Review
Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today. Claire Bishop, (London: Verso, 2024).
Australian and New Zealand journal of art, Vol.First online, pp.1-8
03/11/2025
Appears in Recent Faculty of Education Publications
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Abstract
‘Let’s begin with a generalization’, Claire Bishop announces at the start of a 2012 October essay on performance art, before proceeding to discuss the trend of artists, such as Maurizio Cattelan and Jeremy Deller, who have delegated their works to non-professional performers. One of Bishop’s conclusions is that it is the amateurs who themselves delegate a ‘guarantee of authenticity’ to the artists hiring them, who gain a certain credibility by working not just with representations but with everyday social realities.Footnote1 This technique—of turning a fairly innocuous observation about a recent artworld custom into a broader insight about the ethics and aesthetics of representation—has been deployed to great effect by Bishop throughout her career. As an engaged, with-the-times art critic and an astute theory-driven historian of twentieth- and twenty-first century art, Bishop is unique in being skilled at both, supported by her teaching, since 2008, in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Attuned, like all good critics, not just to the limits of her own tastes but to the very disjunctures between art practice and art theory, Bishop’s penchant for hybrid cultural models has enabled her to reflect on the many transformations of post-1990s art, as critic, historian, performance and visual media theorist all rolled into one.
Details
- Title
- Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today. Claire Bishop, (London: Verso, 2024).
- Creators
- Wes Hill - Southern Cross University
- Publication Details
- Australian and New Zealand journal of art, Vol.First online, pp.1-8
- Publisher
- Taylor & Francis; ABINGDON
- Identifiers
- 991013326827902368
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Education
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Review