Bishop, Claire: Artificial Hells

A searing critique of participatory art by an iconoclastic historian.“Claire Bishop has articulated an important historical overview of the global emergence of participatory art ... Her controversial and thought-provoking conclusions courageously trouble our assumptions about the effectiveness of political artworks, questioning their oppositional quality, their effects on the audiences they reach, and their relation to the institutions that promote them.”—Frank Jewett Mather Award, 2013

“Bishop’s arguments are convincingly supported and potentially very contentious...A critically challenging work of vital scholarship.”—Publishers Weekly

“An essential title for contemporary art history scholars and students as well as anyone who has witnessed a participatory art ‘happening’ and thought, ‘Now that’s art!’ or ‘That’s art?’”—Library Journal

“Bishop seeks a standard for judging participatory works...She draws on the writings of French philosopher Jacques Rancière to argue that art must maintain a degree of autonomy and unreadability in order to resist co-option by the political and economic forces intent on imposing a false social consensus.”—Eleanor Heartney, Art in America

“Pellucid”—Alexander Provan, New York Observer

“The good intentions of contemporary artists frequently pave a road to hell. Claire Bishop follows their descent into the inferno and invites her readers to share her fascination with what she finds along the way. Artificial Hells combines vast historical knowledge with a precise analysis of individual artistic practices. So much so that at the end of her new book we have begun to fall in love with hell—under the condition that it remains artificial.”—Boris Groys, author of Art Power