The First 20 Seconds

Art Drop #02

Hi all and happy November! I, for one, am pretty pleased that October and Halloween are behind us; and, we can look forward to the festivities ahead! As we dive into the fastest-paced months of the year, I thought it would be a great time to launch a new series that I’m currently dubbing The First 20 Seconds. I plan to share how different art industry professionals approach art they have never seen before and find a way to engage with it. Today, you get to hear from me! Next time, it will be someone much cooler.

I am sure many of you have read this stat but research shows that the average museum-goer spends about 27 seconds in front of an artwork. 27 seconds! To me, it’s pretty amazing that the information superhighway in our brains can process an image that quickly and decide if it is something with which we want to engage. Since so much of this work is done practically subconsciously, heretofore, I have not spent much time thinking about what really attracts me to a work in those first critical seconds. So, I did a deep dive.

To ascertain what stops me in my tracks, I scrolled back through my photos from art fairs past because that is a pretty good record of what slowed my roll and made me look twice. The first thing I noticed is that the work has to jostle me out of my norm. It is sort of like Mel Robbins’ counting backwards trick. You have to force your brain out of its habit and reroute the thought patterns. Art that makes me stop does just that.

What would be an example of a piece that shakes up the neural pathways? I mean, right, wrong or indifferent, a banana duct-taped to a wall would be one example. But if we’re staying in the sub-$15k realm, then here are three artists that have commandeered my first 20 seconds and why.

I did not have to go scroll back very far to find three stunner artists that illustrate my point perfectly. I encountered all three of these artists at NADA NYC in May. I was actually familiar with two of them before the fair, but the work is just that good that despite its familiarity, I was still drawn to its novelty.

Jude Griebel, represented by Massey Klein, is one of my favorite emerging sculptors working today. The work is an exercise in oxymoron. It’s both playful and dark, simultaneously light and heavy, at once strong and fragile, vociferous yet quiet. It stops me for the reason that most surrealism stops people: something is familiar but not quite right and you want to stop to figure out what. (User tip: if you click on Jude’s name at the top of this paragraph, it will take you to a page where you can learn more about the work and the artist.)

Similarly yet differently (a phrase that would have all my grad school professors screaming at me), Pauline Shaw’s particular brand of abstraction is just familiar enough to make viewers want to think further on it. It has that tip-of-the-tongue quality that makes you want to get there. At least, that was my experience with it when I encountered it for the first time in the booth of Naranjo 141 (now defunct) also at NADA NYC. Full disclosure: I ended up buying one of the works at NADA as my husband and I have a particular penchant for work that has to do with the cosmos. She recently had a two-person show at Each Modern, which is where the two works featured here were exhibited.

And finally, Kevin Umaña. He is like geometric abstraction meets quilting but its ceramic so neither painting nor textile–how do you categorize that. He defies categorization. (That’s my real-life stream of consciousness in the first 20 seconds, btw.) His work engages with his ancestral heritage, at once paying homage to these people while remaining in an extremely modern visual language. And it just so happens that his show at The Pit LA opens tonight!

So, for me, the first 20 seconds is all about work that wiggles my brain out of its flow like “a stream that meets a boulder.” What makes me stay with it? Well, that is anybody’s ballgame!

Did Pauline, Kevin, or Jude spark your curiosity? Click on images to learn more about each of them or shoot me an email with your questions.

November 1, 2025In All AccessBy Casey Monda7 Minutes

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