The slowness of painting—both in its creation and in its apprehension by viewers—is routinely overlooked because it is so often taken for granted. Compared to digital media, painting is always slow. When painters seek to speed up the medium—offering quickly rendered “fast takes”—they are often doing so to self-reflexively critique art’s commodification. In Richard Prince’s work, for example, this fast take can be read as a deliberate strategy to reveal the problematic nature of viewing painting under the deadening realities of contemporary capitalism—a realization that supposedly prompts further thought. But it feels deflationary with respect to the multiple levels of the experience of time that painting may address.
Stephen Westfall, “Slow Painting,” in Art In America, https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/slow-painting/
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