Prof. Dr. Claire Bishop: Black Box, White Cube - Fifty Shades of Grey?

Lecture by Prof. Dr. Claire Bishop
CUNY - Graduate Center of the City University of New York

The staging of performance in the museum has recently come under fire from a number of art historians and critics, who argue that it is a misguided fad and a cynical marketing gesture. Performance theorists, by contrast, have tended to analyse performance in the museum in terms of post-Fordist theories of labour. Both these approaches create a reductive bond between contemporary performance and neoliberal economics. This paper seeks to shift the discussion away from questions of spectacle, marketing, and labour, and instead to focus on the museum's interest in live performance at a time of ubiquitous portable technology. How has performance accommodated itself to the museum, and what does this accommodation reveal about changes in temporality, attention, and the public sphere?

About Claire Bishop:
Claire Bishop is professor of Contemporary Art at CUNY Graduate Center, New York. She joined the Graduate Center in 2008, after teaching at Warwick University (UK) and the Royal College of Art, London. Her books have been translated into over seventeen languages, and she is a regular contributor to Artforum. Her current research addresses the impact of digital technologies on contemporary art, as well as questions of amateurism and 'de-skilling' in contemporary dance and performance art. Claire Bishop has earned her PhD at Essex University in 2002.

List of publications (selection):

Bishop, C. (2013): Radical Museology, or, What's Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London.

Bishop, C. (2012a): Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, New York.

Bishop, C. (2012b): Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity, October Magazine 140, 91–112.

Bishop, C. (2006): Introduction. Viewers as Producers, in: C. Bishop (Hg.): Participation, Cambridge, 10–17.