April 2, 2008
Artspeak
On his blog, Time magazine critic Richard Lacayo bemoans the state of curatorial writing about visual art:
Why is so much curatorial writing so dreadful? Why is it so clogged with the decrepit formulations of academic artspeak? Why does so much of it sound like it was written by an anxious schoolkid delivering a labored term paper?
My first assumption is that there's a generation of curators who went to college and grad school in the 1980s and '90s, when the congested language of Deconstruction, Critical Studies and so on still seemed important, intrepid and even a little glamorous. I get the impression that even if a budding art writer wasn't commited to those lines of inquiry, the turgid writing those produced infected the academy in all directions.
But the industrial-strength bad writing so common now in the artworld is also, I suspect, a defense against anxiety by curators and catalogue writers afraid simply to say out loud and in plain English what they suppose the work might be getting at
Click through to read the rest, including the five words Lacayo would ban from museum catalogues.