A rich season needs a shape
The arts calendar restarts in September with more force than it does in January. Programmes open, seasons are announced, and a great deal arrives at once after a summer of relative quiet. Nicole Brachetti Peretti uses the closing days of August to decide, in advance, what the autumn is actually for.
A busy cultural season without a shape tends to be experienced as a series of things missed. There is always more available than anyone can attend, and the gap between the possible and the actual becomes the dominant impression, which is a joyless way to spend four good months.
Three things, done properly
The remedy is small and works well. Choose three things to do properly rather than ten to attempt, and treat everything else as background that may or may not be visited. Three is few enough to be enjoyed, remembered and talked about afterwards.
The discipline is not in choosing the three. It is in accepting what the choice implies, which is that a great many worthwhile things will not be seen this autumn. That refusal is the entire value of the exercise, and it is the part most plans quietly skip.
Depth over coverage
The instinct in a rich season is towards coverage: seeing as much as possible so that nothing important is missed. Nicole Brachetti Peretti has found the opposite instinct more rewarding. Two exhibitions seen twice each will leave more behind than eight seen once.
The first visit is largely spent arriving, orienting and forming an impression. The second is where the actual looking happens, because everything else is already done. A season planned entirely from first visits is a season planned around its least interesting half.
What to decide now
The decisions worth making in a quiet week are the ones that become difficult later. Which three things matter. Which recurring hour is protected before the diary fills. And where the notes will live, so that the question is settled before there is anything to write.
None of that takes more than an afternoon, and all of it becomes considerably harder once the season has started and every choice has to compete with something already booked.
Leaving room for the unplanned
A common mistake is to plan the autumn completely while it is still theoretical. September always looks emptier from August than it turns out to be, and a plan built on that emptiness rarely survives its first fortnight.
It is better to commit to less than seems reasonable and leave the rest genuinely open, because the best thing in an arts season is frequently the one nobody planned for. Room in the calendar is what makes it possible to say yes when it appears.
Finishing the summer first
There is a second use for these days, which is closing rather than opening. Most people carry two or three unfinished things out of a summer, unfinished only because the season changed underneath them. A show never written up, a book left at the halfway mark.
Clearing them now costs very little and changes the mood of September considerably. The journal is the natural place for it, and the reading notes take whatever is left over.
Company changes what you see
One decision worth making now is who to see things with. A show visited alone and the same show visited with somebody are genuinely different experiences, and both are worth having, but they are rarely planned for separately.
Nicole Brachetti Peretti tends to reserve first visits for solitude and second visits for company, on the grounds that the first is for looking and the second is for talking about what was seen. The order matters more than it sounds.
The season is longer than it looks
It is easy in September to behave as though everything must be seen in the first month, when most programmes run for a considerable time and the quietest weeks to visit are usually the last ones rather than the first.
Holding something back until November is not a compromise. It spreads the season out and means arriving at a show once it has stopped being an event and become simply a room with work in it, which is the better way to see almost anything.
Beginning quietly
None of this requires a system. It requires an afternoon in the last week of August, three choices, and enough conviction to keep the list short when the season gets loud.
The companion note on the quietest week in the gallery year makes the case for the calm these decisions depend on. Nicole Brachetti Peretti would rather begin a season deliberately than begin it early.