Art attention - from 28 seconds to 28 minutes

The average time that we spend looking at each artwork in a museum or gallery is 28 seconds. 28 seconds to take in all that richness, let alone computing how what we may have read in the label relates to what we are seeing. It's hard to spend time focusing on one work in a gallery, with the pressure of surrounding visitors waiting to look, and all the other works waiting to be seen. So, BBC Radio 4 have come up with an unusual alternative: a radio programme that talks you through the picture.

'Moving Pictures' is already in its second series, and has been going since September 2016, so I am behind the times, but am delighted to have discovered this gem (all available on iPlayer). In a series of 6 episodes, so far, Cathy Fitzgerald focuses on just one artwork each for 28 minutes. She describes what you are seeing, both factually and imaginatively, conjuring the environment and temperature, the smells, breezes and noise. She talks to experts examining the context and production of each work. How the artist might have felt in making it, and how we might feel in response. 

For The Harvesters by Pieter Breugel the Elder, you are conjured to a hot, dry day in 16th-century Flanders, where labourers grab a break from bringing in the harvest. George Bellows' Men of the Docks immerses you in the hard, bitter wait for work in the New York docks in the winter of 1912, and focuses on Bellows' fearless manipulation of his paint with brushes, knives and even fingers. For me, most compelling, is the minutely detailed patchwork hanging by Ann West now in the V&A Museum. It is filled with characters from regency England, from children flying a kite, to a sportsman and a fishwife, maybe even the elusive Ann West herself. 

For each episode, you can access a high-resolution image of the work through Google Arts and Culture, so you can follow the details step by step with the discussion. But I largely found I didn't want to, I wanted simply to listen to the compelling weaving of descriptions and discussions - a work of art in their own right - and to think about how the work might look. Then, after my 28 minutes, to spend some further time devouring the image for myself. 

Each of these episodes is a charming interlude, encouraging you to pay more visual, and aural, attention to the world around you. I hope many more pictures will be 'moved' in this way in further series.