NEW CONCEPTS AND MEANINGS OF SLOW. The case of Slow Art

The present study explores new meanings and values of the word slow in the context of Slow Art Day, a global event that takes place once a year and whose aim is to encourage both visitors and museum curators to engage with art in new and different ways. Since 1989 and the early days of Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement, the concept of slowness has become a relevant and ethical topic that is often related to what is organic, local and sustainable. While the notion and impact of slowness have been studied in different areas such as food (Petrini 2003), media (Rauch 2011), medicine (Wear et al. 2015) and education (O’Neill 2014), museums are yet to be investigated in depth. Through the lens of Appraisal Theory (Martin, White 2005) and corpus linguistics (Sinclair 2004), I focus on a diachronic study of the language of evaluation adopted in the Slow Art Day official blog, which keeps a record of the reports of the museums that take part in the yearly event. By using both a quantitative and qualitative approach, I focus on how appraisal is used to enhance and promote the new and different semantic dimensions related to slowness. My analysis of the Slow Art Day blog will illustrate how slowness is no longer related to the semantic dimension of Time, but also to those of Wellbeing and Inclusiveness, while a close study of evaluative language will show how these dimensions are interconnected to one another.