It’s something I’ve always struggled with, a personal contradiction. How can I call myself an artist but spend no more than twenty seconds in front of any given artwork? There must be an explanation for my fickleness. Perhaps it’s an attention deficit issue or maybe it stems from childhood when my mum would drag me to galleries, insisting I appreciate art. I didn’t want to go to galleries, and she didn’t want me to be an artist. It’s funny how things turned out.

The average person spends 28.63 seconds in front of an artwork.¹ This figure is from a 2017 study but I’ve reached a similar conclusion, counting people and how long or little they spend looking at art. I started this game to boost my self-esteem but I’m often left feeling bitter and resentful. I envy those who solemnly nod at a work as if it’s whispering to them. Worse are those who appear to have a profound experience with art, often marked by a gasp or a tear. I fear I’m incapable of having such an experience and struggle to believe those who claim they have. I know many people who claimed Hilma af Klint changed their lives, for example, but to me they seem unchanged.

I was asked to write about Future Remains the Macfarlane Commission at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), so I wandered through the exhibition, trying to force some sort of revelation. It’s true that I spent more than 28.63 seconds with each work but I was convinced the gallery staff were watching me, and I didn’t want them to think I was a total philistine. 

I came back to ACCA for a tour led by senior curator Shelley McSpedden. Shelley told us that the first dark chamber was not painted black but a lush purple: the colour of the cosmos, or a jewellery box. She spoke about divine fingering and queer constrictions, hand-stitched quilts taking thousands of hours, Blu Tack constellations, glam rock, reggae, and a splash of Adidas. She discussed waves as a space of the diasporic community, deep fakes, dead paintings, and tyrannical carpets. By the end of the tour, I was drunk on art, in awe of each work and their role in the exhibition. But I also left the tour wondering: how was I supposed to know everything we had been told just by looking?

I returned to ACCA, interested in the disconnect between my prior fickle and brief experiences of art, and claims that are made on an artwork’s behalf. I sat with Andy Butler's work Living truthfully in invented circumstances (2024), hoping the darkness would inspire something smart to say about the in-between space left by this disconnect. Instead, my mind drifted to inheritance, the legacies each piece touches on, and the gifts and burdens I’ve inherited myself. I thought about how legacies shape our identity, whether they empower or constrain us and how I might be contributing to a legacy of my own. Finally, I wondered if these thoughts stemmed from Shelley’s talk or naturally arose from spending time with the work, from being open to art that is so generous to its audience. I sat with Butler’s work from start to finish, for exactly 27 minutes. And perhaps that time spent was the closest I’ve come to a profound experience with art.