First there was slow food, followed by slow travel, homes, cities and more. Artist James Osher would like to bring that concept to viewing art.

Osher read a study that found visitors spend an average of three seconds looking at a work of art hanging in a museum or gallery.

Appalled, he decided to address that practice in a conceptual project that has taken him into the collections of the finest museums across the country, from the Getty to the National Gallery of Art.

"The glancing relationship is culturally accepted as the way artwork is viewed," Osher says. "Most art objects are created with a contemplative intent, which is antithetical to culturally accepted experiences.

"I'm very concerned about that engagement, and creating dialogue about that."

One incarnation of his "Three Seconds With the Masters" project opened last month at Addison/Ripley Fine Art in Washington, D.C. Another is at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, where he will talk about "Art on the Run" at 7 p.m. tomorrow (free).

Osher makes thousands of photographs of details of master works in museum collections, cropping, tilting or blurring the subject, to build what he considers his "palette, the vocabulary I can build off of." These he pain­stakingly culls and prints as sensually seductive large-format color images that blur abstract and narrative.

"The object that I create has to sustain itself as my original work as well," Osher says.

Appropriated images are familiar in contemporary art, but Osher goes further by appropriating his labels, from art history texts, in response to the finding that visitors tend to spend more time reading labels than looking at the artworks themselves.

Osher compares this to going to a fine restaurant and having someone describe the experience of what one is going to eat, then leaving without eating.

While he allows that labels can be informative, he cautions that they are subjective, and even that the writer may not know his subject well. Visitors attempting to match Osher's labels to his visual works will be confounded, an experience the artist suggests may be more common but not as easily realized when the relationship has a semblance of connection.

Osher attended Carnegie Mellon University, earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts at the San Francisco Art Institute and a master's at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. In 1979, he stopped making art objects and worked in the investment industry. In the early '90s, his mother's terminal illness and other losses caused him to reconsider his values, resulting in retirement from investments and a return to art making.

Osher says he "accepts the fact that there's a transitory aesthetic" in today's world, and asks whether it differs from a contemplative aesthetic. During a quick pass, "does the wall become part of the contemplation? Does the frame become part of the contemplation? There is a distinctly different experience looking at contemplative imagery," he concludes, which is related to intent.

"Why have museums?" Osher asks. The objects that are preserved and exhibited are considered to have historic value. "They've been kept for 400 years and took months to make. They're not meant for a stroll-through glance on the way to coffee or a light lunch."

"Three Seconds" continues through Jan. 3 at 221 N. Main St., Greensburg. For information, call 724-837-1500 or visit www.wmuseumaa.org.

Jules-Adolphe Breton's 1895 painting "The Last Gleanings," an idealized rendering of peasants returning home from the fields at day's end, has returned temporarily to Clayton, the Henry Clay Frick home at the Frick Art & Historical Center.

The painting will be featured in house tours through March 28, and may be viewed for free during brief talks at 2 p.m. tomorrow and Nov. 12. (Information: 412-371-0600.)

Frick and his family traveled to Europe in 1895, visiting artists' studios, including Breton's where he may have seen the work. He later purchased it from New York art dealers M. Knoed­ler and Co. for $14,000.

The painting hung at Clayton until 1903. In 1907, half a year after Breton's death, Frick returned it to Knoedler for a $25,000 credit toward a Rembrandt self-portrait.

The painting is now in the collection of The Huntington Library Art Collection and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif.

Curator Katherine Talcott zips in from Michigan to join exhibiting artists in conversation about "Gestures 13," beginning at 7 p.m. Saturday in the Mattress Factory, 500 Sampsonia Way, North Side. $10 admission includes a 6 p.m. tour and fall harvest dishes (412-231-3169 or www.mattress.org).

La Fond Galleries, 1711 E. Carson St., South Side, celebrates director Michael Hertrick's 50th birthday from 6 to 9 tonight during an opening for his photography and works inspired by it (free; 412-431-3337).

Son and father Paul and Robert Bowden have a "Return Engagement" at Mendelson Gallery, 5873 Ellsworth Ave., Shadyside, opening from 5 to 8 p.m. tomorrow (free; 412-361-8664).

New Yorker Makiko Miyamoto will talk about her installation "zoo of (in)animate" at 1 p.m. Saturday at Filmmakers Galleries, 477 Melwood Ave., Oakland (free; 412-681-5449).

Lectures Saturday that are part of a three-day "Symposium on Developing Art With Mobile Phone Technologies," at Carnegie Mellon University, will be open to the public free of charge. The talks, organized by CMU's STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, will be given in Giant Eagle Auditorium (Baker Hall, A-51). No registration is required.

Lecturers include Memo Akten, MSA Visuals, UK; Julian Bleecker, Near Future Laboratory; Tad Hirsch, Intel; David Evans, Deeplocal; and Golan Levin, STUDIO and symposium director. Topics include mobile audiovision and interaction, mobility, locativity and society and invention. For information, visit http://artandcode.ning.com.

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