OS XXI: Contemporary Art and the Society of Attention in the 21st Century

In 2015, humanity managed to knock its average transient attention span down to 8 seconds. This puts us behind the goldfish, which is supposed to be capable of concentrating for stretches a full second longer.

How does one speak about art in a society whose members are so incapable of paying attention? What can art tell us about such a society?
Claire Bishop, Professor of Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, is invited by the Onassis Stegi in the context of the “Hybrids” exhibition to talk about the role art can play in the age of social media, search engines and 24/7 online living.

The title of Bishop’s lecture, “OS XXI”, is a clear reference to computer operating systems and the dominance of personal computing in 21st-century society. Bishop poses a timely question: how are we producing and consuming art in an environment in which the natural and the digital are so inextricably intertwined?
What do ‘artist’, ‘creator’ and ‘audience’ mean in an era in which sounds, images and media from different eras are mashed up into the non-stop remix that is our life? What’s the aesthetic of this hybrid environment and what language can we use to talk about it? Do the tools of the art historian suffice, or do we need to seek out new methodologies and techniques, drawing on other branches of the arts and sciences for inspiration?

Bishop presents her most recent work in the sphere of participatory art and radical museology, focusing both on the impact net and digital technologies have had on art, and on the ways in which art can help us understand the ways in which digital technologies are changing our very selves.

Claire Bishop is a Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Installation Art: A “Critical History” (2005) and “Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship” (2012), for which she won the 2013 Frank Jewett Mather award, and “Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art?” (2013). She is a regular contributor to Artforum, and her essays and books have been translated into eighteen languages. Her current research concerns the impact of digital technology on contemporary art and performance since 1989.