Claire Bishop

How do we look at art today? In a very different way from just a few decades ago. We alternate between moments of total immersion in the works and others in which, smartphone in hand, we take photos and videos, scan QR codes or share on social media. The 21st-century viewer’s experience is a hybrid one, a constant oscillation between physical presence in the exhibition space and remote connection to a technological elsewhere.To describe this, Claire Bishop analyses four different practices of contemporary art, whose structures and expressive strategies respond to new modes of perception and attention characteristic of digital culture: ‘research-based art’, with its overload of information to be sifted through, typical of web browsing; exhibition-performances, designed to be viewed live but also captured on a mobile phone; ‘interventions’, a category historicised and theorised here for the first time, for which the public dimension, online circulation and the resulting virality are indispensable; finally, the fascination of many artists with modernist iconography, whose déjà-vu effect once again points to digital media and their endless collection of decontextualised images.At the heart of every discussion lies what Bishop calls ‘disordered attention’, a form of spectatorship based on complex dynamics between the subject, time and technology, as well as on the questioning of thought patterns, dominant narratives and exclusive rules. Without the obligation of depth or absolute concentration, dictated by modernist norms such as the white cube and their corresponding social models, the artwork of the new millennium lends itself to a freer and authentically collective experience.

The future of the public museum has never seemed more at risk: rather than representing the diverse interests of society as a whole, in most cases it has been reduced to a vehicle for promoting block-buster events and protecting the privileges of private concerns, giving rise to temples of amusement and entertainment that are unable to grasp the actual historic moment in its entirety. Apart, that is, from the odd happy but rare exception. In this short essay, Claire Bishop talks about the experience of three European institutions of contemporary art – the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid and the MSUM in Ljubljana – which have dealt with the challenge of cuts to public funding dictated by austerity measures by making a virtue of necessity and developing brilliant alternatives to the dominant mantra of “bigger and better, and, if possible, also more profitable”. Through enlightened policies regarding the acquisition of new work and the display of their own permanent collection, these museums have turned themselves into places dedicated to experimentation, capable of using their own resources to put together a critical discourse and cast a political eye on the current period in history.In re-opening discussion of a heated international debate, Museologia Radicale outlines a manifesto for a new concept of contemporary, which should be seen as a practice and not merely as periodization, favouring a reinterpretation of the museum’s role as an institution charged with preserving cultural heritage, at the same time providing a critical voice that can interrogate the present and contribute to creating a different future.