Although careful looking has always been an essential aspect of art historical practice, over the past ten years it has transformed from an embedded methodology to a movement and cause célèbre. Slow Art Day was launched in 2009, occurring in sixteen museums worldwide. By 2018, over 1,200 events had taken place across the world. In New York, the Museum of Modern Art is hosting Quiet Mornings that end with meditation sessions. The museum's website urges participants to ‘look slowly. … Enjoy the serenity of being surrounded by Claude Monet's monumental Water Lilies, find space for personal reflection in the minimalist canvases of Agnes Martin.’ In London, Tate Modern is planning slow looking sessions for its 2019 Pierre Bonnard exhibition. A variety of British and American newspapers, the BBC, and NPR have all featured articles that explain and advocate slow looking. Lectures at Oxford and Harvard universities have focused upon the practice, and art history courses across the UK and the US have assigned slow looking exercises for students. Interest and support for the movement have primarily come from organisations, people and events that serve as conduits between art's public and academic spheres: museums, the media and educators.

This essay probes certain assumptions inherent within the recent discussions of slow looking. These include implicit binaries lodged within the approach, particularly within the contexts of the physical and the virtual. It will also consider how slow looking applies to early medieval monuments and, conversely, how we might both broaden and refine the concept of slow looking in response to the nature of these objects and their viewers, both past and present. Except for a book by Arden Reed discussed below, the main platforms for the slow looking movement have been newspapers, broadcasts, podcasts, blogs, lectures and a single textbook. Although written by academics, curators and art critics, the focus has primarily been pedagogical and not necessarily aimed at scholarly audiences. Similarly, this essay does not intend to offer an academic analysis of the high crosses of Clonmacnoise but rather to rethink the methodologies of the slow looking movement, their suitability to medieval material, and intersections with other approaches such as phenomenology.