choose in a crowd and discover that the angle was the whole point.
What slow attention actually gives you
The first minute in front of a work is mostly recognition: you register the subject, the scale, the general weather of the thing, and a small internal voice announces whether you like it. That voice is fast and it is not especially reliable. What comes after it is the useful part, and it will not be rushed into arriving.
Somewhere in the fourth or fifth minute the surface starts to give up information. You see where the hand hesitated. You see a colour that was underneath and has been half covered and is still doing work through the layer on top. You notice that the composition is held together by something you had not registered at all, an edge, a gap, a single dark note in a corner, and that if it were removed the whole thing would fall apart. None of this is available at speed. It is not hidden, exactly. It is simply only visible to somebody who has agreed to stay.
A few of the things that slow looking tends to hand over, in roughly the order they arrive:
- The difference between what you like and what is good, which are not the same question and are best asked separately.
- The work's actual scale, felt rather than measured, once you have stood at three distances from it instead of one.
- The decisions underneath the result: what was tried, what was covered, what was left deliberately unfinished.
- Whether it holds. A work that is merely striking gets less interesting each minute. A work that is good gets more so.
That last one is the whole test, and it is only available to somebody with time. Speed cannot distinguish between an image that lands hard and an image that lasts, because at speed they feel identical. Five quiet minutes tell them apart every time.
The second visit and the third
The other thing summer permits is going back. A first visit is always partly about the building: where things are, how the light falls, how far it is from the door. By the second visit that noise has gone, and you walk straight to the thing you came for. By the third, something better happens, which is that you stop going to the thing you came for and start noticing what you had walked past twice.
Returning is unfashionable. There is a quiet pressure to have seen a great many things rather than to have seen a few of them properly, and it is a pressure worth resisting, especially now, when a slow week and a half-empty room make returning so easy. The works that eventually matter to a person are almost never the ones that impressed them first. They are the ones that were still there on the third look, saying something slightly different. This is the attention the art pages are built around, and mid-July is when it comes most naturally.
Patience is not passivity
It would be easy to make slow looking sound like drifting, and it is not that. Standing still in front of something for ten minutes is work. The mind objects. It offers you tasks, other rooms, the temperature, lunch. Staying put through the objection is the entire skill, and like most skills it gets easier with repetition and harder if you leave it alone for a season.
What patience is not is hesitancy. The unhurried looker is not the indecisive one. Quite the opposite: by the time somebody has looked at something four times over three weeks, they know what they think, and they know why, and they can say it in a sentence. The rush is what produces the wobbly judgement, because the rush never got past that first unreliable voice. Slowness is how conviction is manufactured, quietly, out of hours nobody else wanted to spend.
Notes on a hot afternoon
Practically, all of this happens at the edges of a July day, for the reasons set out in the mid-July notes: early, in the cool, before the rooms fill and the heat climbs. Then home, shutters to, and the afternoon for writing down what was seen while it is still warm in the mind. That small habit of writing after looking is where a good deal of the writing here starts, and it is also the only honest record of whether a thing held or not. Memory flatters. A note taken on the day does not.
None of this is a method, and it is certainly not advice about what to acquire. It is closer to a temperament, and the season simply makes the temperament easier to keep. Look at fewer things. Look at them for longer. Go back. Write it down. Let the ones that fade, fade, and pay attention to the small number that refuse to.
These mid-July notes are kept by Nicole Brachetti Peretti alongside the wider journal and the summer's slower reading. If the season offers one lesson about looking, it is the one it offers about everything else in July: the hurry was never adding anything, and the heat has simply made that impossible to ignore.