Artspeak: Necessity, Deception or Perception?

Artspeak is the term used for writing about art that is particularly jargon-ridden, turgid, complex, and obscure. The fact that it is a new and made-up term suggests a level of animosity or derision. But is all of this antagonism warranted? Where did the need to write about art in this way come from? I will try to answer these questions.

“Artspeak" is a term that has entered into our language for the myriad turns of phrases, expressions, buzz-words, and indulgences that are used to write and talk about art. Artspeak comes in for a pretty aggressive assault for some understandable reasons, but there are also structural reasons for it. These reasons are sorely lacking in the various diatribes against Artspeak (let’s leave it capitalised). I want to unpack some of these reasons in what follows.

Suppose you are someone interested in art at any level. In that case, you will at some point in your life have come across Artspeak, a seemingly impenetrable wall of clumsy-clever, perplexing words that only make the artwork they are supposedly meant to serve to seem more obscure.

It understandably raises hackles. Why are these people so arrogant? So presumptuous? You think back maybe to a movie you saw and the parody of the art of literary critic who has nothing to say but bamboozles everyone, or almost everyone with his bullshit. No-one likes being made to look like a fool.

There's a lot of bad writing, and you're right. There's a lot of obscure rant and nonsense circulating art for hundreds of years since art criticism became a widespread profession in the nineteenth century. It's as if the art world has become a self-serving enclave protecting its own. Is it a conspiracy, and is there something that needs hiding? Can bad art be successfully clothed in such overly elaborate language to make it sound good? Or the opposite: can good art be brought down by language so flowery it is repellent?

And yet:

98% of Australians engage with the arts, and more people recognise the positive impacts of the arts.

With more and more surveys such as those conducted by the Australian Art Council of the Arts tell of high levels of general public interest in the contemporary visual arts — why aren't contemporary art galleries adapting their language, in recognition of their widening (and more culturally diverse) audiences?

This is a good question and regularly leveled at the art world in general, which has to do with accessibility, which is the subject of another discussion in its own right.

When we turn to write about art and the many abuses and liberties that those ostensibly in the know indulge in, there are a few things to know.

The first is that, as in any profession, the art world has its buffoons and abusers. Maybe they are not as caught out as other professions. I'm not sure about that, as the many editors I know (including myself) are careful about clear prose. The second is that art and the art world is the zone of choice for parodies and poo-pooers.

I'd submit that there needs to be an area of inference for writing about art on par with difficult and good artwork. That is, that you need to spend time with it, and its job may not always for you to get it immediately. Maybe not all writing is about getting it for the first time.

There is more to good prose, after all than writing on the back of a chip packet. James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf may not be so widely read these days, partly because they are challenging, but that doesn't diminish their status as some of the greatest writers in their language, or any language.

Similarly, there are critics such as Peter Schjeldahl, who are such brilliant writers that I read him for him more than the subjects he writes about. The late great poet John Ashbery was also an accomplished art critic. His poems were subtle, and he brought that subtlety and finesse to his criticism.

There are two sides to the debate: one is that art writing takes too many liberties, needs to pull up its socks and calm down a bit, show a bit of humility. The other is that to subject it to laws of clarity and simplicity is too reductive, is ignorant of many generations of literature, and presumes that all writing should and can be clear. (And what is apparent to one may not be clear to another—clarity seems like a universal, but it isn't.)

Mick Jagger as Cassidy in “The Burnt Orange Heresy.”Credit...Jose Haro/Sony Pictures Classics. Via Associated Press

In order to introduce these two sides and some of the nuance that underpins it, the best thing to do is to delve into a recent movie. Bear with me, as it is worth fleshing out the greater part of the story. (I noted that the film received a little better than lukewarm reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but I firmly believed that many people might have missed the point—a little like a lot of artworks and art writing, I suppose.) If you don’t want to read it through, I’ve indented the part you can skim or leave out.

The Burnt Orange Heresy (2019) is a film about an art critic (Claes Bang) who has been invited by a prominent art dealer (Mick Jagger) to spend time on his salubrious estate on Lake Como, to try to interview an artist whom he hosts as a resident on his estate. The artist, Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland), is an elusive and reclusive type, who maintains a mystical allure over the art world, partly because most of his early work was consumed in a fire. 

His notoriety is based on little at all; he is an improbable character that is convincing enough within the film as a model of the kinds of elaborate deceptions that the art world likes to weave around artists and art. The critic, James Figueras, is an unscrupulous and wily character: in his early days in art school, he was quickly spotted by his art professor as better able to talk about art than make it. 

