“Everyone is distracted. All of the time,” said Justin Rosenstein, a tech entrepreneur who was a member of the team that invented Facebook’s “like” button, in an interview in The Guardian in 2017. Two years earlier, a study from Microsoft had concluded that the average human attention span had contracted to eight seconds.
No wonder that the Harvard professor Jennifer Roberts created a bit of a stir by insisting that her students look at a single artwork of their choice for three hours.
This exercise in what she calls immersive attention has remained a core element of Roberts’s art history teaching for more than a decade, despite the ever-increasing amount of distractive pressures that smartphones, social media and now A.I. heap on students’ minds.
“There’s a little bit more terror in their eyes when I say they should look at a work of art for three hours,” said Roberts in an interview.
“They can’t even fathom that they’ll be able to pay attention for that length of time. It means the rewards of the exercise are all the more vivid to them,” added Roberts, who helped The New York Times devise its 10-Minute Challenge. The interactive digital feature encourages readers to spend 10 uninterrupted minutes looking at a painting, allows them to click around and explore, and, finally, shares deep context on the work.
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The post The Three-Hour Challenge: 180 Minutes with ‘Las Meninas’ appeared first on New York Times.
