This project, which I am working on with Tim van Laar, examines the function of distraction in art, looking at works which disperse our attention rather than focus it. We argue that art’s moment of distraction is important: the distracting moment begins with dissatisfaction, with a feeling that something is wrong, a feeling which structures the entire distracted experience. Its radical rupture marks and begins a non-teleological experience—confused, restless, lacking cause and effect, arbitrary, directionless—but an experience that has its own consequent value, valuable precisely because of its confusion, and because of its banality. Distracting works have a profoundly unstable epistemological/ontological status, a status that need not be resolved.
An artwork’s distraction-induced meaning has a seriousness, an importance at odds with distraction’s usually-demeaned social function. Distraction, we argue, is an aesthetic category, an interpretive frame: it has features and affects, is amenable to theoretical description, and can be distinguished from other aesthetic categories.