Sleepless nights: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Performance

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.