Tuesday, 30 June 2015

On pompous franglais 'art speak' so as to appear an informed, authoritative expert


Work about this type of misuse of English has been dealt with here -
http://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_art_english


International Art English
by Alix Rule & David Levine
On the rise—and the space—of the art-world press release.

“International Art English” was produced by Triple Canopy as part of its Research Work project area, supported in part by the Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Of this English upper-middle class speech we may note (a) that it is not localised in any one place, (b) that though the people who use this speech are not all acquainted with one another, they can easily recognise each other’s status by this index alone, (c) that this elite speech form tends to be imitated by those who are not of the elite, so that other dialect forms are gradually eliminated, (d) that the elite, recognising this imitation, is constantly creating new linguistic elaborations to mark itself off from the common herd.

—E. R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure, 1954

I work, intentionally, in the painting genre of the Western Discourse or tradition of Visual Art.If I wished to express myself verbally I would have done that by writing poetry, literature, philosophy,
etc.
Please never attempt to re-express my visual work in terms of words, especially of the art speak variety. That bizarre way of verbal expression employed in the English speaking world since roughly the 1960's, a kind of franglais obtained from French and German. One finds this in other disciplines as well, for example 'sociology' and 'philosophy', especially when the authors are influenced by work from France and Germany (such as the Frankfurt Schule). An example of this appalling way of writing, using franglais and neologisms, so as to appear educated, informed and an expert is that of Strydom, Piet in his books on 'sociology?'.

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