Black Box, White Cube: Fifty Shades of Grey?: A Lecture by Claire Bishop

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 as 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?