When I was at art college we were told that galleries planned their programmes at least a year ahead — the art business was all about the long game. Nowadays I am asked can I put together a show in six months, come up with an idea by next week or produce a work from my back pocket. I still want to believe that I am part of a world of honed thought and loving craftsmanship where every brushstroke is wrenched from the soul, every thought a poem on the human condition engraved on the rock of posterity . . . Yeah, right.

Art-world acceleration I put down to various forces. First, we are just as prone to being sucked into the idea that fast is somehow central to modernity. To be relevant is to be broadband-quick and dressed for next season. Apparently artists also need to become museum-supply companies with a high turnover of works if they want to succeed internationally.

Artists are able to cope with this upping of cultural velocity because of the methods of production now available. Video and photography and the use of specialist fabricators mean that artists can fill the echoing voids of the ever larger and more numerous galleries in a lot less time. Though many of the best shows I have seen in recent years have consisted of video installations, gallerists have perhaps become used to dealing with artists who can make a few phone calls and have their latest numb-bummer in the post on DVD filling that awkward gap in the exhibition programme overnight.

Also there has been a huge increase in the number of arts graduates, not just practitioners but also dealers and curators to service them, and they all want our attention. These aspirants understandably feel they have a right to “an art career” because they have done the relevant degree. Consequently in this week’s Time Out there are listed a hundred or so exhibitions and this does not include countless open studios, church crypts and restaurants hosting shows by enterprising artists. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the experience of staring at a listings magazine, too bewildered to decide which culturally enriching event to visit.

I now feel I need to corral time for reflection or have my thoughts trampled by a stampede of seductresses driven on by the media. Over the last 15 years contemporary art has become a part of this as a daily staple of the broadsheets. We live in a world where we see more images flicking through a Sunday magazine than a medieval peasant saw in a lifetime. Sometimes I feel as if I have a whirling postcard rack in my head.

As a producer of art I feel an increasing pressure to keep in step with our 24/7 culture-on-demand society, and as a consumer I am overwhelmed by a tyranny of choice. I hereby declare the launch of the Slow Art Movement (I have not hired a PR). Artists, I call on you to spend some quality time with a sketchbook before pointing the digital camera out of the car window. Think long and hard, perhaps even discuss your ideas in a Hoxton café before ringing up the fabricator and ordering that monument to a one-liner. Maybe even take the rebellious and increasingly fashionable step of learning how to make something skilfully with your hands.

Picasso set an awesome precedent by knocking out three art works for every day of his life but Vermeer is held in reverence for a surviving oeuvre that wouldn’t crowd out the wall space in a squash court. So I ask gallerists and curators not to expect artists to churn out cool stuff like some cultural ice machine. Often I plan to see a certain exhibition only to find it has been superseded in the blink of an art historian ’s eye by the next show. If we all spent longer thinking, making and looking perhaps less bad art would get made, shown and seen.