The proposal the art dealer, Joseph Cassidy, lays before James is that he obtains a painting for him. In return, James will not only have an interview that will give international attention, but he will have restored a reputation tarnished by embezzlement, that would, with Cassidy’s support, secure him a directorship in a major museum. James invites a recent love interest, the smouldering Berenice Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki), to accompany him to Cassidy’s villa, who succeeds in captivating the venerable painter. 

They had met during the film's opening scene, which is of James giving a lecture to launch his latest book, where James tells a story about a painting on a slide behind him, unpacking the various meanings and symbologies behind it. In the end, he reveals that the harrowing tale of love, Holocaust trauma, death, and loss was, for the most part, a lie, and yet the audience should still have trust in his powers of persuasion. 

The ploy was made easier because the painting was non-objective or abstract: he could easily assign meanings to different passages in it, such as one brushstroke that petered out being the touching symbol of an expiring soul. 

When James and Berenice are finally invited into Debney’s studio, they find a room full of empty canvases. On the easel, too, sits a virgin canvas (as it is called) sitting, brilliant white, on a pristine, unspattered easel. Improbably but amusingly again, Debney explains that he does paint, but it is all about him going through the motions but with no visible end product. 

To consummate the ritual, he gives each “work” a title with his initials, which he inscribes on the back. The eponymous Burnt Orange Heresy turns out to be the title on one of these canvases. Debney explains that this is his response to the endless obfuscation of the art world. His refusal to make anything visible is his defense, or defiance, in response to the narcissism and corruption of those who profess to love and transact art. 

As the film begins to approach its climax, James suspects Berenice of spying on Cassidy's behalf. In a rash decision to which we suspect he is periodically prone, he breaks into the studio, steals the canvas along with some paint and brushes, then uses the solvents used to thin the paint of clean the brushes to set the studio alight, with the suggestion that Debney caused it as he may have caused the earlier one. James then seizes the opportunity to paint his own Burnt Orange Heresy, an abstract morass of deep oranges canvas. Berenice sees the work and touches the wet paint, and protests at his actions, which cause James to dispatch her into the waters of Lake Como. 

The next scene is at the grand opening in Cassidy's gallery, where Cassidy says in insinuating terms that he knows he had killed her. Then an art journalist introduces herself in floods of praise then brings him to notice a fingerprint (Berenice's) left preserved on the painting's surface. I needn't spoil the ending.

Ironically, or out of some casting symmetry, Bang came to international acclaim in his lead role in the Danish film, The Square, a biting parody of artworld abuses, which won the Golden Palm at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Bang plays a museum director who is equally sleazy and unscrupulous, who falls afoul of his own self-serving stupidities. The film is worth seeing as it is one of those singular cases where the parody is devilishly close actuality, too close. Sadly, there are far fewer museum directors who achieve the comeuppance that is more than their due.

The reason why it is worth giving such a relatively long synopsis is because of the extent to which art is used as a point of intersection, or a vehicle, for a set of mounting deceptions that are verbal, interpersonal, professional, economic, and systemic—and all operative in the world, or worlds, of art.

In short, this film shows how deceptive art and the world of art is—and how people are inclined to benefit from it.

It also helps to encapsulate something beyond the sole topic of verbose and opaque language in art, toward the kinds of deceptions that can be woven, in the plainest of English, around works of art. I have always loved and have repeatedly referred to the quip that Nelson Rockefeller made over his collection of Abstract Expressionist painting: "The thing I like about abstract art is it can mean anything I want it to mean."

Make no mistake, like the fictitious James Figueras of the film, eloquently observers—critics, novelists, journeymen journalists—are pressed into the service of galleries and dealers to validate works of art. This goes beyond blanket praise. It has more to do with harnessing narratives to artists and their work to make them sympathetic, nay, magnetic. Just as clichés are clichés because they are mostly accurate, myths remain tenacious because they are seductive and useful.

But at the same time, it is irrational and simplistic to dwell on conspiracy theories. Charlatans and snake-oil salespeople do not entirely drive the art world. There are many fine minds at work trying to grapple with what art is, what good art is, and how to communicate that to a willing audience.

So let's assume you are in a position of one who believes in the values of art and wants to do his or her level best to convey what is compelling and valuable about it. What are some of the difficulties that a genuine critic or commentator faces?

To begin with, art is fundamentally abstract. It is indirect, whether it describes an event, represents a series of identifiable objects, or is entirely without these objects, and is a combination of colours, shapes, and textures. It is not for nothing that pre-modern art was used as the vehicle for expressing gods and divinities, or later, courtly grandeur—it expressed all that is beyond words and our knowing.

The next point is that art suggests before it states, and whatever it states leads back to suggestion. When art begins to divest itself of the burden of religion and moves toward secular subject matter, it inevitably turned inward: this is the substance of the Romantic soul. Art was how to try to make sense of the incomprehensibility of existence. “If there’s no God, and I am finite, then what is there?” becomes the irrepressible refrain.

