Disordered Attention

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.