Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today
By Claire Bishop
Published by Verso
London/New York, 2024

In her latest book, art historian Claire Bishop tackles our default waking condition—and not just when looking at art and performance. In today’s experiential economy, “we are physically present . . . but also networked to multiple elsewheres”—succinct words that the smartphone in our hand confirms. While Bishop’s is an immediately clear diagnosis of contemporary consciousness, she explores four distinctive, largely analogue modalities of artmaking impacted by digital technologies, tracing how “hybrid attention is ‘OS XXI,’ the operating system of spectatorship in the twenty-first century.”