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?

Anthony Gardner is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Oxford and the Sir William Dobell Visiting Chair in Art History at the Australian National University. He has published widely on subjects including postcolonialism, postsocialism and curatorial histories, with articles in On Curating, ARTMargins,Third Text, Postcolonial Studies and many other journals and anthologies. From 2012 to 2021, he was an editor of the MIT Press journal ARTMargins, for which he continues to serve as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board. Among his books are Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations (Melbourne, 2013), Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (MIT Press, 2015) and, also through MIT Press in 2015, the anthology Neue Slowenische Kunst: From Kapital to Capital (with Zdenka Badovinac and Eda Čufer), which was a finalist for the 2017 Alfred H Barr Award for best exhibition catalogue worldwide. In 2016, he co-authored (with Charles Green, University of Melbourne) Biennials, Triennials and documenta: The exhibitions that created contemporary art, published by Wiley-Blackwell.

Image: Paul Yore, Pleasures Against Nature (2020)