How to Read “Artspeak”

Ever read a piece of writing about contemporary art and felt even more confused by the end than when you started? Writing about contemporary art can be notoriously difficult for the everyday person - and even artists - to understand. About ten years ago, Alix Rule and David Levine published an article labeling this phenomenon “International Art English” (you can also watch a very short video introducing it here).

While the article’s tone is a bit satirical, the authors make good points about the density of current art writing and its tendency to adopt (and even invent) complex, incoherent vocabulary. To summarize some specific examples, Rule and Levine write that International Art English (IAE) often uses words like “radically,” “interrogate,” “subvert,” “transversal,” “autonomy,” “interstitial,” “embodied,” and “dialectic,” to name just a few. Prefixes like “para-,” “post-,” and “hyper-” and suffixes such as “-ity,” “-ality,” and “-ization” are also common. For instance, IAE adds some of these suffixes to adjectives in order to make them nouns: visual becomes “visuality,” global becomes “globality,” and potential becomes “potentiality,” none of which are actually real nouns in English.

Below are a few resources to clarify some of these “Artspeak” terms when you come across them. Using the dictionary, or dictionary.com, is also a great strategy for a quick approximation of a word’s meaning if it’s unfamiliar to you.

Resources on art and rhetoric vocabulary:

• MoMA’s Glossary of Art Terms
• The Tate’s Online Glossary of Art Terms
• A Brief Glossary of Rhetorical Terms

How to Write About Art

Just because a lot of contemporary art writing tends to be confusing and dense doesn’t mean that yours has to be. In fact, if you want your writing to convey a clear message to as wide an audience as possible, it shouldn’t be. A good rule of thumb is to imagine a family member or friend reading your writing: if there’s a word, phrase, or sentence you don’t think they’d understand, you probably need to simplify. And simple, clear, and concise writing doesn’t have to be inelegant.

Resources in the CCA Library on art writing:

• How to Write About Contemporary Art by Gilda Williams
• A Short Guide to Writing About Art by Sylvan Barnet
• Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content by Ann Handley
• A Writer’s Reference by Diana Hacker

Resources on college-level essay writing:

• Student's Guide to Writing College Papers by Kate L. Turabian; revised by Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, Joseph Bizup, William T. Fitzgerald, and the University of Chicago Press editorial staff
• LRC Guide to Basic Essay Structure
• The Purdue Owl: Online writing lab with information about writing style, process, citations, formatting, mechanics, grammar, and much more
• Grammarly blog: easy to read articles about grammar and writing. Pro tip: if you're looking for a specific topic (for example, thesis statements), just Google search "Grammarly + thesis statements"