Can art heal your attention?

I tried to find out (my attention, not yours specifically), then I wrote about it for Commonweal.

I have a new essay out called “Fix Your Gaze” in Commonweal about art and attention. I hope you’ll read it!

Many writers in recent years have argued that art is the solution to the attention crisis. That is, art rewards sustained attention, so you can get better at avoiding constant distraction if you spend more time at the art museum.

I’m drawn to this hypothesis, but I wanted to test it myself. So I spent an afternoon at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last spring to see what would happen. I started the essay in one place regarding this question and ended up in another.

Discussed in the essay: Bay Area Rapid Transit, Sara Safransky’s The City after Property, attention fracking, Josef Pieper, “the good old days,” SFMOMA, Jenny Odell, Ellsworth Kelly, The Order of the Third Bird, Harvard students who have to look at a painting for three hours, X (formerly Twitter) (former) Headquarters, Alexander Calder, brunch, Morris Louis, Big Art, Yayoi Kusama, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, the urge to photograph paintings, art historian T.J. Clark, the exhilaration of mortality, Ragnar Kjartansson, YouTube comments, the Owl Tree bar, texting in church, attempting to draw a human head, an epiphany had while driving, St. Augustine, Iris Murdoch, Wallace Shawn, how to live your life.

Don’t you want to see how this all fits together?

It occurred to me while working on this piece that the “attention crisis” might look different to someone who lives in Brooklyn or San Francisco than it does in Dallas or Jacksonville. If you don’t contend daily with people who are playing a game on their phone while driving an F-150 at 80 miles an hour, you might come to think that the real problem is that people don’t bring books on the subway anymore. In the one place, the problem is a lack of sustained, intense focus; the other, it’s a lack of broader awareness of one’s surroundings.

There are some resonances between my essay and the argument art historian Clare Bishop is making in her book, Disordered Attention, which she discusses in an interview with The Nation.

Commonweal is one of the best magazines out there. It just celebrated its 100th anniversary with a fantistic, even (to me) inspiring issue that charts the magazine’s past and its remarkable adaptation to a changing Church and culture. It’s a Catholic magazine — it aimed, at its outset, to be a Catholic version of The Atlantic, The Nation, or The New Republic — but it features many non-Catholic writers and I think has a broader appeal than just to Catholics. I’ve read Commonweal for more than 25 years — my parish used to put a few free copies in the vestibule, and I would often snag one — and am proud to contribute to it today.

If you’d like to subscribe to the magazine (print + digital for half the price of most Substacks) you can do so here. It’s really worth it. Subscribing is a great way to “support my work” and the work of dozens of other terrific writers.