Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

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.

Reviews

Praise for Artificial Hells * : *
Claire Bishop has articulated an important historical overview of the global emergence of participatory art...Her controversial and thought-provoking conclusions courageously trouble our assumptions about the effectiveness of political artworks, questioning their oppositional quality, their effects on the audiences they reach, and their relation to the institutions that promote them. * Frank Jewett Mather Award, 2013 *
A critically challenging work of vital scholarship * Publishers Weekly *
Combines vast historical knowledge with a precise analysis of individual artistic practices. So much so that at the end of her new book we have begun to fall in love with hell - under the condition that it remains artificial. -- Boris Groys, author of Art Power

Author Bio

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.