Add art to mindfulness and what do you get? Laura Gascoigne goes online to find the answer through the National Gallery’s five-minute meditations

When McDonald’s applied to open an outlet near Rome’s Spanish Steps in 1986, local resistance took an unusual form. Unlike José Bové, the French sheep farmer who destroyed a local branch of the fast food chain, the Italian political activist Carlo Petrini took positive action: he launched a national campaign for Slow Food.

Petrini lost his fight with McD’s, now firmly established on what it calls the P.zza di Spagna, but the movement he started has gone global, spawning Slow Movements in other spheres. The Canadian writer Carl Honoré – whose 2004 bestseller In Praise of Slow was hailed by the Financial Times as “to the Slow Movement what Das Kapital is to Communism” – has described the phenomenon as “a cultural revolution against the notion that faster is always better. The Slow philosophy is not about doing everything at snail’s pace … It’s about quality over quantity in everything from work to food to parenting.”

The revolution has now spread to the art world. Eleven years ago Phil Terry, chief executive of the American corporate consultancy Creative Good, spent an hour in front of Hans Hofmann’s abstract painting Fantasia on a visit to New York’s Jewish Museum. It was such a “mind-blowing experience” that it inspired him to found Slow Art Day, an annual event held on the first Saturday in April when friends gather at a gallery, select five works of art, look at them for at least 10 minutes each, then meet for lunch to discuss the experience. Ten minutes may not sound much, but when the average time spent by gallery-goers in front of pictures is 17 seconds, it’s an eternity.