Attenzione disordinata

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.