“What I think is looking often isn’t looking at all. It’s a kind of gazing,” reflects Olivia Laing on the act of viewing art¹. The author and cultural critic has written extensively about art and artists, yet even they admit to a cursory way of moving through galleries: “I’ll kind of scan through a gallery, and I’ve hardly taken anything in.” It is an experience of exhibition-going I recognise in myself.

Research cited by Tate suggests that gallery visitors spend, on average, about eight seconds with each work². Such a figure hints at a hurried mode of cultural consumption: the visit accomplished, the exhibition “seen,” the proof captured. It points to a desire to be in proximity to art, yet an uncertainty about how to engage with it.

I think of the city as a gallery—a vast and continuous exhibition. The artworks are everywhere: in façades and street furniture, in infrastructure and ornament, in the improvisations that emerge where people encounter the built world and one another. Compositions arrange and rearrange wherever you look. By this logic, daily life exists within a field of art; the question is whether we notice any of it.