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On a wet May Saturday while visiting California from Texas, I board the BART train in Berkeley, headed across the bay to San Francisco. I have already looked at my phone thirty-four times today, but I try not to look at it while I ride. I look instead at other people looking at their phones. A mother holds hers out in front of her and her young daughter, ready to take a video: “Uno, dos, tres!” she announces, and they start making faces into the camera. Then they look back at the screen and laugh.
I’m surprised that only about half of the others in my train car are on their phones. Someone wearing a mask and a keffiyeh is reading, making notes in the geographer Sara Safransky’s book The City after Property. Opposite me, a man in a security-guard uniform clutches a coffee cup and looks ahead, even when we go through the tunnel and there’s nothing to see out the windows.
Like many people, I worry about the condition of my attention. I worry, too, about other people’s attention—especially when they’re driving gargantuan pickups at the reckless speeds prevalent on Texas highways. I worry that our attention is being “fracked” by companies for whom our glances, sustained over just a few seconds but multiplied by a billion times a day, equal massive profits. I worry about my writing students’ attention. If they can’t focus on their reading or their classmates or me, how are they going to learn? How can we have in-person relationships if we’re always looking for the next thing our devices can deliver? It doesn’t even matter what the next thing is—all that matters is that it’s next.
In a sense, my concerns are nothing new. The earliest monastics fled to the desert in large part so they could pray without the distractions of third-century city life. Even in the 1950s, “the good old days” according to some, leading thinkers lamented people’s inability to focus. “Man’s ability to see is in decline,” declared the German philosopher Josef Pieper in a 1952 essay. By this, he meant losing “the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is.” For Pieper, “the integrity of man as a spiritual being” was at risk because modernity had produced a bewildering quantity of things to see.
I’m on my way to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, partly because I have heard that looking at art can help improve my attention—and thereby help me resist the attention-extraction industry, reclaim my autonomy, and rebuild my capacity to see reality. In her book How to Do Nothing, the writer and artist Jenny Odell describes a visit to the SFMOMA during which she looked closely at the monochrome panels of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Blue Green Black Red” (1996): “I was completely caught off guard by a physical sensation,” she recalls. “Although the covering was consistent and flat, the color blue was not stable: it vibrated and seemed to push and pull my vision in different directions.” Odell understands still images like paintings as “training apparatuses for attention” because, paradoxically, they take time to perceive, slowly disclosing more to the attentive viewer.
Odell is not alone in making this case. Writing in the New Yorker, Nathan Heller sees a promising response to the attention crisis in a secretive, twee group called the Order of the Third Bird, whose members gather to view artworks in twenty-eight-minute blocks of time. Each block contains four seven-minute phases, one of these a “negation” in which the Birds look away from the work and purge it from their brains. Even more strictly, the art historian Jennifer Roberts requires her Harvard students to view an artwork in person for three hours straight. The exercise “serves as a master lesson in the value of critical attention, patient investigation, and skepticism about immediate surface appearances,” Roberts writes in an essay. “I can think of few skills that are more important in academic or civic life in the twenty-first century.” With these endorsements in mind, I step off the train and head to the museum.
SFMOMA is in the SoMa neighborhood (South of Market), an area that’s become synonymous with the distraction economy. The headquarters of X, formerly Twitter, were six blocks away. (The company has since moved to Texas.) On the day I visit, the museum has waived its usual thirty-dollar entry fee. The place is lively. A series of bands and DJs play in a ground-floor auditorium. A bar is set up in the lobby.
The first gallery I enter is filled with people looking at Alexander Calder mobiles, talking, and taking pictures. I don’t know what to pay attention to: the art, the people, myself? Which people? Which artworks? There is too much to see even in this (literally) curated space. How can art save my attention if there is too much art?
A friend had suggested over brunch that the museum would be calmer on the upper floors. I take her advice and head up to the midcentury American galleries. In one, two young women sit on a bench facing a massive, untitled canvas (1959–60) by Morris Louis. Twelve feet wide, it’s streaked with bright acrylic lines that approximate a flower in bloom: red, yellow, violet, green, orange, all running to muddy brown in the center.
“It’s not resonating?” one of the women asks.
“No.”
“I can persuade you.” They continue talking about the painting as I wander off. A few minutes later, one of them is posing in front of the canvas. The sort of “big art” favored by SFMOMA makes for a good backdrop.
Most of the people in the museum are in pairs or threes, chatting, sometimes about the artworks, sometimes not. The solo visitors are looking at their phones—likely chatting via text. I am the one weirdo jotting in a notebook.
I go higher. On the sixth floor, hundreds of people wait to get into an Instagram-friendly exhibition of two of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. Nearby are the contemporary German paintings, less popular, though they are some of the best in the museum’s collection.
