In January, I finally went to Tate’s Philip Guston exhibition, after poring over glowing reviews for months. One thing that wasn’t mentioned in any of the reviews I encountered though, were the contemporary responses in the exhibition. “We have invited London-based creatives to respond to Guston’s work,” the exhibition guide announced. What this meant in practice was that QR codes appeared alongside certain paintings, which visitors could scan to access music and poetry created specifically for the show. But I didn’t have headphones with me. So I just opened the web pages, leaving the tabs hovering in my browser, and moved on. I couldn’t shake a nagging sense of incompleteness though; a kind of gallery FOMO. My phone itched in my pocket.

The incorporation of digital elements into major exhibitions isn’t new – QR codes have been cropping up for a while now, often alongside suggested hashtags for social posts. Interestingly though, this has occurred in tandem with increasing anxiety around spectatorship. Post-COVID, there have been recurring discussions about people having “forgotten how to behave” in cultural settings. Usually, the “bad behaviour” involves being on a phone – taking photos in the theatre, or scrolling through Instagram at the cinema. In the art world too, fingers are pointed at people taking photos of artworks “without really looking” at them, or bumper exhibitions that seem designed to funnel visitors through successive “Instagrammable moments”. At the same time, “slow looking” has been valorised, with the work of artists such as Pierre Bonnard treated as an antidote to the fast-paced post-internet era.

Yet, there is also clearly a tension here, as phone use is accepted and even encouraged on an institutional level – as a tool for marketing, education or accessibility – but not on an individual one. Get your phone out to listen to a musician respond to Guston’s work and you’re engaging “correctly”. Get your phone out and take selfies and you’re a philistine. Are these activities really that different though? Or are they both symptomatic of a new, hybrid way of looking in the digital age?

This is the subject of art historian Claire Bishop’s new book, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (published by Verso). Our phones have become a “prosthesis for viewing” art, Bishop writes. Yet, rather than casting judgement on this new normal, Bishop’s book is about how artists are responding to it, and how contemporary art itself is changing. Essentially, she works to overturn the belief that there is a “right” and “wrong” way to engage with art: the first being quiet, contemplative, closely-focused and slow, and the second noisy, quick, digitally-connected and “distracted”.

The charged history of “attention” as a concept is central here. In the introduction – where Bishop cites “the rise of an attention economy and its flipside, attention deficit disorder (ADHD)” as the “contextual horizon” of the book – she explains that the concept of “attention” only emerged in the 19th century, “in tandem with industrial capitalism”. What Bishop terms “normative attention” was built to conform with a conception of the subject as rational, on a model that is “paradigmatically white, patriarchal, bourgeois, colonial”.

Attention was conceived as an individual quality, which, as Bishop writes, “enabled it to be quantified, optimised, and disciplined”. Workers could be observed and controlled, their attention monitored, in the service of profit. 19th century architecture and urban infrastructure began to change in response, Bishop notes – designed to hone this newly-theorised attention. In galleries, crowded salon-style hangs were replaced by single rows of paintings. Theatres were arranged so the seats faced the stage head-on, instead of in a curve (where the activities of other audience members were scrutinised as much as the official performance). And, across all visual art forms, hushed focus became de rigour. Chattering and rabble-rousing, on the other hand, was deemed unseemly; crass. “Distraction,” Bishop writes, became “a moral judgment.”

“Inattention is a kind of attention. Distraction is another mode of attention” – Claire Bishop

“We tend to want to blame the viewer for being distracted,” Bishop tells me over Zoom, a couple of days before the book’s release. “And of course these things are structural.” Without my prompting, she seems to echo my thoughts in the Guston show. “If someone is standing in front of a painting taking selfies with the picture, we frown, right? But if they are uploading a nice picture with a hashtag: #Tate, #Hayward etc…” She grins. “Tate is Exhibit A here, with its Bloomberg sponsorship and QR codes,” Bishop notes. “They get artists to make playlists to accompany certain works.” This tension between the individual viewer and the institution is similar to one Bishop discusses in Disordered Attention, between “the viewer” and “the critic”. The first may Google things or snap photos in the gallery, posting them or sending them to friends while still looking at the art; this mediation is perceived as distraction. The critic, meanwhile, mediates later, and their attention is given acclaim.

