Cherish great art, know the counter-culture

IT'S too easy to be inattentive of the masters.

IT'S not primarily time you need to understand art, but attention, which means presence, focus and a willingness to reach beyond the confines of our own minds to encounter something made by another human mind.

Sometimes it does take time to achieve an attentive state -- making a sketch is an excellent aid -- but with practice, one becomes better able to switch attention on at will and one can then see aspects of a work with perfect lucidity almost instantly.

Great work, though, invites us to stop and commune with it, for its meaning cannot be decoded and carried away in a formula. It is rather that it reshapes the world imaginatively and invites us to enter into and inhabit this reformed, alternative world. What we gain from reading a novel, looking at great paintings or listening to music is not factual or theoretical knowledge but a kind of insight like that we derive from the experience of life itself.

Most of the art we see does not merit more than a passing glance. Much of the work for biennales and other large-scale art trade fairs is, paradoxically, attention-getting in the colloquial sense without really sustaining more than the momentary acknowledgement from crowds who murmur flatly "cool" and pass on.

Developing a capacity for attention is hard in an age of relentless trivial distraction -- from the ubiquitous mechanical beat of psychotropic music to the addictive technologies of games and social networking -- and made even harder because inattentiveness and amnesia are implicitly promoted as positive values by commercial culture.

To criticise the culture, indeed the ideology, of distraction is to run the risk of being called conservative, but the contrary is true. In today's mass consumer culture, amnesia and distraction favour uncritical compliance. The effort to achieve stillness and attention, to recover memory and to engage with literature and art that require more than the robotic repetition of "cool" is a deeply counter-cultural project and an act of resistance to dehumanisation.

Christopher Allen is The Australian's national art critic.