The Power of Patience: the value of deceleration & immersive attention [Article]

Professor of history of art & architecture, Jennifer L Roberts describes the experience that her students go through when required to write an intensive research paper based on a single work of art of their own choosing.

Before doing any research in books or online, the student would first be expected to go to the Museum of Fine Arts, where it hangs, and spend three full hours looking at the painting, noting down his or her evolving observations as well as the questions and speculations that arise from those observations. The time span is explicitly designed to seem excessive.