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Sleepless nights: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Performance
- Source: Public, Volume 23, Issue 45, Jun 2012, p. 8 - 22
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- 22 Jun 2012
Abstract
The unavoidable necessity to sleep acknowledges the built-in limits humans have to the nearly inescapable demands of work and consumer culture. International art events such as Nuit Blanche present a resistance to this mortal ‘sleep’ as a version of participatory art. Though such events foreclose traditional notions of spectatorship, they nevertheless reinforce spectacle as a systemic challenge to individual subjectivity. Arguably, contemporary art’s increasing sleeplessness and its contradictory implications compel a kind of ‘activation’ that affirms rather than resists the global market.
© Intellect