A User's Guide to Art Speak

Photo from Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

At The Guardian Andy Beckett discusses "art speak" -- something that's now been dubbed "International Art English" in a widely circulated article by an artist and an art critic. Mr. Beckett describes it:

If you've been to see contemporary art in the last three decades, you will probably be familiar with the feelings of bafflement, exhaustion or irritation that such gallery prose provokes. You may well have got used to ignoring it. As Polly Staple, art writer and director of the Chisenhale Gallery in London, puts it: "There are so many people who come to our shows who don't even look at the programme sheet. They don't want to look at any writing about art."

With its pompous paradoxes and its plagues of adverbs, its endless sentences and its strained rebellious poses, much of this promotional writing serves mainly, it seems, as ammunition for those who still insist contemporary art is a fraud. Surely no one sensible takes this jargon seriously?

David Levine and Alix Rule do. ...

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They christened it International Art English, or IAE, and concluded that its purest form was the gallery press release, which – in today's increasingly globalised, internet-widened art world – has a greater audience than ever. "We spent hours just printing them out and reading them to each other," says Levine. "We'd find some super-outrageous sentence and crack up about it. Then we'd try to understand the reality conveyed by that sentence."

"International Art English" is a great neologism. IAE is the patois of the ignorant attempting to describe the ineffable.

I am so happy with that last sentence, I should stop. But ...

I can't stop though, because I used to subscribe to Art Forum and my brain still hasn't recovered.  The point being, the spread of International Art English extends beyond the gallery wall. It is more than  the bibble-babble of artists who often aren't used to using English in the first place and curators whose careers depend on not actually having anything to say. There's a market for this stuff.

Which should lead us -- well, leads me, anyway -- to ask "how is this possible?" Is it that people are actually elevated through incomprehensibility? Is it an educational failure in which scholasticism trumps understanding, where words are something more akin to talismans for feeling than tools for expression? The idea here (but it is only speculation) is that when the ignorant advance they are more likely to favor the work of others who are ignorant than those who are not.

Of course, it may be just the failure of readers to understand what is written. Difficult thoughts -- and expressing why one created a work of art or what it's supposed to mean can call for difficult thoughts -- require investment from the reader to be understood. Having read many gallery blurbs and Art Forum reviews, however, I tend to think usually it is the thinking of the blurber or reviewer that is lacking. that seems to be Levine's and Rule's experience, too, as quoted above.

Of course, it may also be that this is just part of the "artistic frame of mind." No doubt there is artistic, aesthetic delight in the irrational, and that's great. But blurbs and reviews are rarely intended as part of a work of art; they're explanations or descriptions for it. I'm not even sure why that's necessary. The work of art, most often, should speak for itself.