2014 was, at least for art historians, the year in which interest in the slow began to appear everywhere. There were several articles, including a much- cited one in Harvard Magazine, multiple blogs and a lot of discussion in various e-fora. Slow lesson plans and exercises were shared and their merits debated on the Material Collective's Facebook page. These were followed rapidly and inevitably by calls for examples of the merits of fast learning and various posts about exercises involving the use of Twitter in the classroom, and so forth. There was a certain amount of rejection of, or at least reaction against, the all-pervasive digital and its culture of remediation, text and immediate access, and a corresponding renewal of interest in a return to the digits and the work of the hand and fingers, an interest that was clearly part of a much larger concern to reclaim the craft exercised by the human body, and the focus of the unplugged mind. Several of the exercises posted to the Material Collective, for example, involved ‘slow looking’, asking students to sit in front of a work of art, all electronic devices turned off, for what was deemed to feel to them like an unreasonably lengthy amount of time and to just look, slowly and carefully, and to write – with pen or pencil – about what was seen, and/or to draw the work of art. (There is no better way to get to know a work of art than to try and recreate it with your own hands.) Slow looking exercises were designed to make students think deeply about what they were looking at, how it was made and how it made meaning through its physical presence and materials, but it also got them back to the object and away from the mediated or remediated image – although all art, even that encountered personally, is, of course, mediated. What was not mentioned anywhere in the posts, at least as far as I have been able to discover, was that sitting in front of a work of art, looking, writing, drawing, watching it change as the light changes, takes us back to the origins of art history as a discipline.