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The ways we encounter contemporary art and performance is changing. Installations brim with archival documents. Dances stretch for weeks. Performances last a minute. Exhibitions are spread out over thirty venues. There are endless artworks about mid-century architecture and design. How are we expected to engage with today's diverse practise? Is the old model of close-looking still the ideal, or has it given way to browsing, skimming, and sampling?
Across four essays, art historian and critic Claire Bishop identifies trends in contemporary practice - research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture - and their challenges to traditional modes of attention. Charting a critical path through the last three decades, Bishop pinpoints how spectatorship and visual literacy are evolving under the pressures of digital technology.
List of contents
Introduction: OS XXI, Disordering Attention
1 Research-Based Art: Information Overload
2 Performance Exhibitions: Black Box, White Cube, Grey Zone
3 Interventions: Seizing the Moment
4 Invocations: Contemporary Art Quotes Modernist Architecture
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index
About the author
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.
Summary
How technology and the attention economy has impacted contemporary art
Report
Today, the most contemporary art form could be called cancelism. Cancelism as an art historical genre reflects the global shift to populism, disinformation and polarization. Cancelism is anonymous, crowd based, ubiquitous, it privileges affect over analysis, it goes beyond traditional understandings of left and right. In her lucid analysis, Claire Bishop traces some of the historical developments that led to this situation: the futurist glorification of disruption, countercultural interventions based on the model of coup d´états, artivist decisionism - different threads through which disruption and transgression were consolidated as key modes of production from Silicon Valley to Pussy Riot. For anyone who wants to understand how art functions in the age of populism, Bishops book is an indispensable guide. Hito Steyerl, author of Duty Free Art
