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.
