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This weekend, readers will find an unusual section in their Sunday New York Times. It contains no news articles, Opinion essays or even page numbers — just six works of art.
My colleagues Larry Buchanan, Francesca Paris and Nico Chilla have been publishing an online series since 2024 called the 10-Minute Challenge. The premise is simple: Once a month, they ask you to look at a piece of art for 10 minutes (or as long as you’d like), scrolling and zooming around a high-resolution image. When you’re finished, they tell you more about the piece.
The point isn’t to give readers a comprehensive sweep of art history or to teach the most significant works in the canon. The challenge is designed to get readers to slow down, focus and reclaim a little of their attention span.
As one of the many readers who took the challenge, I was delighted to find a meditative patch of the internet, if only for 10 minutes. It wasn’t news, but it made my world a little bit bigger. I was also interested in the tension of trying to rebuild my attention span while using the very screen that has contributed to its erosion. If we could find a compelling way to translate the challenge into print, could a newspaper better help readers focus?
I teamed up with Susan Hopkins, who edits projects for print, to help answer that question. Susan and I work on the Print Hub, and our team takes pieces designed to be consumed onscreen and reshapes them for the newspaper. Changing the medium alters the message, so our work is about trying to preserve or enhance the meaning of a project, even if it can’t be told in exactly the same way as it was online.
We knew each artwork would need to be printed fairly large, which pointed us toward a special section with a curated selection of pieces. Susan, Larry and I chose six of our favorites, ranging from a bouquet by an 18th-century Dutch flower painter to a portrait of love and pain by Frida Kahlo.
One of our newspaper’s strengths is its size. A phone is just a few inches wide, but at nearly two feet, a broadsheet spread is the size of a poster — larger even than the dimensions of one of our selected artworks.
To take advantage of our broadsheet scale, I designed a section that pulls apart into a series of posters, with a guide to the images on each reverse side. This unconventional structure also allows the section to be read in any order — hence the lack of page numbers. The posters can be tacked up on a wall or passed around a living room, turning a solitary project to improve your focus into a communal experience.
We also knew that if we wanted readers to spend time really looking at the art, we would need to set a high standard for newspaper image reproduction. We started with higher-quality paper: a heavier, bright white newsprint typically reserved for our Sunday Styles section. My colleagues Dave Braun and Jim DeMaria, production artists who prepare imagery for publication, made sure that every detail of each oversized image was crisp, vibrant and toned as true-to-life as possible.
The largest of these posters is a nearly three-foot-wide reproduction of Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” The triptych’s form is echoed in print by a tri-fold presentation the width of three broadsheet pages. The Times’s plant in College Point, Queens, has one of the few newspaper presses in the country that can produce tri-folds, and this is the first time our newsroom has inserted one into a broadsheet section. Don’t let anyone tell you newspapers aren’t trying new things for the sake of art.
Though the Sunday Times may not come with a built-in timer or the ability to pan and zoom, the 10-Minute Challenge is not about the tools used to tell it. Our tools, however, facilitate the message and shape it in implicit and explicit ways. Print quietly offers the most distracted among us a suggestion: With a newspaper, you can disconnect from insistent dings, buzzes and push notifications without turning away from the world.
Single copies of the 10-Minute Challenge special section are available for purchase from The New York Times Store.
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