I browse a gallery of ghostly, photorealistic paintings by Gerhard Richter, pausing for several minutes at Seascape (1998), in which indistinct puffs of paint, faintly scraped horizontally, give surreal texture to the low waves breaking onto a beach in the foreground. The work is delicate, suggesting the ephemerality of the world. I look at the clouds—they’re like a heavy bank of mist—and think about whether they’re reflected in the water, or if the water is misty of its own accord. I’m anxious about taking it all in, acquiring all the visual information I might later want, so I’m tempted to take a picture. Doing so, I think, would absolve me of the need to see and describe the painting as completely as possible in my notebook. And I’m here to work on my attention, on seeing with my own eyes, on being in the moment. So my phone stays in my pocket. But I also know I can look it up online later. Is this cheating?
I turn a corner and am immediately stunned by a huge, astounding composition: Anselm Kiefer’s Die Meistersinger (1982). It’s a landscape of concentric furrows in rough streaks of brown, cream, and red radiating from the upper left of the canvas. In that corner, gray and black shapes suggest uniformed riders on horseback. Atop the canvas are tufts of straw, up to six inches deep, which are intermittently covered with splotches of red and white paint. And buried in the thatch are numbers, one to thirteen, painted on small panels. This is the opposite of Richter’s Seascape: abstract, yet raucous and visceral. I look for some time, maybe a quarter of an hour, at a distance and up close. The work musters my attention, though I still feel inadequate to it. This time, I can’t resist: I have to take pictures.
You could argue that we feel this impulse to photograph artworks because we mistrust our senses. Digital information, we think, is both more permanent and more precise than what we gain through organic means, so it must be more reliable. The impulse might also stem from our capitalist desire to cut the work down to size and possess it, so that it can be more readily shared, liked, and ultimately monetized by people who work in the towers surrounding SFMOMA.
But there’s another, more humanistic way to think about it. We might take photos of artworks because we recognize that whatever attention we give them is never enough. They deserve longer looks than we can spare. They deserve to be revisited. But unless we live nearby (and can afford admission or membership fees), we can’t give the works what they deserve. In all likelihood, we won’t even look at the pictures we take. And why would we? They won’t measure up to the work itself. The photo is a promissory note to the work, one we may never repay.
In his book The Sight of Death, art historian T. J. Clark recounts dozens of visits he made over several months to view two Nicolas Poussin paintings in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The works constantly exceeded his ability to see or remember or make sense of them. He returned to them not in order to get incrementally more information out of them—though he did get that—but because he was hooked on the feeling of being surpassed. “Don’t we go back” to a great artwork, he asks, “because we sense that in it is re-enacted a death or terror we would all like to experience again in this harmless, ordered, palliative state?” It may be that this encounter with mortality can, on the rebound, vivify us.
If the experience of finitude is the goal, though, there is nothing special about art as the means of attaining it. Nature can do the same and, conveniently, much of it is beyond the reach of cellular networks. Odell recognizes this; she exercises her attention on frequent hikes and at a public rose garden in Oakland. Some people even pay to spend several days in an absolutely dark cave—that is, they view nothing at all—in an effort to break out of their attentional patterns. Maybe the only reason people propose art as the antidote to distraction is that there is a lot of it, it is expensive to acquire, and we don’t know what else to do with it.
After viewing the Kiefer, my legs are tired. I had walked in the Berkeley hills the day before, and now, after an hour and a half in the museum, I’m ready to sit on a barstool and think things through. Before I go back downstairs, I poke my head into a gallery playing a video installation, Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors (2012), which the Guardian’s Adrian Searle named the best artwork of the twenty-first century. Nine projectors show musicians dolefully performing an hour-long song together in different rooms of a rambling old mansion in the Hudson Valley. Kjartansson sings and plays guitar while sitting in a bathtub.
The gallery is larger than some music venues in the city, but it’s packed. In the middle of the room, people sprawl on their bellies and listen. Very few look at phones—fewer, in fact, than I would expect at a live concert. On a YouTube page featuring video from the installation, people attest to how the piece reliably makes them cry or pulls them back from the ledge. “Every time I contemplate suicide,” one commenter writes, “I replay my experience with this art exhibit, and I can’t quite express why, but it talks me back down.” Another writes, “I literally have to visit monthly. I just sit there because it’s one place where I can truly think.”
I didn’t see a crisis of attention at the museum or even on my way to it. In fact, I saw the very conviviality that critics of the attention economy believe is in danger. Maybe that means the art did what Odell, Roberts, and others think it will do. But it may also be that the attentional crisis is not what these authors think it is. We clearly have it in us to be patient and attentive, at least in certain contexts. People (mostly) don’t text in church. Outside those contexts, of course, it’s another story. The museum worked its attentional magic on me, but the effect wouldn’t last. As I leave, I register that in the three hours since I got on the train, I picked up my phone only eight times. By the time I go to bed, I will have picked it up thirty-seven more.
As a solution to the problem of our failing ability to see, Pieper proposes not viewing art but creating it. “Nobody has to observe and study the visible mystery of a human face more than the one who sets out to sculpt it in a tangible medium,” he writes. Art, then, is a way to trick yourself into really seeing the object you’re trying to depict.
