Two recent books offer practical recommendations for how we should attend to art amidst the crisis of attention.
After Y2K, when the world failed to end, the art historian T.J. Clark spent six months at the Getty Institute in Los Angeles looking at two paintings by the 17th century French painter Nicolas Poussin and recording his reflections in a diary. Clark’s The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006) recounts this experience; there are 49 entries dated from his time at the Getty, showing that “astonishing things happen” when you devote yourself to sustained attention to works of art. In his diary entries for Poussin’s Landscape with a Calm (1650–51) and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (1648), he considers the paintings’ most minute details—the curlicues of white outlining the neck of a bull, three green smears making up a meadow, traces of underpainting—and wonders what they mean for big questions about the nature of representation, or what he calls “the business of making likenesses.” Visiting the paintings day after day, Clark reflects on the experience and politics of looking with obsessive attention, noticing how haze in the Los Angeles sky or tungsten light changes how the paintings look in the Getty gallery, how his own mood shapes what he looks at and how he is struck by it. One of these moods is “bitterness” at those “professional twenty-first-century intellectuals” who think that extended looking at Poussins is merely nostalgic or “elitist.” But sometimes his bitterness is more quotidian, like when the world intrudes upon his capacity to pay attention as it does in the line that ends his entry for the morning of January 28: “But I’m tired – and kids with squeaking Nikes are taking over the room…”
Clark’s dissatisfaction is political. He characterizes his present as “a terrible moment in the politics of imaging,” citing phenomena that have only accelerated since the year 2000, like the “endless available revisability of the image” and the “sewing together of everything in nets and webs.” Clark is not alone: it has become a part of common sense that we are suffering a “crisis of attention.” Because what we pay attention to is one measure of what we value (as opposed to what we say we value), worries about the crisis of attention are worries that we are valuing the wrong things. By returning to look at two paintings over and over again, Clark aims to “recapture…what is involved in truly getting to know something by making a picture of it” instead of repeating the distracted way we usually skim and sample images. Clark exercises attention as a “reactive” act of resistance to some of the disorders of the contemporary world. But who has six months to spend in the Getty looking at two paintings? Two recent books offer practical recommendations for how we should attend to art amidst the crisis of attention: Claire Bishop’s Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (Verso, 2024) and Matthew Strohl’s Hard to Watch: How to Fall in Love with Difficult Movies (Applause, 2024). Bishop argues that we shouldn’t fight “disordered attention” while Strohl offers practical advice for how we can structure our lives so we are able to give difficult art (in his case films) the undivided attention they require.
Bishop, an art historian and critic at CUNY, argues that it is a mistake to think that there is a single appropriate way of attending to contemporary art. Her objects of study are varied and demand different kinds of attention from their audiences, from installations that create a feeling of information overload to political artistic interventions that try to capture media attention, or repetitive invocations of great works of modernist art and “the grey zone” of avant-garde performances that take place in traditional art galleries. Bishop argues convincingly that different genres of contemporary art demand different norms of attention and that the hyper-focused, silent, attentive style of looking and listening that we associate with art museums and musical and theatrical performances is a late nineteenth century invention whose time has passed. We look at our phones while watching movies or listening to music. We talk to each other and take pictures and videos of paintings and performances to later post on social media. Unlike the cultural chorus warning about our diminished ability to pay focused attention to what matters, Bishop’s response is that we have entered a time of “selective inattention,” and we shouldn’t fight it.
It is hard to resist Bishop’s conclusion that modernist ideals of attention are simply the wrong way to attend to certain genres of contemporary art. Bishop coins the term “the grey zone” to describe blending of the “black box” with the norms of “the white cube.” The “black box” is the physical space and norms of spectatorship characteristic of twentieth century experimental theater, in which sets and effects are eliminated to focus on “immediacy, proximity, and communion.” The “white cube” is shorthand for the norms of the modern art gallery in which works are exhibited, rather than performed. The grey zone is the intersection of those spaces where “performance exhibitions” take place. For example, the choreographer Maria Hassabi creates works involving dancers who move extremely slowly in art gallery spaces, sliding down stairs like viscous liquids, rolling across the floor, slowly sitting up or turning their heads. Museum goers walk around the dancers and photograph them, and the performance is continuous while the museum is open. The long duration and sometimes imperceptibly slow movement make it nearly impossible for any single spectator to attend to the performance as a whole, and so the hundreds of photographs posted on Instagram of the exhibitions become a necessary prosthetic for perceiving the work.
