Description
A vital survey of twenty-first-century art and spectatorship, from one of the leading art thinkers of our time.
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 condition of spectatorship in contemporary culture. How has digital technology reorganised our attention? And how are artists processing, reacting to, and rejecting these developments?
Across four provocative and insightful essays, art historians and critic Claire Bishop identifies trends in contemporary practices 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.
Today, we look at art and performance with a phone in our hand. Deep attention has been replaced by browsing, skimming, and samplings. Has full focus become obsolete, superseded by the peak-and-wane intensity of the viral?
ISBN: 9781804292884
Publisher: Verso