This split maps neatly onto André Lepecki’s distinction between “spectators” and “witnesses”: the former are characterised by passivity, whereas the latter are conceived as active, engaged story-makers. Bishop rejects these binary models though. “I’m pushing back on Andre Lepecki, who is a dear colleague,” Bishop tells me. “I think he’s a really terrific author, but that distinction seems to take up a certain moral high ground that academics and critics take towards the use of social media.” This is the same moral hierarchy that the very notion of “normative attention” was built on, she suggests:  “The whole book, in a way, is pushing against that resistance to social media network technology that you see amongst academics and a lot of critics, and which simply doesn’t sync with people’s experiences in a space.”

In Disordered Attention, Bishop is essentially attempting to move away from an elitist model of attention, which decrees “right” and “wrong” ways of looking. And so, in four chapters that started life as individual essays, she reads research based art through the lens of information overload, performance exhibitions with non-linear structures through the modes of “looping” and “refreshing”, artistic interventions through the model of the viral, and the rash of contemporary works inspired by modernism as mimicking “scrolling”. Within this expansive survey of the contemporary art scene, Bishop also mounts a defence of sorts, arguing that art works that are readily dismissed for being “too Instagrammable” in fact reflect “a new form of hybrid spectatorship”, produced by our smart phone prosthetics.

One of these works is Sun and Sea (Marina) – a looping opera about climate change, where viewers looked down on beachgoers singing about ecological collapse. People could come and go as they pleased, as the performers endlessly buffered – tanning as the world burns. The opera-artwork became a sensation, thanks in part to winning the Golden Lion at 2019’s Venice Biennale, but also because images of the performance spread like an apocalyptic wildfire. “It’s so photogenic,” Bishop tells me. “And they know it’s photogenic. It’s gorgeously lit, with all these pastel colours on the beach. It’s absolutely made for circulation.”

In other words, it’s all intentional: the “Instagrammability”; the viewers’ urge for real-time documentation; how the performers are arranged below, like a living postcard. The photogenic quality of the work isn’t the only intentional, hybrid element though. “It’s also completely about distraction,” Bishop says, “to the extent that there’s always something pulling your eye away from the libretto.” She admits that the first ten minutes of the opera drove her mad, “because there was a dog barking and people playing a game and I couldn’t figure out who was singing and where we were in the libretto, or even what was being sung.” Speaking to the performers later, she told them her “scattered attention” drove her crazy. “They said, ‘Oh good, it’s totally about that’,” she says – “not being able to grasp immediately what the central focus is.” As Bishop writes in the book, “We are physically present in the performance but also networked to multiple elsewheres.” This gives the sensation that the work is happening all the time, everywhere, all at once. Which, for a work about climate inaction, is the whole point; the hybrid spectatorship doesn’t just fit the work, it is the work.

Rather than “scattered attention”, Bishop understands this hybrid spectatorship as selective attention. “This is Richard Schechner’s term for a kind of oscillatory, intermittent attention,” Bishop explains: “An attention that can function while you’re still talking to people, and still doing other things.” Schechner developed the idea in relation to a music performance, where, as Bishop notes, “there is low level of chatting and eating while people are listening to a performance.” Of course, this is “something auditory rather than something optical,” Bishop adds, but it “struck me as exactly what I thought is happening during a lot of performance exhibitions, where I’m watching dancers do something, but I’m chatting and talking at the same time,” Bishop says. “I’m totally watching what’s going on,” she stresses, “but maybe I”m also having a conversation about it, or a conversation about something else. Or I’ve got my phone out and the fact that I’m looking at it through my phone doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention to it. I’m really paying attention to it.”

