Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance

＂Much has been written about the impact of the internet, smartphones, and social media on our attention spans-and most of it has been negative. But these debates do not adequately engage with the new conditions of spectatorship in contemporary culture. How has digital technology reorganized our attention? And how are artists processing, reacting to, and rejecting these developments? Across four provocative and insightful essays, art historian and critic Claire Bishop identifies trends in contemporary practice since the 1990s: research-based art, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernism. She historicizes the present while suggesting that new frameworks of attention have come to replace the modernist ideal of rapt absorption＂--

Claire Bishop is a Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Installation Art: A Critical History and the award winning, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship.