Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today

Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today
by: Claire Bishop (Author)
Publisher:Verso Books
Publication Date: 11 Jun. 2024
Language:English
Print Length:288 pages
ISBN-10:1804292885
ISBN-13:9781804292884
Book 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 modernistarchitecture – and their challenges to traditional modes of attention. Charting a critical path through the lastthree decades, Bishop pinpoints how spectatorship and visual literacy are evolving under the pressures ofdigital technology.
About the Author
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 modernistarchitecture – and their challenges to traditional modes of attention. Charting a critical path through the lastthree decades, Bishop pinpoints how spectatorship and visual literacy are evolving under the pressures ofdigital technology.