Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today
How technology and the attention economy shape contemporary art and performance

The reception of art and performance is changing. Smartphones and social media have troubled the old model of individual appreciation and close looking, giving rise to new forms of mediated perception, such as sampling, skimming and scrolling. Charting recent trends in contemporary practice — research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture — leading art critic Claire Bishop challenges the assumption that fully focused attention is automatically good and distraction necessarily bad.
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Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today
How technology and the attention economy shape contemporary art and performance

The reception of art and performance is changing. Smartphones and social media have troubled the old model of individual appreciation and close looking, giving rise to new forms of mediated perception, such as sampling, skimming and scrolling. Charting recent trends in contemporary practice — research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture — leading art critic Claire Bishop challenges the assumption that fully focused attention is automatically good and distraction necessarily bad.
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Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today

Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today

by Claire Bishop
Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today

Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today

by Claire Bishop

Paperback

$19.95 
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Overview

How technology and the attention economy shape contemporary art and performance

The reception of art and performance is changing. Smartphones and social media have troubled the old model of individual appreciation and close looking, giving rise to new forms of mediated perception, such as sampling, skimming and scrolling. Charting recent trends in contemporary practice — research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture — leading art critic Claire Bishop challenges the assumption that fully focused attention is automatically good and distraction necessarily bad.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781804296738
Publisher: Verso Books
Publication date: 11/11/2025
Pages: 272
Product dimensions: 5.06(w) x 7.77(h) x 0.73(d)

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.

Table 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
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