Art speak

Artists are often a serious bunch and we use words and catch phrases that hover around us to reflect our serious nature. Sometimes they are just normal words that take on abnormal traits when coming from the mouth of an artist. Sometimes they really are abnormal words to begin with. These are the words and phrases you often hear in Hollywood’s portrayal of the arts and you sometimes read in pompous artist statements and cringe when you do. Not surprisingly, a few weeks later you catch yourself remorselessly using those exact same words… This is Artspeak and it is our legacy! enjoy our secret shame.


Artspeak: “NICE…”
Context: As in “Nice use of pencil here…” or “That’s a nice painting…” or “This part of the piece is pretty nice, but…”
Verdict: Nice seems more a moral judgment or a vacuous way to express pleasure that isn’t really so pleasurable but you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. Last time I checked, art doesn’t have morals and if something is only just nice then is it really so special? This word is best kept at bay. See also; good, swell, OK, lovely, pleasant … Cringing yet?


Artspeak: “Inspire, Inspired, Inspiration, Inspiring”
Context: “I was inspired to use this bold color…” “It’s an inspiring piece…” “I just don’t have any inspiration…”
Verdict: This word has and always will have a place in art. We get our, um, information for our art pieces that we use to move forward with… AAGHH, OK, We get our inspiration for our art somewhere outside ourselves and inspire is a perfect word to describe that exchange. It’s not a bad word really; it just is so overused in the arts that it grates on our hearing after awhile. It has been replaced in art schools by the more authoritative and smarter sounding “informed;” “I was informed by the landscapes’ color relationships” as opposed to “I was inspired by the landscapes’ color relationships.” They mean almost exactly the same thing but you sound smarter saying informed.


Artspeak: “Juxtaposition, Juxtaposed, Juxtapose”
Context: “The juxtaposition of these color relationships creates a real symmetry in the piece.” “When these are juxtaposed it creates a range of possibilities…”
Verdict: Artists are an insecure bunch. No one really cares about what we do in the wider society so we have a hard time feeling good about ourselves. As such, artist use big words when small ones will do just fine. Juxtapose is just such a word. In the dictionary juxtapose means to place side by side, especially for comparison or contrast. So why don’t we just say that? Try these two sentences; “If you put orange next to blue it will cause color tension.” A nice sentence but are you going to believe me? How about “Juxtapose orange with blue and it will cause color tension.” Now we’re talking! Are you going to doubt that!? You can’t hide from Juxtapose!


Artspeak: “Ism’s”
Context: From wikipedia; Ism’s usage is to signify larger organized systems and concepts. Mannerism, Impressionism, Surrealism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, Expressionism, Deconstructionism, Etceraism…
Verdict: Maybe the only groups more insecure than artists are the people who criticize those artists. In order to protect the validity of their criticism they have been labeling different kind of art movements with these Ism’s to make the theories seem better than they are. Basically, using an ism is a way to confuse and to create enough insecurity in someone’s point of view so that they won’t dare call you on the ridiculous notion you just brought up.





Artspeak: “Duality”
Context: “I wanted to create a duality of…” “My work is about duality.”
Verdict: I have to admit, I thought I knew what this meant and when I looked it up in the dictionary I’m a little more confused. Duality; n. a dual state or quality. Um, I guess it means there are two things happening at once. It’s like having good and evil actually existing at the same time or light and dark dancing in harmony or cats and dogs living together. Or, imagine if you put black and white on the same canvas! I think duality comes up when you don’t know what else to say. “I love it, your art is just so full of….Duality!”


Artspeak: “Investigate, Investigation”
Context: “I investigate complex systems to find visual order.” “My work is about the investigation…”
Verdict: Not so bad, really, investigate is just a word that is used too much in the arts. It makes the search we perform seem harder and thus our works seem bolder by association. If you are searching for something then you’ll just find it eventually. If you investigate something, well then… what you are searching for must be elusive and important! There are no private searchers, private lookers or private checker-outers in the yellow pages that I could find. I’ll need to investigate this some more…


