In their last spring their flowers [of the lemon trees] bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death. — When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut

Somewhere along the line, visibility stopped being a by-product of artistry and morphed into its currency — hoarded, traded, and anxiously audited. Digital platforms only mechanized what the art industry had already perfected: the indefatigable performance of presence. Art fairs metastasized, gallery calendars cinched into a fiscal-quarter cadence, and artists were recast as shift workers in their own studios, clocking in creativity with the punctuality of accountants. The subtext: keep producing, or risk joining the ranks of names lodged on the tip of the tongue.

In a sardonic twist on Sartre’s maxim, existence no longer precedes essence; instead, one risks insignificance without constant performance within the digital feed: a cultural apparatus driven by algorithmic imperatives that reconfigures visibility as the very condition of worth. This “feed economy” compresses time, favoring immediacy and systematically dwarfing the slow accretion of mastery, contemplation, and conceptual rigor that undergird artistic creation, all in favor of stats and instant gratification. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls late capitalism a “performance society,” in which endless production begets homogeneity, exhaustion, and ultimately self-exploitation — a mechanical reproduction machine spinning in place, symptomatic of our modern condition’s failure to cultivate contemplative distance.

But artists are hardly passive casualties of the pageant. Many navigate, subvert, or harness the very tools of the feed economy with tactical fluency — irony, digital savvy, and necessity-driven tactics as instruments of agency and self-definition. To claim creative autonomy amid this unabating velocity is nothing short of a radical politics of time. Figures like Ousmane Sembène and Glauber Rocha exemplified slowness as a deliberate refusal to be hijacked by the homogenizing cadence of the market’s metronome or the coercive logic of mainstream governmentality. Slowness, far from a quaint affectation, is a strategic rupture — a deliberate interruption in the incessant circuit of replication that creates space for bona fide contemplation and creation. It is the suspension of the “state of exception,” in which one recovers the possibility of authentic creation outside the logic of urgency. Measured by the dominant clocks of capitalist chronometry, such creative stasis might appear stagnant, even regressive. But stillness is no failure. It is generative soil — a substrate profuse with the possibility of enduring significance.

If the industry’s frenzy threatens to engulf you, here are five considered strategies to decelerate without losing creative purchase:

1. Set a maximum output, not only a minimum: By limiting production as much as mandating it, you establish a strategic firewall for incubation, reflection, and intellectual fermentation.
   
   

2. Designate “unproductive” days as sacrosanct: No calls. No deadlines. No compulsory visibility. Such intervals invite mindfulness and contemplation, laying the foundation for presence and restoring your ability to work from intention rather than compulsion.
   
   

3. Pursue transversal study: Step outside your principal domain; interdisciplinary inquiries help reconfigure your conceptual register. Creative leaps often occur as ideas cross-pollinate, igniting renewed and unexpected connections.
   
   

4. Release less, refine more: Let creative idleness act as a gestation period — a brake on saturation. Resist the urge to flood the feed; cultivate curiosity instead, through measured and deliberate restraint.
   
   

5. Audit your motivations: Examine whether you’re guided by genuine creative drive or by market-induced performance pressure. Ask yourself: What would it mean to fully own my creative truth, regardless of reception? In what ways am I performing rather than creating? The answers will recalibrate your work from the inside out.

We have learned to package artistic output in the jargon of productivity — deliverables, KPIs, scalability. Yet the creative mind is not built for endless output; it needs idleness as the body needs slumber. The industry will not decelerate; it will replace what it cannot commodify. It hungers for novelty, yet — paradoxically — always returns to the work it cannot subsume, work honed in the temporal autonomy that only slowness can grant.

Hero Header: Danielle Mckinney, Second Wind, 2025 © Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler.