ARTS

Francesca Billington, The Nation -  Attention is often defined by what it excludes: To focus on one thing means ignoring another. Attention can also be a state more than a deliberate action, a “relaxed distribution of focus,” as Claire Bishop, a professor of art history at CUNY Graduate Center, writes in Disordered Attention. Her book tracks how our attention has been reorganized by digital technology and how artists, in particular, have adjusted their work in response. Today, most people hold phones in their hands when they visit a gallery; they take photos, text those photos to friends, look up the artists. But even if the tech that is molding our attention might be new, the sociable nature of attention originated in the theaters and museums of the 18th and 19th centuries. 

Then, as now, artists steered and occasionally played with our attention. In the 18th century, the Austrian composer Joseph Haydn inserted silences into his otherwise orderly music to thwart the expectations of his listeners and jolt them into attention. The white-walled contemporary museum follows a similar logic. Surrounding work with blankness allows us to concentrate on the art itself. Other artists are treating contemporary forms of information overload as an opportunity. At the 2019 Venice Biennale, a climate-change-themed opera, Sun & Sea, ran for eight straight hours. A cast of sunbathers read and built sandcastles on a beach built inside a gallery as the audience filtered in and out of the mezzanine, chatting and snapping photos. This setup, along with the opera’s duration, encouraged a diffused attention that existed both here (the gallery) and there (online). “We have come to document as we look,” Bishop writes. At first, she was irritated by the performance. She couldn’t tell who was singing, and peripheral noise hummed around her. “And then I came to realize that was not the point of the piece,” she said. “I really like these durational works for how they encourage us to stay and watch repetitions, iterations, and see how things change.”