Lecture: Claire Bishop

Claire Bishop will discuss the rise of research-based art, offering a genealogy for its emergence in the 1990s. It argues that changes within this genre are partially tied to the reception of post-structuralist theory in art schools in the 1980s, and partly to technological developments in information management since the late 1990s.

In tandem with the rise of the attention economy, the viewer’s reception of research-based art has correspondingly shifted over these three decades. The paper offers a critique of this artistic tendency: its post-hermeneutic approach to display, its reconfiguration of spectatorship as labour, and its exacerbation of (rather than resistance to) information overload.

Claire Bishop is a British art historian, critic, and Professor of Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York since September 2008. Bishop is a contributor to art journals including Artforum and October. She is known as one of the central theorists of participation in visual art and performance.