before i lose my style

towerofsleep:

“The question is: How did we end up writing in a way that sounds like inexpertly translated French?””

—

Alix Rule and David Levine’s expose of the rise—and the space—of the art-world press release: “International Art English,” in Triple Canopy issue 16. 

The internationalized art world relies on a unique language. Its purest articulation is found in the digital press release. This language has everything to do with English, but it is emphatically not English. It is largely an export of the Anglophone world and can thank the global dominance of English for its current reach. But what really matters for this language—what ultimately makes it a language—is the pointed distance from English that it has always cultivated.

In what follows, we examine some of the curious lexical, grammatical, and stylistic features of what we call International Art English. We consider IAE’s origins, and speculate about the future of this language through which contemporary art is created, promoted, sold, and understood. Some will read our argument as an overelaborate joke. But there’s nothing funny about this language to its users. And the scale of its use testifies to the stakes involved. We are quite serious.

There’s something almost pornographically satisfying about seeing rigorous data analysis applied to a situation that everybody knows to be true: art writing is the worst. It constantly performs the most absurd obfuscations, redundancies, and solecisms. And yet we keep perpetuating exactly the same kinds of linguistic constructions! Against all my better instincts, when I sit down to write about art, IAE springs, unbidden, onto the page. What this wonderful research (real research!) shows us is the exact, painfully recognizable forms of this language abuse. Extra frisson is provided for me by the fact that I have actually read many of the cited press releases and essays and am familiar with the writers and curators who penned them. One example that’s taken to task here is actually from a Toronto exhibition that was used as a model text by a classmate of mine in a seminar on practical curating!