Claire Bishop (b.1971, United Kingdom) is Associate Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Her publications include Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate/Routledge, 2005) and Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012). Her curatorial projects include the performance exhibition Double Agent at the ICA, London (2008) and the PRELUDE.11 performance festival at CUNY Graduate Center (2011). She is a regular contributor to Artforum, and is winner of the 2013 Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism.

Bishop’s talk OS XXI: Contemporary Art and the Digital looked at how the art market still revolves around visual artefacts produced as one-offs or in limited editions, and bearing traces of the artist’s hand. At the same time, it presents the question of how we increasingly consume art digitally – whether through search engine queries, online databases, or through photographic documentation. Is visual art guilty of repressing its relationship to new technology? Does its attachment to the aura of obsolete media (such as analog film, slide projections and archival installations) mean that visual art itself is soon to become outmoded?