“Attention is Precious”

The title is borrowed from artist Ken Jacobs, and it’s one of the central themes running through the retrospective of Jacobs’ work currently at Broadway Windows. It could also serve as the caption for all the photographs I took when I went to see the exhibition last Friday. Here are a half dozen of them.

Plenty of people have written about the value of attention and the attention economy. What I like about Jacobs’ guidance is that it never demands we pay attention to his work, but asks us to attend to our own. It’s a playful reminder that we make choices, starting with where we focus attention (and how we carry intentions). In an economy built to distract, that’s a timely existential theme.

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