Art in an Age of Perpetual Distraction

We live in an age of perpetual distraction. Think of our compulsions for social media. Or the algorithmic marketing that seeks to lure our focus from website to website and product to product. Or the pervasiveness of mobile technologies and rapid editing that bombard us with images at home, on the streets, and in our places of study and work. All these demands for our attention are transforming how we concentrate, how we process information, and how we engage with everything around us in ways that align with, but also extend beyond, the rapidly burgeoning diagnoses of ADHD in children and adults alike. We are instead in the midst of an “attention economy” around which contemporary capitalism now pivots and which has, its flipside, a growing sense that our distractibility now defines our contemporary world.  

How we respond culturally and socially to these remarkable global changes is thus a pressing issue facing us today. While it’s tempting to lionise slowness as a countermeasure to change, this risks ignoring how we still need to work with the tools and challenges of distraction given their ubiquity. Can we therefore reimagine distraction as a generative force or is always doomed to be negative and deservedly demonised? If our visual and sensory media are the primary means by which this global social change is happening, can we look to artists and artworks for other ways to use those media and thus to imagine distraction otherwise? Could distraction be a means to ignite other frameworks that are central to arts and the humanities – such as curiosity, empathy, or pedagogy – that also hinge on connection differently from the apathy, entropy, and ailment with which distraction is usually associated?  

Part of the Art History Seminar Series, convened by Mary Roberts, and presented by the discipline of art history at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute.  Presented in collaboration with the Chau Chak Wing Museum.