Claire Bishop

Claire Bishop is an art historian, critic, author, and professor in the art history department at CUNY Graduate Center, New York since September 2008. Bishop is editor of Participation (2006) and Installation Art: A Critical History (2005) and is a contributor to many art journals including Artforum and October.
Bishop's essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” which appeared in October in 2004, remains an influential critique of relational aesthetics. Her books have been translated into over eighteen languages.

She studied art history at St John's College, Cambridge (1990-1994) and completed her MA and Ph.D at Essex University in 1996 and 2002 respectively. Bishop was an associate professor in the department of art history at the University of Warwick, Coventry from 2006 to 2008 and a tutor in critical theory in the curating contemporary art department at the Royal College of Art, London from 2001 to 2006.

Claire Bishop's current research addresses the impact of digital technologies on contemporary art, as well as questions of amateurism and 'de-skilling' in contemporary dance and performance art. Her recent book, "Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship" (2012) is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, best known in the U.S. as 'social practice.' In it, Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This Itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina, and Paris; the 1970 Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawel Althamer, and Paul Chan. "Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship" was reviewed in a wide range of publications including Art in America, Art Journal, CAA Reviews (College Art Association), Art Review, Art Montly, and TDR: The Drama Review. In 2013, Artificial Hells won the Frank Jewett Mather Prize for art criticism and the ASAP book prize.

• 1968-1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. (ISBN 9788392404408)
• Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012. (ISBN 9781844676903)
• Double Agent. London: ICA, 2009.(ISBN 9781900300582)
• Installation Art: A Critical History. London: Tate, 2005. (ISBN 9780415974127)
• Participation. London: Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2006. (ISBN 9780415974127)
• Radical Museology, or, What's Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013 (ISBN 9783863353643)