Information Overload: Research Based Art and the Politics of Spectatorship
Claire Bishop
This lecture examines 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.
The viewer’s reception of research-based art has also shifted over these three decades, in tandem
with an attention economy. The paper offers a critique of this artistic tendency: its post-hermeneutic approach, its reconfiguration
of spectatorship, and its exacerbation of (rather than resistance to) information overload.
Bishop is the author
of Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012) and 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.
