Disordered Attention

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.

• Introduction: OS XXI, Disordering Attention1 Research-Based Art: Information Overload2 Performance Exhibitions: Black Box, White Cube, Grey Zone3 Interventions: Seizing the Moment4 Invocations: Contemporary Art Quotes Modernist ArchitectureEpilogueAcknowledgementsNotesIllustration CreditsIndex

Today, the most contemporary art form could be called cancelism. Cancelism as an art historical genre reflects the global shift to populism, disinformation and polarization. Cancelism is anonymous, crowd based, ubiquitous, it privileges affect over analysis, it goes beyond traditional understandings of left and right. In her lucid analysis, Claire Bishop traces some of the historical developments that led to this situation: the futurist glorification of disruption, countercultural interventions based on the model of coup d´états, artivist decisionism - different threads through which disruption and transgression were consolidated as key modes of production from Silicon Valley to Pussy Riot. For anyone who wants to understand how art functions in the age of populism, Bishops book is an indispensable guide.