The Art of Talking Art

I find much of the conceptual, pseudointellectual work at Aperture very annoying. It reminds me of the Emperor With No Clothes. Much of it is second rate photography, at best, and cannot stand on its own merits, hence the futile attempts to legitimize it with nearly incomprehensible, or more properly nonsensical, language. If it's truly good, the photograph speaks for itself. It doesn't require three or four paragraphs of four and five syllable words to induce vertigo to the point that ones vision begins to blur until the photograph starts looking better.

Or maybe I'm just ignorant. Perhaps both. I suppose Andy is right. I should just ignore it and move on.
 
Jamie123 said:
While I agree that there's certainly a lot of BS in the art world and a lot of crap being sold I strongly disagree that there's something wrong with, let's call it 'academic art' and art speak per se.

I'm pretty annoyed by this popular notion that art is bad because it requires a certain degree of academic knowledge. Lots of things worth appreciating require a certain degree of knowledge in a specific field. This goes for wine, whiskey, even rangefinder cameras, so why should it be any different for art? Some art is an acquired taste but that doesn't mean it's not good. Just as an example, I think Jeff Wall's work requires quite a bit of knowledge in order to be really appreciated and I think his work is excellent.
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Dear Jamie,

Well, I know quite a bit about whisky and rangefinder cameras, and a modest amount about wine and art, and the point with ALL of them is that 'academic knowledge' is precisely what you don't need. No-one ever acquired a taste for (let us say) Laphroaig, Leicas or Lange from reading about them, especially from reading impenetrable treatises.

If someone cannot explain themselves in plain English (or even plain French or German), then they probably have very little to say and are concealing this in sesquipedalian verbiage. Alternatively, they may not be talking about their purported subject at all, but rather, are talking about hermeneutics and semiotics under the guise of that subject, often because they know a lot more about hermeneutics and semiotics (even though they know little enough about either) than they do about the subject in hand. Sontag springs to mind.

Cheers,

R.
 
Roger Hicks said:
If someone cannot explain themselves in plain English (or even plain French or German), then they probably have very little to say and are concealing this in sesquipedalian verbiage. Alternatively, they may not be talking about their purported subject at all, but rather, are talking about hermeneutics and semiotics under the guise of that subject, often because they know a lot more about hermeneutics and semiotics (even though they know little enough about either) than they do about the subject in hand. Sontag springs to mind.

Cheers,

R.
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Exactly! That's why I threw my copy of Sontag's On Photography in the trash bin after suffering through the first two thirds of it, something I seldom do, being a bibliophile.
 
bmattock said:
The problem is that 80% of the language of critique is a fraud and a humbug.
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I completely agree, but in the catalogue it may be better to put

“Exploring the contention that an overwhelming substantiation exists for the acceptance of reasoned expressional analysis being an illusory deception concealing a hypocritical confection”

it helps take peoples mind off the dull pictures
 
I think about it this way. Art critics and gallery owners and those who write about art must say something. There is always a desire to differentiate themselves from all of their compatriots and competitors. One does not wish to be the magazine editor who simply grunted "Nice photos. I like 'em," even if that is how one actually feels. Likewise, one does not wish to be the critic who says "I didn't get the artists point at all, but perhaps I'm just not clever enough to understand him."

I can also imagine phone conversations like this:

Critic A: Hey, Bob. I went to see the Blargleberry installation at High-Falutin' Art Joint yesterday. Have you seen it yet?

Critic B: Hey Joe. Yeah, I saw it. Brilliant work. The guy's really got it going on.

[Now, as it turns out, A went to the gallery and was utterly mystified by the crap he saw insulting the walls of High-Falutin' Art Joint, but he's cautious because he doesn't want to seem stupid to his peers. B never went to the gallery at all, but doesn't want A to know that, so he just gives random praise as if he had gone and been impressed.]

Critic A: So...you think he transcends boundaries?

Critic B: Oh, definitely. He's daring the public to engage with him and examine the inner life of [at this point he's googling for Blargleberry to figure out what kind of photos he takes] inner-city insects and candy wrappers.

Critic A: Yes, that's it, exactly! He's deliberately behaving as if he didn't really understand insects and as if candy wrappers ought properly be thrown on the ground instead of disposed of properly, and asking the audience to correct him by exhibiting outrage. Genius!

Critic B: Joe, you really have a handle on his work. [consulting google some more] I happen to know he grew up in the Adirondacks, and had never seen a candy wrapper until he came to New York. So this is truly Outsider Art, he's looking at the base of the city with New Eyes and telling us what we already knew, but from a perspective not generally seen or examined in detail.

