Through the works of some twenty artists from various countries and generations, along with a group of scientists, the show titled “Économie de la tension” (Tension Economy) aims to explore in what ways these practices take a stance on current issues.

The title of the show reappropriates the notion of the “attention economy” recently analyzed by the researcher Yves Citton in Pour une écologie de l’attention and L’Économie de l’attention. Nouvel horizon du capitalisme? (2014) According to this theory, in a world in which there is an overabundance of information, our attention regimes are henceforth characterized by intellectual availability as a scarce resource – at the risk of transforming minds into commodi ed capital. Far from being something recent, the observed phenomenon has only expanded with the Industrial Age, gradually becoming hegemonic with technological advances at a time when digital networks are widespread. It concerns such diverse spheres as the economy, advertising, the media, education, research, and culture, by focusing in a biased
way on a limited set of parameters and an obsession with the quantity rather than the quality of attention. “More broadly, each time an evaluation process is set up (of government services, hospitals, schools, etc.), that process contributes to actively producing the values it claims to be content to objectively observe, creating recursive loops that overwhelm our compasses.”¹

What is art’s position with respect to this “attention race,” and what are artists’ role and degree of involvement in society?

In France, with the spring of 2016 we see a desire to reappropriate public affairs. Rede ning the participatory character of a democracy, this new awareness goes beyond the formal framework of traditional social movements. It takes shape notably around the popular protest movement known as “Nuit debout” (Up at Night), which has opened a new type of space for debates and proposals. The mistrust there of the mass media gives voice to a desire to renegotiate the eld of attention in the space of media, rethink the tools for analyzing society, and even create new ones that re ect a plurality of viewpoints.

It is interesting to compare this new societal desire with those in the eld of art. Not inaccurately a recent article entitled “Il se passe quelque chose… (sauf dans la culture)” ² critiques the super cial commitment of and comfortable distance that is maintained by the art world in general and its institutions in particular—commitment and distance being given voice in statements that remain empty rhetoric.