Harvard art history professor Jennifer Roberts sets a tough challenge for new students on her course. Go into a gallery and pick any artwork. Now stare at it for three hours.
It is, she admits, “a painfully long time” to look at a single object. But the aim is to train people to improve their focus in an age of constant distraction.
Does it work? I visited the National Gallery of Ireland to find out. The recently acquired Jack B Yeats painting Singing ‘The Dark Rosaleen’, Croke Park (1921) was my chosen picture. I started the clock – and lasted all of 30 minutes before the urge to check my phone became too great and I bailed for the coffee shop.
That half-hour didn’t retrain my brain. But it did do something to my concentration that could be described in three phases. First, the more I stared at the picture, the more it felt alive, with the musicians at the centre almost levitating beyond the canvas.
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Second, I found myself more deeply questioning the artwork’s meaning. Why have the singers their backs to the crowd? Did Yeats wish to have the mustachioed men behind them looking not just at the players but beyond them to you, the viewer? It’s as though they ask: what would you have done at this time of political turmoil?
Third, the stretch of time reminded me of a long-forgotten experience: screenless boredom.
Maybe I would have got more out of it if I had stayed longer. But there was no shame in quitting.
So academic and author Francis Halsall convinces me later on, when discussing why exactly we look at artwork.
“I find the idea that art should be ‘useful’ somewhat depressing. It should aspire to be more than this,” the National College of Art and Design lecturer says.
Using art as a “workout” for the mind “relates to [philosophy writer] Alain de Botton’s argument, which I don’t like, that art could be a form of therapy in response to contemporary conditions”, Halsall also says.
“I’m not saying that retraining attention isn’t a good thing to do, but rather that I don’t want this to be the purpose of art and galleries.”
He approves of German thinker Theodor Adorno’s commitment “to art that is puzzling, miraculous, weird and something we never quite grasp”.
Halsall has curated a show that is running at the Solstice Arts Centre in Co Meath. It is one that fits the bill.
“It has a philosophical starting point,” he says. It explores the boundaries between, on the one hand, science and mathematical purity and, on the other, inherently flawed human handicraft.
Objects that look like they might have been produced by machines are revealed up close to have “little glitches where things go a bit wrong”.
“These glitches produce something that is beautiful if you’re prepared to make the effort to spend some time with it, even if it is not immediately entertaining or even likable.”
It provides a neat backdrop for asking that age-old question: What exactly is art?
“Honestly, I don’t know. At the very least we can say that anything can be art including cooking Thai curries in galleries or an empty room where the light goes on and off,” Halsall says, referencing two modern art works that have featured in Australian and British galleries.
The latter, imaginatively titled The Lights Going On and Off, won its installer Martin Creed a Turner Prize and was acquired by The Tate.
But for many it represents all that has gone wrong with modern art. Not to get all reactionary about it, but galleries seem to be more focused on ideology than aesthetics; more value is placed on scoring intellectual points than creating something objectively beautiful.
Halsall bristles at the argument. “Art has always been ideological although perhaps this was sometimes hidden or not obvious,” he says.
As for the claim that modern art is unduly smart-alecky, he says: “Without examples this might seem to be a straw-man argument. On the one hand the vast quantity of art that circulates in art fairs tends to not do this ... On the other hand, maybe the concern for critique and intellectualism is something imposed on artists by the expectations of audiences and institutions rather than something self-imposed.
“Perhaps there is the expectation that art should be accessible or meaningful or useful. I find this frustrating because it’s often not expected of other social activities.
“Take rugby, for example, something I find as baffling as I do uninteresting. We do not ask rugby players to make their passes more accessible so that someone like me can understand what’s going on. Neither do we ask for their plays to be metaphors for the human condition or critiques of underlying political circumstances.”
What of the future? Last year an artwork created by a robot fetched more than $1 million (€860,000), while earlier this year Christie’s held its first auction devoted exclusively to AI-generated art.
“The art in our show demonstrates that art is probably not reducible to an algorithm,” Halsall says. Describing himself as “optimistic”, he believes “interpersonal human interaction” will become “increasingly important”.
Maybe so. But my advice is to get down to a gallery while it’s still possible to marvel at human artwork. And before Big Tech has completely colonised your attention.
Of Peras and Apeiron: Ends and Infinity runs until October 25th at Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, Co Meath; solsticeartscentre.ie
