A lecture by Claire Bishop, moderated by Nuno Crespo and Jürgen Bock, organised by the Instituto de História da Arte da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Maumaus and the Museu de Serralves with the support of the Goethe-Institut Portugal.

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 has 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 position performance more dialectically in relation to contemporary experience. Key to this argument is a discussion of live performance in the museum and its relationship to ubiquitous portable technology, particularly its impact upon temporality, attention, and the public sphere.

Claire Bishop is an art historian and critic based in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of 'Installation Art: A Critical History' (Tate/Routledge, 2005) and 'Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship' (Verso, 2012). She is the editor of 'Participation' (MIT/Whitechapel, 2006) and '1968/1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change' (Warsaw, Museum of Modern Art, 2010), and co-curated the exhibition 'Double Agent' at the London ICA in 2008. She is a regular contributor to Artforum and writes occasionally for October (MIT Press).