Mona Lisa - x2 speed

ML - Welcome to Mona Lisa. A weekly newsletter for artists with timeless quotes, ideas and light bites for curious & wandering minds.

Lite Bites

👗 The fashion industry invented “planned obsolescence.” In the 1920s, designers changed hemlines just to keep people buying.

🚀 NASA once asked an artist to recreate the smell of space. Astronauts described it as gunpowder, metal, and raspberries.

🛍️ Michelangelo sketched his shopping lists because his assistants couldn’t read. Fish, bread, wine—all drawn out so nothing was forgotten.

🫡The best advice you’ll ignore: Work in a way that makes you forget about the outcome.

Mona’s notes - on the need for speed

1. The option to listen or watch anything at a faster speed than reality is a hack that we’ve normalised to. I find myself opting for x1.5 speed on audiobooks, a risky x1.75 speed for Youtube videos on troubleshooting tech issues, and x2 speed for product reviews.

2. Last week I found a whole sub-genre of music on Spotify of ‘sped up’ songs …that borders on unforgivable. I credit this defamation of music to TikTok and Snapchat culture where if you blink you’ll miss it. 🎧

3. Now voice notes… I have a newsletter dedicated to voice notes coming up, but what’s the opinion on listening to your friends at x2 speed? I admit I did this a few times and it felt mean 😬…but more on this in a future issue of ML.

4. Does this desire to speed everything up show impatience in the listener, or just sloppy content creation (voice notes included)? Or are we normalising to a ‘tweet’ mindset with a desire to skip the foreplay and get to the beat-drop?

5. Everything is an elevator pitch. The ‘time is money’ fetish and all…💰

   5.1. Should art function this way too? Should a painting, a photograph or a ceramic vase be easily ‘digestible’ upon a first glance?

   5.2. How long do you spend standing in front of a painting, and is it fair to say we demand too much of them because we no longer live with paintings?

   5.3. I make this newsletter short for a reason…

6. I wish we could all go back to x1 speed. I miss that space for contemplation that comes with a certain cadence of receiving information - whether it be music, a book or a short video on how to cook the perfect jammy egg. The thing is, it will only make sense if we all agree to go back to x1 speed, otherwise there’s a real fear of getting left behind…🐌 

   6.1. But maybe that’s where the beauty will remain - in the slow, and for the few who care to show patience.

Love Mona x

"Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead, let life live through you." — Rumi

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