Critic A: [scribbling furiously on a pad of paper whilst talking] Absolutely! His genius is primitive and untrained, which makes it all the more powerful. He's got the pulse of the city, and by ironically referencing the insects, he shows us not only the omnipresent in our society, but actually comparing the denizens of New York to insects in the sense of how we scurry to and fro, always busy, always productive, but our machinations are incomprehensible to the world outside New York. What a keen grasp of the ironic, what a deep dive into what makes us, us. The man is going to do Great Things, I'm sure.

Critic B: No doubt! Well, he will if you write that about him, anyway. I think I'm going to toss a few nasty asides in my next piece on him, hoping he'll catch them and call me on the phone and tear into me. I really love the guy, but controversy sells newspapers, eh?

Critic A: You are the man, Bob.
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At this point, both men turn to the task of writing precisely 500 words on the towing genius that is Blargleberry. Within days, he's the toast of the town, within weeks he is snorting detergent and plooking groupies like a rock star.

I'd write a screenplay about it, but it's been done.

By the way, a good movie on this subject is called "Pecker" for the newbies in the group who have not yet seen it.
 
George9 said:
I can't understand the anti-art/anti education theme running through this thread.😕
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Dear George,

Funny, I had the impression that most of us are pro-art and pro-education; just anti-obscurantist, and are underwhelmed by art that needs to be propped up by pseudo-intellectual discourse.

Of course a lot of perfectly good art, with no need of being propped up, is also set about with pseudo-intellectual discourse. Most of us are against that too.

Cheers,

R.
 
Andy Kibber said:
It's kind of embarrassing how worked up people get about this sort of thing.
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What is also embarassing is the curmudgeony old man attitude here that some how art critics/writers and curators are imbeciles who despite probably 3-4 years of university education cannot form an educated opinion about that which they study.

It is a different ball game certainly but to deride something as vapid and without any merit simply because one doesn't apreciate the end result is... well, childish.
 
emraphoto said:
What is also embarassing is the curmudgeony old man attitude here that some how art critics/writers and curators are imbeciles who despite probably 3-4 years of university education cannot form an educated opinion about that which they study.

It is a different ball game certainly but to deride something as vapid and without any merit simply because one doesn't apreciate the end result is... well, childish.
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Not all of them.

But equally, 'probably 3-4 years of university education' does not automatically equip anyone for anything. Plenty of dunderheads graduate, especially in intellectually undemanding fields.

There's also a difference between forming an educated opinion, and being able to express it clearly. What most of us are deriding as 'vapid and without any merit' is the writing, not the art.

This is not a new argument. I take it you've read Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word (1975, reissued by Picador in 2008).

Cheers,

R.
 
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emraphoto said:
What is also embarassing is the curmudgeony old man attitude here that some how art critics/writers and curators are imbeciles who despite probably 3-4 years of university education cannot form an educated opinion about that which they study.

It is a different ball game certainly but to deride something as vapid and without any merit simply because one doesn't apreciate the end result is... well, childish.
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It was a child who dared to state what everyone else knew but dared not state; that the Emperor had no clothes.
 
Roger Hicks said:
Not all of them.

But equally, 'probably 3-4 years of university education' does not automatically equip anyone for anything. Plenty of dunderheads graduate, especially in intellectually undemanding fields.

There's also a difference between forming an educated opinion, and being able to express it clearly. What most of us are deriding as 'vapid and without any merit' is the writing, not the art.

This is not a new argument. I take it you've read Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word (1975, reissued by Picador in 2008).

Cheers,

R.
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well Roger you are preaching to the choir when it comes to dunderhead graduates.

Of course, to the bewilderment of many, 3-4 years of education doe not gain one entry to a higher caste. I don't believe that was my point.

I have not read The Painted World and with the amount of reading I currently face I would be most appreciative of a synopsis.
 
My daughter is doing Art and Art History at A level at the moment so we have been “doing the galleries” a lot this year.

At one time, this sort of obfuscation was confined to the pretentious places that were just talking the price up a bit, but now it’s getting everywhere, and is becoming a real barrier to learning and understanding the art itself.

Now that’s fine for an old foggy like me I know what I’m looking at, I just find it amusing.

However my daughter has a real difficulty, and the very people who should be making the art accessible and understandable to her are instead hiding it behind this bizarre high class slang
 
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Of course, and this is especially true of post-modernism, you can always apply the old adage: if it smells like bs, it probably IS bs...
 
Somehow, discussions of art and scatological matters frequently intersect...

(Trying to remember the writer [Dickinson? Nah...] who said that everyone secretly likes the smell of their own...well, you know...)


- Barrett
 
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