This summer, I took Pieper up on his suggestion and enrolled in a drawing class. I had drawn before, but my skills were rusty after a decade of disuse—a decade in which, it goes nearly without saying, I became ever more dependent on attention-economy products. The classes, three hours on Tuesday afternoons, were exhausting. It did indeed require tremendous mental effort to study the grades of shadow beneath an apple or to reproduce the curves and planes that comprise the shape of a human head. It was a challenge both of seeing and of anticipating what tools and movements could represent the picture my mind composed. How will the charcoal smudge if I use a mechanical eraser? A kneaded eraser? My fingertip?
I drove to class on the highway but returned home on calm city streets, because I was so disoriented by the shift between the close attention I exercised in the studio and the need to make sense of a wide-open area with objects at varying distances. Moving vehicles were difficult to perceive accurately after I’d spent so long contemplating the shape of the space between a pair of nostrils.
That’s when it occurred to me: the kind of attention it takes to render a head or see a work like Die Meistersinger is nothing at all like the attention it takes to drive a car. In fact, if I looked at the road the way I looked at the Kiefer painting, I would have crashed immediately, because by concentrating on my side-view mirror, say, I would have missed 99 percent of the information I needed to keep the car on the road. Driving requires diffuse attention: an awareness of everything around you. It doesn’t demand total, deep focus. You can carry on a conversation, even fight with your spouse, while safely judging speed and distance, anticipating others’ moves, steering, and braking. You can listen to music. You can sing. What you can’t do is read two-point type on a four-inch screen.
The problem is not really that we can’t focus, that we can’t truly see the world in the deep way Pieper, Odell, and Roberts think we should. The problem is that we can’t prioritize. Our greater struggle is with moral, not aesthetic, perception. People who text while driving, or even just at dinner with their families, aren’t failing at deep attention. They don’t need to stand in front of an abstract painting for an hour a week. They need to recognize which task matters most in the moment and give it the proper care.
Pieper, a thoroughgoing Thomist, could use a dose of Augustine, who saw that while all things in creation are good, they are not equally good. Our moral duty is to recognize the relative goodness of the things of the world (and beyond it) and then desire the better things proportionately more than less-good ones. We sin, Augustine writes in the Confessions, “when, in consequence of an immoderate urge towards those things which are at the bottom end of the scale of good, we abandon the higher and supreme goods.”
We need to ask ourselves, then, two questions: How good is the thing or task before me? And what amount of what kind of attention does it merit? As I realized on the drive back from drawing class, attention isn’t just one thing. The ability to focus for a long time on a static object is useful, but that use is limited. We need, too, the ability to discern when to zero in on one thing and when to employ soft focus, when to shut out minutiae and when to drop what we are doing and take a phone call.
And how do we learn these things? Through customs and norms and rules and debate and trial and error—the same way we learn any ethical ability. In recent semesters, I have taken my writing students to the university’s art museum to look for a long time at one painting. We don’t spend three hours, but we spend longer than the students are inclined to. It’s a worthwhile exercise, and the students get more out of it than they expect. (None has said the exercise reminds them of their mortality. Not yet.) But I don’t think it alters my students’ attentional habits enough to carry into our classroom meetings. They generally don’t text during class, but I attribute that more to my ban on screens than to their encounter with the painting.
I suppose art could, indirectly, help our moral perception by reorienting our gaze away from our distorted views of reality and toward the good. Iris Murdoch certainly thought it could. Art, she writes in The Sovereignty of Good, invites “unsentimental, detached, unselfish, objective attention. It is also clear that in moral situations a similar exactness is called for.” Kjartansson’s The Visitors helps at least one person see (correctly) that it is better to live than to die, though it does so through immersive sentiment, not exactitude. So I am not sure Murdoch’s point applies to art generally. And again, as Murdoch admits, art is not the only way to have this sort of self-alienating, humbling experience.
The moralistic view of art is barely less reductive than a tech CEO’s view of it as “content.” Art doesn’t prepare you to focus on more important things; it is a more important thing.
There will always be too much to see. Pieper complained that visitors to New York City had not noticed the chess tables in Washington Square Park. So what? You’re simply going to miss things on a visit to New York—or in a lifetime living in the city. Even to make it through quotidian tasks requires a tremendous act of filtering out the fascinating details of our world. Wallace Shawn recognized this in the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre: “I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out!” He’s right. The narrow, blinkered perspective on the world that so many thinkers lament is necessary for self-preservation.
Our mortality forces us to be selective about what we pay attention to. It forces us to prioritize. Looking at art is not the antidote to looking too much at our phones; art is simply an alternative to it—though often a better alternative—just as nature or prayer or sex is. If you spend hours in a museum, you will probably still be distractible once you exit. I was. But you will have done something with your time that was better than scrolling on your phone. You will have viewed and enjoyed works of human hands. You may have even been surprised or soothed or moved to tears. If you went with someone else, you will have talked to them, laughed, seen the world briefly through their eyes. You will have lived a sliver of your life in a more excellent way.