It was in the rise of Romanticism that the various arts were rearranged in their priorities. Music, which had traditionally been at the bottom of the hierarchy table of the arts, was, in the early nineteenth century, abruptly raised to the highest seat.

This was because there had been a relatively abrupt shift in the perception of values away from a prescriptive outside (God) toward the individual subject, which meant that indeterminacy had become internalised, and with that came an increased importance in personal expression. Music was elevated because it was comprehensible (you got it) but at the same time unexplainable (can you explain a Beethoven symphony?). Art, visual art, tended in this direction. “Musicality in painting” was a known refrain in the French avant-garde in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This is so important for understanding the issue of Artspeak because of an uncanny coevolution that I hope to put crudely: just as art criticism gained currency and popularity, art was becoming increasingly more abstract and resistant to definition. How much can you say about one of Monet's paintings of haystacks? Not much before you feel you are lapsing into incoherence.

What you can do is discuss the various historical circumstances, but as for the painting itself, you run against a brick wall. This was the intention, of course: artists wanted to reach toward an untainted, striking visuality. Yet Monet, to continue with the example, was good friends with two prominent art critics Octave Mirbeau and Gustave Geffroy (they were also writers in their own right several literary strings to their bows), who not only defended him but in their writing gave him ideas of what to do next. Because you could only go so far with the picture "itself", Mirbeau and Geffroy would often compose mini-meditations, like prose poems on the pictures. They took the reader by the hand on a visual-poetic journey. And if the writer was skilled enough, readers happen to go on the ride.

But if you want to look at this in another way, the critic actively engaged in a deception, much as film character James Figueras had done, to sweep up his audience and give them a more wholesome and actively imaginative experience.

I can hear you say: "But that is what any good art critic does, we're talking about the bad ones who hide behind a wall of verbiage and jargon that makes me want to cry!" Well, yes, but the line between the two is narrow, to the point of marginal. While there has to be some belief that the critic is writing in good faith and with some orientation to the best of the facts, he or she is still embellishing and reaching subjective conclusions.

This means that there is always a danger to lapse into highfalutin language when grasping at straws as to what to say. Although art criticism technically began in the middle of the eighteenth century, it only became something of a profession unto itself around a hundred years later. Since then, as is standard with specialist disciplines, it has built up its own protocols—conflicting and varied as they are—and its own language.

A recent controversial text about the uses and abuses of art criticism appeared in Triple Canopy in 2012 by Alix Rule and David Levine in which they railed against what they called “International Art English”, now referred to as IAE. It had to happen sooner or later, and in this case, later rather than sooner.

Since then, “IAE” is now a (somewhat) commonly circulated abbreviation for flowery and opaque writing about art. The implication is that writing about art is a safe-haven for the indulgent. Such criticisms are generally of the poo-poo variety of commentary, however, a style of which I am inveterately suspicious, as it shifts dangerously into a Tea-Party mentality of sorts.

I always tend to defer to the philosopher Nietzsche who was pathologically suspicious of pat descriptions and over-simplistic formulas for thinking as they lead to a slavish adherence to a truth that isn’t there. Many people gravitate to over-simplistic explanations because they are easy to follow and give immediate comfort. Ambiguity can lead to anxiety.

Enough of that. Predictably, Rule and Levine refer to one of the great upholders of clear prose, George Orwell. Orwell is a writer that anyone literate should turn to periodically. His essay, "Politics and the English Language", reads as fresh and relevant as when it was written in 1946 to stamp out “ugly and inaccurate” English.

In dedication and devotions to the guardians of good prose, it is worth pausing to read several sayings that warn against unnecessary obscurity.

For example, Albert Einstein is worth consulting: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough." The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.”

And:

“Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.”

I like the last one best, as it warns against being simple at all costs. It allows for leverage and the powers of mystery and complexity. Not Everything ought to be reduced or reducible to straight facts or straightforward thinking. No-one knew that better than Einstein.

Now to a few of Orwell’s rules and aphorisms that should be in your back pocket. Most if not all of these statements are not unique to him, but he is significant for bringing them together with passion and vigour:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or another speech figure that you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

The malaise of Artspeak as we know it had already begun in the 1980s, which when artists and art writers came under the spell of French theory and started to write in a particular style, some of it inherited from Surrealist poetics, another part based on translators who were not overly vigilant about being verbose. It was not uncommon for reviews, catalogue essays, and other art blurbs to refer to philosophy, old and new until in-house terms became more of the norm.

