Wednesday, January 14, 2026

slow art / deep-running skill and doggedness

Roy R. Behrens (©2011), Barbarian Seville. Digital book montage.
Robert Hughes
in "A Bastion Against Cultural Obscenity" [a speech delivered at Burlington House, London] in The Guardian, June 3, 2004—

What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in ten seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks into something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.