Scene from Chantal Akerman’s 1975 Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

What follows is an essay by John Gibson and Andreas Elpidorou.

Here’s an improbable claim that turns out to be true: there is plenty of boring art that is also good art, and, in more than a few fascinating instances, this art is good in part because it is boring.

This will seem improbable for many reasons, not least because it appears to fly in the face of some of our most deeply held commitments about the nature of art and the aesthetic, which leads us to the belief that, in the words of art critic Lucy R. Lippard, “good art is never boring no matter how spare it is.” If boredom characterizes its object as meaningless and insignificant, it is hard to imagine an affect more ill-suited for art, since art, in its historical image, offers the promise of precisely an encounter with meaning and significance. Art, after all, stakes its claim to value on the promise of furnishing valuableexperiences, which boredom would seem to be constitutionally incapable of delivering.

Yet ever since modernism stepped on the scene, there has been a steady proliferation of celebrated artworks that are a huge slog—tedious, frustrating, dull—and which must be so if they are to distribute their intended emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual goods. We shouldn’t trust that such works are good just because they are celebrated. But some of these boring works are, in fact, very good.

Don’t get us wrong: in most cases the production of boring art is a story of artistic failure. But the success stories are what matter, and there are many examples of plays, novels, poems, films, and musical works that bore us brilliantly, and which wouldn’t be able to do their thing without being in part or whole really boring. The bewilderingly difficult 216 pages of John Ashbery’s lyric poem Flowchart, the 8.5 hours of nothing happening in Warhol’s Empire, the nearly 6 hours of Matthew Barney’s study of shit and Norman Mailer in the River of Fundament, the (failed) search for meaning in Samuel Beckett’s trilogy, the constantly deferred promise of a musical theme in John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space—works like these demand that we bide our time while they make time itself oppressive. And they do this in ways that enable something remarkable to happen.

All the examples just provided are of temporal arts, that is, of artworks that gradually reveal their content over an expanse of time. That might incline us to think that the boring moments in art always function like physical therapy, in which we hate the experience but are grateful for the rewards that come after. But while some boring works just make stretches of this lead-up time tedious, others make all of it tedious. The rewards of good boring art are often only made available during these experiences of oppressive time, and it is only by being bored that we can receive them*.*This is not at all like surgery, visits to the DMV, or work meetings, for which we would gladly receive the desired goods without the painful experience.

There is a philosophical puzzle here, of a piece with other puzzles about artforms that target negative emotions such as disgust, terror, fear, sadness, and the like. We have addressed some of these puzzles with respect to boring art elsewhere, in the detailed and perhaps boring way one would expect of a sustained academic treatment of the issue. Leaving the technical issues aside, there are several reasons an artist might find a great aesthetic resource in boredom.

One reason concerns a common way works of art achieve ethical and political significance. Art lodges a good portion of its claim to cultural and psychological value because of the ways it turns the world into an object not only of aesthetic immersion but scrutiny. Different historical periods will incline artists to cast the world in differently unflattering lights. The great history of tragic and experimental theatre, for example, variously represents the world as inhospitable to human happiness because of the role in human affairs played by fate (Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex), contingency (Shakespeare’s Hamlet), poverty (Büchner’s Woyzeck), class (Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan), gender roles (Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn), or racism (Drury’s Fairview). Our point is that for the past hundred or so years, boredom has played a similar role in providing many artistic practices with their specific image of what ails us.

A recurrent trope in boring art is that in modernity the experience of boredom is required, at least for many of us and because of certain of modernity’s defining features—the nature and role of labor, technology, consumerism, and social organization, to name some of the usual suspects. Even if you disagree with this assessment of the world, you’ll concede that a culturally familiar response to modern life is a version of whatever. In the wake of modernity, many basic forms of human activity strike us as supremely boring, bereft of purpose and significance. Or—and this gets closer to our view—one might see boredom as less the default affect of daily life and more as always standing at the shores of experience, threatening not to flood our minds and lives but to fill them, slowly, drop by drop. In a world in which our attention is a prized commodity—a resource for corporations, news agencies, social media—our world looms over us with boredom but often instead delivers constant streams of distraction and shallow puddles of meaning.

If boredom is always at the door, the artist’s challenge is to decide exactly where and how to let it in. Good boring art doesn’t participate in the attention wars, a fight for whatever fragment of our mind it can capture. Its boredom is neither a punishment nor an engineered pause designed to sell us a ready-made remedy: an adventure, a life not our own, or in our technologically suffused world, likes and shares, infinite scrolling, or the next TikTok clip. It rather bores us to give us space, to deliver attention back to us, and, ideally, to help us reclaim the agency that distraction erodes.

Success in the production of good boring art requires that an artist identify just the right features of the world as the culprit. An artist who represented the climate crisis or current US immigration policy as dull and insignificant would get the world wrong in a fundamental way. Our point is that the cases of success are deeply interesting and, stronger still, help explain why great works of boring art, like great tragedies, can feel like philosophical achievements: they use boredom to disclose something important about our way in the world, with the “our” describing us, if you will, statistically and not universally.