“There’s a lot of morality and a lot of expectations and a lot of what some scholars would call ‘white bourgeois norms’ around attention. These inculcate a set of behaviors which are about being quiet, wrapped, focused, not disturbing everyone else… These are actually quite racist and ableist in terms of their expectations around what audiences can and should be doing” – Claire Bishop

“Inattention is a kind of attention,” Bishop stresses. “Distraction is another mode of attention.” Though, she hastens to add that she avoids using “distraction” as a term: “I think it’s morally loaded, and I hate the way it’s mobilised” to express disapproval. “When I say to my partner, get off your phone, stop being so distracted, listen to me, it’s because I’m really annoyed with it and because I want them to be paying attention to what I’m saying,” Bishop highlights. “Actually, distraction is often super high attention, and totally absorbed in the feed. It’s just that idea that it’s absorption in the wrong thing.” In our new, networked normal, this is the framework she urges us to move away from. “There’s a lot of morality and a lot of expectations and a lot of what some scholars would call ‘white bourgeois norms’ around attention,” Bishop says. “These inculcate a set of behaviors which are about being quiet, wrapped, focused, not disturbing everyone else… These are actually quite racist and ableist in terms of their expectations around what audiences can and should be doing.”

Our smart phone prosthetics aren’t going away any time soon, but perhaps we can learn to shake off some of the moralising that attaches to their use. It would certainly be ironic if modern technology prompted a return to a kind of pre-Enlightenment spectatorship: social and selective rather than individual and highly-controlled; deep attention replaced by skimming, scrolling and sampling. Bishop’s book maps out a new horizon, where hybrid spectatorship is seen as an expansive opportunity for artistic engagement, rather than a modern mind killer. “I think maybe the goal is to have every performance as a relaxed performance,” Bishop muses. In any case, contemporary art can’t avoid reacting to the new conditions of spectatorship. “It’s almost like the late 90s,” Bishop suggests finally. “DVDs are introduced and so film becomes the fascination. You can’t quite predict what that reaction is going to be.”

Claire Bishop’s Disordered Attention:How We Look at Art and Performance Today is published by Verso and avilable now from your locsl independent bookshop. 

FARGO — The arrest of 20-year-old J’Veonte Logan took place in the middle of the afternoon on one of Fargo’s busiest streets.

Logan was arrested by Fargo police and the Metro Area Street Crimes Unit during a traffic stop on the 12th Avenue North railroad bridge just west of the North Daota State University campus.

Seventy-nine-year-old Kenneth Andersen is a professional photographer. Most of his work focuses on veterans and special projects he also works on in his wood shop.

Little did Andersen know the timing of his lunch break Wednesday, June 26, would make headlines.

“Well it’s the new Samsung S24 Ultra,” he said holding his new phone.

Andersen just got the new cell phone a couple of days ago.

“I sort of know how to use it,” he said.

On Wednesday, he quickly learned how to use the camera on his new phone.

“It looks like a news deal,” he said of the scene he pulled up on.

He was headed back to his studio after lunch when he was forced to stop on the bridge because 10 police cruisers were blocking the street in both directions.

“All of a sudden, the light came on,” he said with a chuckle referring to his news sense.

He pulled out his new cell phone and started taking pictures of a man being arrested.

“I thought this wasn’t going to be a good deal here, I’m not going to get out of my pickup and look around,” said Andersen.

That man was on top of the Fargo Police Department’s most wanted list.

Andersen said he had no clue who the man being arrested was.

“You did not realize this was the homicide suspect they’ve been searching for for three days?” asked WDAY.

“No, I had no idea,” said Andersen.

Andersen knows about news photography.

He worked for a local paper near Wadena back in the 60s. He said a photo of a deadly school bus crash in Staples was his most sought after during his career.

“I had one picked up by the Associated Press. At the time, they paid me $5. That was a lot of money in 1962, I think it was,” said Andersen.

While cameras have changed over the past 60 years there’s one thing about news photography that will never change with time.

“Be at the right spot to do that at the right time,” said Andersen.

Matt Henson is an Emmy award-winning reporter/photographer/editor for WDAY. Prior to joining WDAY in 2019, Matt was the main anchor at WDAZ in Grand Forks for four years.