James Lee Byars wrote in 1968: “I founded a fictitious museum in New York in ’68 and collected 1,000,000 minutes of attention to show”. That same year, Andy Warhol made a declaration of principles in the catalogue of an exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”. Bruce Nauman is another example of an artist who has continually demanded the attention of the spectator, sometimes through explicit orders (Please/Pay/Attention/Please, 1973 and Pay attention, 1973). Although the intentions in all these cases were very different, all three pointed towards something that has become a scarce commodity in the 21st century: attention.
It is curious that while contemporary ways of life force us to multitask (whether we are capable of it or not), there are more and more cases of childhood diagnoses of “attention deficit syndrome”. It cannot be otherwise. We have We are used to talking on the phone while we do a search on Google, while we have several tabs open in the browser to check the different social networks we are part of (and which we have to “feed” in some way if we don’t want to disappear from the social-virtual map). Exhausting! And basically, not very efficient. Our concentration is constantly fragmented.
One of the first people to introduce the concept of “attention economy” was the economist and social science specialist Herbert A. Simon, in his article “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” written in 1971, referring to the fact that the wealth of information implies the death of something else, that is, the attention of the recipients, so that the overabundance of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to locate it effectively.
Advertisers discovered this a long time ago and that is why in their strategies they consider it essential to capture the attention of a potential client who ends up purchasing a certain product or service. But we have reached a point where the final act of purchase is no longer the goal sought, but attracting attention has become an end in itself and some economic strategists not only speak of the “attention economy” but also of “attention transactions”.
In art, the need for attention has always been there, in the desire to be exposed and to be heard and appreciated. Now this urgency to be present translates into a multiplication of events and activities, of many things happening. The risk is going unnoticed or that the 2 seconds of visibility (which is surely what Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame have become) pass too quickly.
[Article published in Bonart, 2014]