If there is a patron saint of boring art, we suspect it is Chantal Akerman. Her feminist contribution to slow cinema demonstrates one way of thinking about how an artist can make immensely productive use of boredom. The film is Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelle(Olympis Films, 1975) and the title’s length and prosaicness—it states the full name and address of the protagonist—gives us a sense of what we’re in for. It’s a film of repetition, employing a camera that very much takes it time documenting the minutiae of Jeanne’s life. Akerman decelerates cinematic time: the film reproduces the dull and monotonous rhythms of daily life, in a way that allows her to establish a visual analogy between the peeling of potatoes, smoothing of sheets, and sex work, making all of it feel of a piece in the order of tediousness.

It is a film in which each repetition of Jeanne’s daily life follows the same pattern but with a minor difference, and which makes the placement of a soup tureen in the final scene as significant as the murder that occurs in a bedroom a few moments earlier (apologies for the spoiler). It is sloooooow in its handling of its action, such as there is, which forces us to linger in this tediousness and explore its contours and causes.

In this way, Jeanne Deilman uses boredom in a manifestly artistically productive manner. It turns viewership into voyeurism and, in doing so, establishes its precise critical stance toward its subject matter. The film does this very effectively—and in a way a philosophy lecture or sociological study perhaps never could—because it forces us not merely to grasp but to feel the tedium of these daily repetitions: to inhabit them, in the 3.5 hours of the film, and so to ourselves experience their meaningless and insignificance (with the hope that we can then see this oppressiveness in roles we regard as natural in our own domestic lives). In doing this, Akerman performs a trick all good artists do. The form of her work embodies its meaning, as the philosopher and critic Arthur Danto would put it. And boredom is, in her masterpiece, a constitutive element of that meaning. We wouldn’t fully experience the film’s point if it didn’t bore us.

An incautious reader may rejoin with something like, “all that insight, all the social criticism the film delivers, implies that it has meaning, value, and significance. So it cannot be boring, since boredom characterizes its object as empty of exactly these things.” But if one thinks this, one has, gently put, an entirely wrong view of the nature of boredom.

There are different forms and causes of boredom. All of them, however, embody the same logic. Boredom is the pain of emotional and intellectual discontent. It is a crisis—that awful realization that what was promised or expected is not what is offered. While bored, we stand face-to-face with a task, situation, or world that feels emptied out of possibilities for worthwhile engagement, and our motivational capacities are thrown into confusion, as though we have an itch but cannot figure out how to scratch it.

“Boredom” is not another name for apathy. Boredom disturbs and challenges us. It throws us back to ourselves, exposing our inability to be proper agents while simultaneously challenging us to reclaim our agency. As when we find ourselves in a relationship that continues well beyond it expiration date, at its best boredom prompts us to reflect on, and then pursue, what we really desire, value, and are committed to. Its drudgery can hint at potential liberation, insisting, as Rainer Maria Rilke does in his famous sonnet, that “you must change your life.” At its worst, it can exhaust us, depress us, or push us down harmful paths, as we see in Jeanne’s case.

Good boring art aspires to get audiences to experience the first, more salutary—though by no means painless—goal of boredom. This is why, for example, we experience Jeanne Dielman not only as condemnatory but also as positive, even practical, in the insights it offers. The film invites us to consider all the ways our world must change if its story isn’t to strike us as emblematic, that is, as partly our story, too. Much good can come from works that prompt forms of thought like this, and they will often bear recognizably personal, social, and ethical forms of value.

Endemic to the experience of boredom lie both the perception of a lack—of meaning, interest, or something else—and a strong desire to restore engagement with the world to some satisfactory level. In boredom, we don’t remain satisfied with dissatisfaction. We turn concerned, nonplussed, and frustrated. We may even become intrigued by the fact that the work of art stubbornly resists our attempts at engagement. Good boring art bothers us, and it is through this tension that we are compelled to reclaim our agency, expand our field of attention, and discover new grounds of meaning. Exactly how does boring art get us to activate our agency? When it delivers on its promise, it is because it configures us as art critics of a decidedly philosophical bent, engaged, as all critics are, in the search for value and the artistic grounds of its delivery.

And here we have it. Good boring art is an art of anxiety, tension, and unease. It is art that prolongs an experience of discontent and frustrated agency and draws from it forms of philosophical insight: into our world, our lives, our practices, our relationships, and everything else that can turn out to be really, terribly, awfully uninteresting.

Boring art, then, is an art of life. It just assumes a very unflattering view of life, but one that at times you have probably suspected is true.

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John Gibson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Louisville. He is currently co-director of the TRT-funded project *Aesthetic Cognitivism & the Prospects of Criticism,*and is writing a book on meaning and value in fiction and poetry.

Andreas Elpidorou is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Louisville. His books include The Anatomy of Boredom (2025), and Propelled: How Boredom, Frustration, and Anticipation Lead Us to the Good Life(2020).

Edited by Alex King