Harvard art historian Jennifer Roberts teaches the value of immersive attention | Harvard Magazine

As the art historian Jennifer Roberts argued several years ago, “Just because something is available instantly to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness.” Or, as she also puts it, just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it.

This act of “really looking” is deceptive. It requires an almost “unlooking” to see closely, a kind of defocusing. Because: We tend to see in groups, not details. We scan an image or scene for the gist, but miss a richness of particulars. I suspect this has only gotten worse in recent years as our Daily Processed Information density has increased, ... See more

What this exercise shows students is that just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it. Just because something is available instantly to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness. Or, in slightly more general terms: access is not synonymous with learning. What turns access into learning is ... See more

She felt she would be failing in her duties if she didn’t also attempt to influence the tempo at which her students worked, helping them slow down to the speed that art demands. ‘They needed someone to give them permission to spend this kind of time on anything,’ she said. ‘Somebody had to give them a different set of rules and constraints than the

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She felt she would be failing in her duties if she didn’t also attempt to influence the tempo at which her students worked, helping them slow down to the speed that art demands. ‘They needed someone to give them permission to spend this kind of time on anything,’ she said. ‘Somebody had to give them a different set of rules and constraints than the

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“to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted.

I'd come to think our brains needed help transforming from trash compactors into microscopes, and that's where art comes in: a way to fight our instincts to truncate and elide, and, in so doing, to notice more, appreciate more, empathize more. Which is all to say, to experience more. If our lives are the set of experiences that we collect, then art

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