Americans, on average, spend between six and ten seconds with individual artworks in museums or galleries—hardly time enough. But how, in our culture of distraction, might we extend attention? Slow Art models sustained ways of looking, through encounters with various media both present and past—including photography, painting, sculpture, “living pictures,” film, video, digital and performance art—even light and space. Works by Diderot, Emma Hamilton, Oscar Wilde, Jeff Wall, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Andy Warhol, and Richard Serra, among others, shape a new and distinct aesthetic field. But rather than a collection of objects, slow art is participatory—it directly engages beholders to bring artworks to life. Against current orthodoxy, Arden Reed argues that, for contemporary viewers, the contemplation of slow art is akin to religious practices during the ages of faith. "...what in another writer’s hands might have been a dry academic treatise turns out to be a lively ramble through high and low culture, touching on the likes of Diderot, Goethe, David Foster Wallace, Susan Sontag, Sleeping Beauty, the Countess de Castiglione and Andy Warhol." ― Wall Street Journal "Reed seeds his profundities throughout  Slow Art  in example after example, weaving them into compelling histories that get you thinking about art in new ways." ― The Santa Fe New Mexican Published On: 2018-02-02 "It has an interesting point to make when it comes to the relationship between stillness and motion, layering and adding dimensions as well as approaching art from a “slow” angle instead of the artwork itself necessarily carrying such qualities. What seems to be a fad and neologism, is actually based on a concept that harks back to ancient times yet what is exemplified in the book is that it is inextricably with our current state of affairs and the future." ― Scene Point Blank “The ‘slow’ artwork that arrests and doggedly holds our attention is the subject of Arden Reed’s original and rigorous study. Arguing that slow art triggers the contemplative experience once solicited by sacred images and texts, Reed traces the reemergence of the aesthetic of stillness in response to modernity’s escalating pace and animation, and the contemporary revival of this aesthetic in an era of instantaneous digital communication. His account moves across media and registers of high and low, from the historical tableau vivant and its contemporary iterations (such as Laguna Beach’s Pageant of the Masters) to the ‘black’ paintings of Ad Reinhardt, the Torque sculptures of Richard Serra, the photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto, and the immersive installations of James Turrell. Reed has theorized an aesthetic category all his own.”—James Meyer, author of Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties   “ Being on speed in rush hour, we may discover in the counter-aesthetic of slow art the unspeakable paradox of gravity: stillness in motion, in and out of time.” — Godfrey Reggio, director of the Qatsi trilogy ( Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi,  and  Naqoyqatsi )   “Arden Reed teaches us to look—and then look again—in this book of radiant encounters, this hybrid study of how works of art unfold over time. Slow Art  artfully enacts what it describes with a keen contemplative intellect and a rare spiritual poise.”—Edward Hirsch, author of  How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry   “ I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book about art as fresh, smart, lucid, illuminating, thought provoking, wide ranging, and altogether delightful as this one. Or more important. There’s a good chance  Slow Art  will change the way you look and think, and only for the better.”—Kurt Andersen, author of  Fantasyland and host of Studio 360   “If you love art (or wonder why you don’t), this book is a must-read. You will learn how to see art, but you will also discover a new way to live in this speed-obsessed twenty-first century.”—Phil Terry, founder of Slow Art Day and coauthor of Customers Included: How to Transform Products, Companies, and the World—with a Single Step “Reed asks us to enter and engage in immersive experiences. His book is a thoughtful—indeed passionate—reminder of art’s conversion of the material into the experiential. Since the Greek painter Zeuxis, art has attempted alchemical and often optical transformation. Reed moves the needle from Zeuxis’s trompe l’oeil deception to recent art in which physical sensation and intellectual inquiry hold the viewer captive.”—Norman L. Kleeblatt, Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator of The Jewish Museum, New York   “Displaying historical breadth and contemporary depth, Reed explores the capacity of art to create a space and time for thoughtful meditation in today’s high-speed world. Slow Art takes readers on a pilgrimage from ancient icons to the Middle Ages to the deserts of today’s American West to discover the sacred in what usually appears to be profane. An important book that deserves to be read slowly.”—Mark C. T