How technology and the attention economy shape contemporary art and performance

The reception of art and performance is changing. Smartphones and social media have troubled the old model of individual appreciation and close looking, giving rise to new forms of mediated perception, such as sampling, skimming and scrolling. Charting recent trends in contemporary practice - research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture - leading art critic Claire Bishop challenges the assumption that fully focused attention is automatically good and distraction necessarily bad.

"A thought-provoking book on creation and viewership." - i-D

"[A] deft examination of post-1990s contemporary art ... pushing back against the trend for anxious denunciations of growing inattention." - ArtReview

"Full of clear, crisp insights that helps us understand the obvious yet surprising impact technology has had on art." - CLOT Magazine

"Bishop posits that our phones have become a kind of 'prosthesis for viewing' art, and her book is about how artists are responding to this new normal." - Art in America

"Illuminating...an erudite foray into the messy meeting place between art and technology in the 21st century." - Publishers Weekly