The 10-Minute Museum Challenge
The following selection is a made-up entry from a fictional diary I’ve not been keeping as I segue into retirement. Every Thursday for the entire month of August 2025, I visited the very real Cincinnati Art Museum for roughly one hour to practice the the 10 minute deep dive exercise described by Larry Buchanan in the New York Times.
Here is the assignment, according to Buchanan:
“In a modest attempt to sharpen your focus, we’d like you to consider looking at a single painting for 10 minutes, uninterrupted.”
“Our exercise is based on an assignment that Jennifer Roberts, an art history professor at Harvard, gives to her students. She asks them to go to a museum, pick one work of art, and look at only that for three full hours.”
Entry No. 1: Thursday, August 7
I think the hardest part about this challenge is to find paintings that give you the most to observe in 10 minutes, so, no Impressionists and no Cubists! There, that was easy! That’s half of any art collection, right?
Starting in the 18th and 19th century American art section. I find that artists have figured out perspective and interesting subject matter while also getting the hands and feet right. Those were always my biggest problem back in my college drawing class. Either too big or too small, though I did manage to get the right number of digits. And knuckle hair. Boy, did I really hone in on that knuckle hair.
I choose this one: “The Landing Stage at Boulogne” by Walter Elmer Schofield (1876-1944). Wow, that is impressive. Okay, I have my stopwatch ready to go…wait, does reading the description count in the 10 minutes? I’m going to say yes. “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence,” Buchanan might say, but he didn’t actually say it, so I’m going to say yes it does.
“The Landing Stage at Boulogne” by Walter Elmer Schofield (1876-1944). (Photo taken by me, which is totally okay per the museum’s policy, by the way.)
Let’s count the people and the ships. That’ll eat up some time. People count: 15? What about those blurry dots in the background? Are those people? Stupid trifocals. I’ll come back to this one.
The ships should be easier. Obviously, there are four. Except for that smokestack there in the foreground. That’s another. Wait, I see another set of masts in the background, to the left. Now is that six? I’ll start over. Count the masts. But wait, how many masts does each ship have? Two? Or is it three? How come if some have a smokestack, they also have a mast?
Surely all of this discussion has taken at least 10 minutes. What?! Only 5 minutes? Is this thing slow?
Come on, Jon, dig deeper. I see…snow. Must be winter, though maybe an early spring. Sometimes it snows in March, you know. And the buildings in the background remind me of some of the market places we saw in New Orleans. That was such a good trip. When was that, 2010? Remember the beignets? And all that powdered sugar all over the floor? It looked like Scarface had had a party there…Okay, concentrate. Think elevated thoughts here.
Let’s see. I think this is France. New Orleans was part of the Louisiana Purchase, though it really wasn’t a purchase as we understand it … Do the 10 minutes include letting me go back and reread the description? Why not? “Boulogne-sur-Mer…on the English Channel was one of France’s busiest ports.” How do you pronounce that? Like bologna? Baloney?
Funny, a painting by an American painter in France. And from Pennsylvania, no doubt. In a Cincinnati museum.
That water. It’s very hypnotic. And the snow seems very tactile. It’s almost like you can reach out and touch…
“You are too close to the painting. Please step back.” Who said that? There’s no guard here. Wait, was the voice directed at me? Sounded like AI. Oh, there’s a sensor on the ceiling pointed downward. But surely it wasn’t me? I’m behind this line here. Those blobs across the gallery over there, they’re the scofflaws. Don’t they know this is a museum!
Anyway, snow. And the smoke, so visceral. You can almost smell the salt air mixed with the smoke across this frigid harbor. Yes, it does look very cold. You know, I don’t care if I’ve spent more than 10 minutes with this painting. It is so dense, so much to unpack.
5 minutes? Oof, I forgot to start the timer again. I’m definitely sure I’ve been here for 10 minutes. You know, this isn’t so hard. I’m looking forward to more. “You are too close to the painting…” Again? Those Philistines! How many of them are there? Stupid trifocals.