Claire Bishop's 'Disordered Attention' Examines Digital Impact on Art Spectatorship

Claire Bishop's book 'Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today' analyzes how digital culture has transformed audience engagement with contemporary art since the 1990s. Published by Verso, the hardcover is priced at £18.99. Bishop challenges critiques of inattention, arguing that digital networks have created a hybrid, collective spectatorship beyond traditional attention-distraction binaries. The book's four chapters explore performance exhibitions, research-based art, interventions, and modernist revivals. Performance exhibitions feature artists like Tino Sehgal, Anne Imhof, and Maria Hassabi, merging theatrical and gallery modes. Research-based art discusses Renée Green, Walid Raad, and Forensic Architecture, highlighting shifts from counter-histories to activist responses in an era of information overload. Interventions cover movements from Dada to Black Lives Matter, with examples from Tania Bruguera and Pussy Riot, examining political contradictions in global activism. Bishop identifies a 'grey zone' between gallery and theater that disrupts normative, Enlightenment-based attention, promoting a more sociable, fluid spectatorship. She questions whether spectatorship is shaped by capital and technology, framing this as a central art-historical polemic. The book avoids simplistic judgments, instead rethinking spectatorship as perpetually hybrid.