But what about works that demand more than a “relaxed distribution of focus,” work that we want to give more of ourselves to? Matthew Strohl provides recommendations for how we can create distraction-free media niches that make giving our undivided attention to difficult art possible. In Hard to Watch, Strohl, a philosopher and voracious viewer (his Letterboxd account shows that he watched 90 movies in January 2025 alone), makes an argument for the value of prolonged, attentive engagement with “difficult” movies—those that are complex, opaque, long, or grotesque. Demonstrating the value of deep engagement, he meditates on ambiguous or seemingly inaccessible films, like Terrence Malick’s critically maligned late film Knight of Cups (2015), Alain Resnais’s elusive Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963), Julia Ducournau’s body-horror movie Titane (2021), and the provocative, slow cinema of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielmann, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Strohl’s expansive, enthusiastic interpretations of these movies is the central attraction of the book, but it is his practical tips for overcoming what he calls “weakness of will in the age of streaming” that puts his book in productive dialogue with Bishop’s endorsement of selective inattention.
For Strohl, the pleasure of readily available, easy-to-watch TV and movies “can tempt us to act against our better judgment.” Our better judgment is that it is rewarding to watch movies that “require active concentration.” And so he offers us techniques for giving our better judgment a fighting chance against weakness of will, including making personal resolutions to watch particularly difficult-to-watch movies, writing short Letterboxd reviews as a memory aid and spur to reflection, and leveraging the fear of missing out when the Criterion Channel publishes its monthly list of movies leaving the service to watch movies you have not gotten around to. As he puts it: “No one is ever ‘in the mood’ to watch Claude Lanzmann’s 9.5 hour Holocaust documentary Shoah…. The way I got myself to finally do it was to make a short list of movies that I promised myself I would watch before the end of the year and put Shoah on it.” Another benefit of reading Strohl’s book is that you will end up with an ambitious list of movies for your to-watch lists.
I share Strohl’s nostalgia for the virtues of the old Netflix DVD-by-mail system that had you build a queue of movies and then automatically shipped them to you as you watched and returned the ones you had at home. That system involved a nagging feeling that you could be getting more for your money if you hurried up and watched the movies you had, which encouraged good viewing habits (this was not true for everybody: I have a friend who would just pay more and more for the maximum number of DVDs Netflix allowed at one time so he wouldn’t have to send anything back). The current Netflix streaming service, in contrast, is designed to promote weakness of will, by encouraging you to keep watching, no matter what.
But overcoming weakness of will is not just a matter of exercising more willpower. Strohl’s tips for watching difficult movies involves shaping a “media ecosystem” that makes it easier to watch Akerman, Malick, and Resnais while not feeding from the Netflix autoplaying “trough of junk food.” Creating that media ecosystem could be as simple as canceling Netflix, subscribing to Kanopy instead, and getting a membership to your local repertory or art house cinema if you are fortunate enough to live near one.
Strohl’s austere conception of what is required to properly view difficult movies does not exclude the value of attending to different kinds of art. In his terminology, there are different types of “aesthetic slots” that we fill with different kinds of objects: we need to relax after a day at work, so we watch an old episode of Peep Show, or we need to kill time while waiting to board a flight, so we watch playthroughs of videogames (or whatever fills that slot in your aesthetic life). If it is possible to have valuable aesthetic experiences in response to much less demanding works of art in different “slots” (Law and Order, Love Island), what makes the sometimes painful and boring experience of watching “difficult” movies worth it?