Again, it was all about difficulty, but now the difficulty describing an art object was mirrored by the problem inherent to the text itself. Your struggle in the face of the artwork was matched in the battle in trying to disengage clarity from the explanations that accompanied it.

The 1980s also witnessed the art market surge to limits not seen before. Since then, art has always been a recourse to large investors when financial markets are precarious or fail. With it came a lot of swagger on many writers enlisted to sell works of art. Let us return to the film described above: the art market is also flooded with fakes, and words if they are convincing either in what they say, or just as a performance of erudition, are excellent ways of moving all that fool’s gold.

All of this is not to make excuses, but maybe to give a deeper understanding of Artspeak's evolution and reasons, and maybe to excuse it if it is not so over-the-top. Countless op-eds have been written offering broadsides on the abuses of language that some art writers will perpetrate, the level of indulgence they crave of their audience, and also the extent to which they prefer to intimidate than coax, engage in personal posturing instead of acting in the humble service of explicating and unpacking works of art.

Yes, but I believe that there are now enough examples out there to partake in some summary eye-rolling and head-shaking. But what discipline does not have its verbal Casanovas? History, philosophy, sociology, and its off-shoot, cultural studies, all have their skanks.

Agreed, we dislike being made to feel stupid. But after we have all had a chortle and have picked ourselves up, we might also entertain a little humility. Because after the 1980s, and most likely with the introduction of global discursive environments which are all about accessibility and user-friendliness, and serviceability for the sake of the quick-read, writing on art, and much other reflective writing requiring analysis and expertise has gone in the opposite direction.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz emphasises the “KISS” principle: “Keep It Simple Stupid”. I am willing to defer to Saltz on a good number of things, and I agree with him in principle. But I am also worried that this suggestion is taken as a rule, as a universal. This would then discount a whole side of literature—including art criticism—that is nuanced, sophisticated, and difficult but where the attention and effort are worth it in the end.

While I find screeds, verbal gumpf, and ideological diatribes tedious, and while I believe there is a certain moral cowardice in hiding behind jargon, there must also be an admission that there are specialist languages with their own special configurations and histories. We don't decry legalese or scientific writing: it is dense and dry because of the job it needs to do. This may be an inept comparison since if you are reading this, you are nonetheless disinclined to immerse yourself in scientific papers for the sake of enlightenment or pleasure.

But the examples, tenuous as they are, serve to suggest that we might also take a few steps back and ask whether that we can admire erudition and that we have the confidence in ourselves to admit that there might be more we need to know about words and ways of writing.

This is not a defense of all that is most ugly in Artspeak. It is an effort to put another spotlight on the reader and a reason of the possibility that a text may be difficult when dealing with subtle and challenging ideas, and that, with attentiveness and good faith, we might all have something to learn from challenges that might at first seem unsettling, and, with effort, might, in the end, come up with unforeseen rewards.

After all, we can't but admire James's success in getting an audience to believe in a masterpiece that he had painted after he had written the account about it. What comes first, the chicken or the egg?

My recommendation is not to be satisfied with simplicity or the poo-pooers. Go to a creditable art magazine (I'm not going to suggest an American one immediately, although Art in America is an excellent place to start). And find an article that you find challenging and set out slowly to deciphering it with a dictionary and a thesaurus. You may find that your simpler version is more effective, or…you might find that the poetry and the wordplay have introduced you to a more fantastic realm of awareness. 

The problem has to do with the fact that most of us have been fed a steady diet of marketing buzz. Nuance is not preferred because it gets in the way of the pitch.

I think we need to be aware there is more than one kind of reading experience. Let's take it out of the realms of art into exercise. Hopefully, most of us will find it easy to run on the spot for thirty seconds or casually swim a lap of a pool. It is a different kind of exercise experience to do some hard yoga or to swim twenty laps or more. These are choices that also come with their own rewards.

I am convinced that we, therefore, need to be attentive to different kinds of writing, new words, new phrases, and so on. Being patient and making an extra effort can yield some surprises. Take the time, if you can. At least then you can really poo-poo because you made an effort.

It doesn’t always work (the success rate is about 50/50). Still, I am committed to widening and ever-widening frontiers because I'm terrified of being bored, and to have strict rules on any kind of approach, be it making art, writing, or anything else, leads down the same path, and that would be horrifying.

Because uniformity in art is horrifying. I’d like to be so presumptuous as to echo Einetsien’s last note of open-endedness and ambiguity.

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A few links to the underbelly of all of this:

1. A user's guide to Artspeak - https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide-international-art-english

2. Decoding Artspeak: Figure and Ground - https://www.artsy.net/article/editorial-decoding-artspeak-figure-and-ground

3. This New Algorithm Writes Perfect "Artspeak” - https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-new-algorithm-writes-perfect-artspeak