Anyone who has taken photographs in museums and galleries over the last few decades will be aware of how conditions for photographers have changed. In many places, photography was once forbidden; in some, permission had to be explicitly granted, and the relevant document even worn around the neck; in others, artworks could be photographed but posing with them was banned. While many performance artists welcomed photography, a few hated it. Once, in a darkened space packed with frenetic dancers and static viewers, I had my lens slapped away by one of Tino Seghal’s performers. Yet, as Claire Bishop notes in her new book Disordered Attention, such rules have been swept away since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. Now, almost every gallery-goer has a camera on them and expects to be able to use it whenever they like. Galleries feed off the free publicity of images circulating on social media, and even Seghal has had to accept that his works will be photographed and videoed.

The result is a transformed gallery scene, one which bears little resemblance to the old model of the white cube, where autonomous viewers were meant to engage in quiet, solitary contemplation of equally autonomous objects, each separated by an expanse of plain wall. According to this old ideal, geniuses made masterpieces which deserved prolonged and singular attention, and the gallery environment ensured that the bourgeois viewers capable of exercising it could do so without interruption. It is no surprise, then, that the new environment, in which viewers are chatty, distracted, and at best sporadically absorbed as they shuttle between looking and recording, while posting selfies and snap-judgements onto social media, has been subject to a good deal of condescending criticism.

One task of Disordered Attention is to counter such attitudes by providing a more nuanced and historicized portrait of the contemporary scene. Rather than disparaging the changing etiquette of gallery-goers, Bishop focuses on the evolving practices of artists and institutions as they have responded to new digital technology, from the Internet to smartphones and social media. For Bishop, these developments have not destroyed art viewers’ attention but ‘reconfigured’ it. Attention, she maintains, is not a ‘universal, deep-rooted faculty’ but a ‘mutable’ capacity, responsive to new technologies and shifting cultural norms; the term ‘distraction’, she argues, is little more than a moralizing insult used to describe a type of attention of which the speaker disapproves. Bishop, who teaches art history at the cuny graduate school, argues that the old, disciplined focus was a product of the darkest elements of Enlightenment ideology, synonymous with ownership, property and mastery and thus ‘white, patriarchal, bourgeois, colonial’. In contrast, today’s ways of seeing are ‘incessantly hybrid’, at once ‘present and mediated, live and online, fleeting and profound, individual and collective’.

Disordered Attention contends that this apparently novel form of viewing is in fact a return to older collective experiences of art which were suppressed by both the gallery white cube and the ‘black box’ of experimental theatre, both ‘purportedly neutral frames that steer and hierarchize attention’, constructing a ‘single-point perspective’. In theatres before the late nineteenth century, by contrast, the audience looked at each other as much as at the stage. Galleries were likewise sites of social preening and conversation. Early film screenings, as Gabriele Pedullà describes in In Broad Daylight (2012), were similarly merely episodes in variety shows where unruly, distracted audiences dined and conversed. The shift to a mostly silent, disciplined viewing was both social and technological, as electric light enabled the brilliant illumination of the stage or screen, and the rapid dimming of the auditorium. In the gallery, spotlights nudged the attention of the visitor away from fellow viewers and towards what was displayed on the wall.

In contemporary exhibition spaces, it is not only that viewers tend to be more ‘distracted’—or less blinkered, depending on your point of view—but that over the course of a long process beginning in the 1960s many artworks have become less autonomous, less bounded by a perceptible frame. Artists now make performances and videos which are so long that no viewer can be expected to see the whole, or present a mass of documents that would take weeks to read carefully. Spectators have come to expect that their view of such works will be fragmentary. Other artists, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija or Carsten Höller, stage unusual social situations as a passing salve for the deepening wound of capitalist alienation. Back in 2004, Bishop wrote an astringent and controversial critique of that tendency for October, which questioned the emancipatory, ‘feel-good’ effects of interactive art that supposedly converts isolated, passive beholders into a community of engaged viewers, and recommended work that sought to confront or even exacerbate social antagonism rather than wishing it away. These arguments later formed part of her book Artificial Hells (2012), a history and defence of the kinds of participatory work which, often in charged and dangerous circumstances, thrust audiences outside of comfort and convention, aesthetically as much as politically.

Disordered Attention is not a systematic examination of the newly mediated forms of spectatorship, as Bishop concedes (‘My methods—in keeping with the book’s theme—are somewhat hybrid and disorderly’). The book comprises four essays, independently written and published over the last decade—case studies in which Bishop examines a different ‘genre’ of contemporary artmaking, analysing how its practice and display have metabolized new technologies and their corresponding modes of attention, and considering what the effects have been upon the viewer. She begins with ‘research-based art’, a kind of ‘archival installation’ that emerged in the 1990s and often features aggregations of documents and other textual ephemera, producing an ‘information overload’ that viewers tend to approach with a mix of skimming and sampling. She then turns to long-duration gallery performance, especially dance, of the kind that burgeoned in the late 2000s around the time the iPhone was launched. These choreographed works may ‘loop’ and ‘refresh’, like digital media, and ‘encourage photographic capture’. They are frequently presented as a series of capturable stills which Bishop suggests has seeded a form of collective viewing that is both physical and online, ‘a new way of looking with camera in hand’. In her third chapter Bishop addresses tactical interventions. Usually taking place outside the gallery, these are brief, unauthorized, disruptive, broadly political gestures, subject to the rapid growth, consumption and decay typical of viral phenomena, and often received with a cynical weariness for their exploitation of that familiar cycle. Finally, Bishop considers a form of ‘citational practice’ popular since the 1990s, involving tasteful engagements with modernist architecture and design in wistful reflections on lost ideals, which also turn out to be nicely tailored to scrolling on rectilinear online interfaces.

The eye that Bishop turns on this nexus of artmaking, display, discourse and viewer behaviour is well-informed, historically and politically attuned, perceptive, critical and synthetic. By tracking the larger movements of the scene, she offers an implicit counter to the tide of fawning monographs, the main role of which is to feed the pr machine and boost prices. Instead of dealing in exceptionalist celebrations of individual artists, Disordered Attention presents developments in artmaking and viewing as historical processes, tied to the interaction of media, markets and institutions. In her sceptical take on the large number of artists at work on excavating forgotten corners of modernism, for instance, Bishop shows how the growth of residencies and biennial commissions, along with budget flights, came together to place artists in cities far from home where they have been enjoined to make something site-specific.