Make Slow Art Day Last Year-Round
Blog Post
By Dave, CEO & Founder | Posted April 04, 2017
Are you taking part in Slow Art Day on Saturday? The annual event features 156 museums and art galleries nationwide, including small institutions and large ones like Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation and Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art.
The cultural institutions are asking visitors to register at www.slowartday.com and then to show up on Saturday to look at a preassigned work of art for a full five to ten minutes. Then guests simply talk about their experience with each other.
Why is this important? Because it encourages your cultural institution’s visitors and members to examine the art thoroughly instead of blowing through the exhibits to catch “as much as possible” in one visit. “When people look slowly at a piece of art they make discoveries,” according to the Slow Art Day website. “It unlocks passion and creativity and helps to create more art lovers.”
The event was created by Phil Terry, after he spent a full hour looking at 1943 abstract painting “Fantasia,” by Hans Hofmann, at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum, The Wall Street Journal reported. He “found the unfamiliar experience galvanizing.”
According to the WSJ, most people spend 17 seconds looking at each individual painting during a museum visit. “The temptation to [zoom] from piece to piece in search of instant gratification can be overwhelming.”
Slow Art Day is a one-day event, but its philosophy can and should be promoted year-round. Guide by Cell can help. We already provide a suite of services to add interpretation to your exhibits, helping visitors appreciate each individual piece of art instead of rushing through quickly and never returning. Invariably, our clients benefit from providing deeper levels of visitor engagement.
Our Smartphone Tours allow you to create a mobile website rich in content and engagement. Audio Guides let visitors dial a number, press keys and instantly engage with your audio content. With Text Messaging, you can deliver event reminders, links to web pages and games directly to your visitors. Mobile Fundraising and one-on-one Text Chat allow you boost engagement even further.
We can also help your visitors talk about your exhibits with Visitor Polls. Ask them to relay their emotions and impressions of our by calling a toll-free dedicated line and leaving a message. You have the ability to collect and track caller data and audio.
It takes only one good painting or other piece of art, and five minutes of your visitors’ time, to make a real impression.
This month only, we’re offering Visitor Polls — a $500 value — FREE with an annual contract for the Text Messaging service, Mobile Web Authoring Platform and Audio Guides.
To learn more, call us at 415-615-0150 or email [email protected] for a free 20-minute demo of all four service offerings.