MCSI Lecture Series Presents: Joanna Fiduccia

Lecture: "The Artwork and the Grounds of Attention"

Artworks enjoy a privileged status in scholarship and popular writing about attention, often justified by their perceived ability to hold together two ideals of attention. On one hand, art seems purpose-built for sustained contemplation; on the other, it appears like a congelation of the artist’s immersive and unified attention. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, some artists and art historians sought out different models, responding to modern assaults on attention by turning away from its intensive, self-reliant, and conventionally masculinized modes, and toward a set of (back)ground concerns. Might these models continue to offer alternative figures for the subject of attention today?

Joanna Fiduccia is Assistant Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. Her first book, Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism, will be published in spring 2026. She is currently working on a study of the evolving relationship between political sovereignty and automatism.