A Bourdieu-minded skeptic might say that watching difficult movies is done just for clout (especially if you’re posting them to Letterboxd). But that worry is hard to pin on Strohl given his committed aesthetic omnivorousness. In an earlier book, Why It’s Ok to Love Bad Movies (2022), he makes the case for the value of watching what no traditional hierarchies of aesthetic value would consider prestigious: Troll 2, Ninja III: The Domination, and some of Nicholas Cage’s most mannered performances. Watching difficult movies is not valuable just because they are difficult; rather, it is that what is enjoyable or rewarding about them does not readily or easily yield itself without some demanding engagement. For example, according to Strohl, Alain Resnais’s disorienting, weirdly edited film Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963) rewards many repeated viewings in a way Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) does not. These are claims that audiences have to test for themselves, but Strohl’s essays hold open what can be a very heavy door for people who have never tried to access these movies before.
Despite their differences in focus, both Bishop and Strohl endorse pluralism in their approach towards restoring deep engagement with works of art: different types of art demand different kinds of attention. And yet in spite of their theoretical commitment to pluralism in the norms of attention appropriate for different genres of contemporary art, there are times when Strohl and Bishop reveal their personal preferences for either an austere, T.J. Clark-like environment, or a more chaotic environment aimed at cultivating specific modes of consciousness. For example, on social media, Strohl has criticized his local arthouse movie theater because “it is a miserable place to watch a movie and is really more of a wine and snacks social venue.” In contrast, Bishop enthusiastically describes “relaxed” theater performances that are friendly for “neurodiverse audiences, especially adults and children with learning difficulties and autism.” Movie theatres call these “sensory friendly” screenings, where they do not completely dim the lights and allow people to move around, interact, and use their phones during the performance. In a recent interview with The Nation, Bishop says: “It would be interesting to think of a future in which all performances are relaxed performances.” I can only imagine Strohl’s dismayed response to thinking of such a future!
Bishop convincingly criticizes theorists who think there is only one appropriate norm of attention. She wants to strike back against the “latent snobbery,” elitism, and ableism of theorists and audiences who insist on this outdated norm of spectatorship to the exclusion of ways of seeing that are “incessantly hybrid: both present and mediated, live and online, fleeting and profound, individual and collective.” But sometimes people insist on old modernist norms of spectatorship not out of latent ableism or elitism, but because the alternative is not being able to pay attention to the work at all. For example, last year when I was reading Bishop’s book, I took my parents to a performance of Mozart’s piano concerto No. 20, where a man sitting in front of us loudly crunched his way through four bags of goldfish crackers during the performance. My dad was visibly annoyed; the goldfish man made it impossible to concentrate on the music. The next day we went to see Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment, the National Gallery’s 150th anniversary exhibit of the first impressionist show. Many people moved through the exhibit by taking a picture of a painting with their phones, then snapping a picture of the information card next to it and repeating the process for each painting in the room. It was now my mom’s turn to be annoyed: she wondered, why go to the show in person if you are not even going to take time to look at the actual paintings right in front of you? The goldfish snacker and art snappers might have been at home in a “grey zone” performance, but in the concert hall and impressionist show they disordered our attention.
The final entry in Clark’s The Sight of Death describes Clark reencountering Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake in a “desolate thruway” of the National Gallery in London in 2003, after it has been returned from the Getty. The painting is hung near the Leicester Square exit, where “thirty-plus people a minute steam past it, one or two of whom give it a passing glance,” prompting Clark to wonder about how the “cruel and callous” light in the gallery “makes my weeks spent wondering about what time of day Poussin may have been intending seem totally absurd.” Seeing the painting in these conditions leaves Clark “miserable and stupefied” until he reflects on the fact that in hundreds of years the painting has been through worse, and that eventually conditions will be right for people to attend to it again.
We can endorse pluralism about the norms of attention demanded by contemporary art without needing to completely “jettison plenitudinous modern attention as an impossible ideal.” Bishop is right that approaching some contemporary art with that kind of attention would lead to “exhaustion and alienation.” But Clark and Strohl show how certain paintings and movies demand and reward that ideal of attention, and how it is possible, given the right environment, to stay focused on the most demanding forms of human expression even as the entire world rests packaged on your palm waiting for your next passing glance.
Nat Hansen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. He is drinking coffee and writing a book on ordinary language philosophy.
Thumbnail photo by Valentin Ciccarone via Unsplashh