Artspeak: “I hope to…” “My work attempts to…”
Context: “I hope to intercept taken for granted concepts by refiguring fixed subject / object hierarchies as unexpected and dynamic encounters.” “My work attempts to accent and examine fields of emergence.”
Verdict: I feel bad because I took the above examples directly off of an artist statement on an artist’s website.The work on this website was actually very engaging but can you make any sense of those sentences? I fall under the spell of using “I hope…” and “My work attempts…” all the time. It’s like we’re afraid to actually say what we actually did! If we are always hopeful and attempting then can we ever really fail? In opposition, I am reminded of the sports adage “you are what you are.” I hope I am not what I am as I attempt to be something that I’m not…


Artspeak: “ – “
Context: “re-imagine” “in-spiration” “di-chotomy” “land-scape” “beer-bottle”
Verdict: 1) Take a perfectly good word or two perfectly good words. 2) Add a hyphen to it at some opportune break or between the two words to make a pseudo new word that is so much more meaningful than the old and maybe not so good word(s.) 3) Won-der how you ever managed to co-mmunicate with plain old En-glish be-fore.


Artspeak: “Conceptualize, Conceptualized”
Context: “I conceptualized this piece using…” “When I’m working, I conceptualize…”
Verdict: Noticing a pattern here? If your gonna go, go big! I really don’t get the reason to use conceptualize(d.) This is one of those words that when you hear it you think “yea, I know what that means…” but as you think harder and harder you cant quite come up with a definition that makes sense. I’ve even gone so far as to conceptualize what conceptualized means and it still doesn’t make sense!


Artspeak: “En Plein air”
Context: “This piece was painted en plein air.”
Verdict: Because I made this painting en plein air and not just THAT I PAINTED IT OUTSIDE it’s a much better painting. That’s all those fancy French terms mean – done outside. En Plein air is not a style, nor an art movement, nor a particular medium but just a fancy way of saying “done outdoors.” Imagine two identical paintings side by side and one was labeled “En Plein air” and one was labeled “Done Outside” and which one would you buy? (ok I slightly simplified this one, en plein air actually means more than just outside, it means completely devoid of walls, so it's not in the street and it's not next to a barn, it's by a stream, a waterfall, an mountain etc.)


Any other Artspeak terms to add?

Most of those words fall more into the category of "Speak".

Originally Posted by René Artois

Most of those words fall more into the category of "Speak".

I shall say 'zis only once:

What's the category of "speak"? Every spoken word is in the category of "speak" by definition, I don't understand the point of such a label or the connection it had with my post.

I ing love this thread.

Nice....

I hate the word 'nice'.
Might as well just say meh(nasal grunt maybe). It always sounds to me; 'Oh bless, at least you tried lol'.

Originally Posted by CescPistols

I hate the word 'nice'.
Might as well just say meh(nasal grunt maybe). It always sounds to me; 'Oh bless, at least you tried lol'.

Yeah.
Last year I was teaching special needs kids and wehad an exhibition at the end, the one word I heard from the people that came was: "nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice." I mean I was the one that saw the work that went into those pieces, literal blood, sweat and tears, and those ogling plebs just stood there with their mouths open. gggrrrrrrrr

All I got from the OP's post was that artists are arrogant and have a superiority complex.

Originally Posted by Poach

All I got from the OP's post was that artists are arrogant and have a superiority complex.

Not exactly, I'm saying we artists have poor verbal skills and fragile confidence and so compensate by using unnesseccarily flowery language, it's of course a generalisation, but it's a pretty accurate rule of thumb.

Originally Posted by Poach

All I got from the OP's post was that artists are arrogant and have a superiority complex.

Quite the oppostie impression with me, I thought it was screaming out with a inferiority complex.

Originally Posted by King of Kings

Quite the oppostie impression with me, I thought it was screaming out with a inferiority complex.

Hmm, maybe that means artists are complex and individual people that can't all be labeled and lumped together.

Originally Posted by Arch-hereticK

Hmm, maybe that means artists are complex and individual people that can't all be labeled and lumped together.

Yes I would agree, but this can be said for all people not just artists.

What I meant was that most of the words aren't only associated with art, and are used alot in everyday life by us common folk.
And I think people who pretend modern art (Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst etc) actually means anything, have the biggest superiority complex, because they pretend to understand it whilst more intelligent people see it for what it is (crap).

Originally Posted by René Artois

What I meant was that most of the words aren't only associated with art, and are used alot in everyday life by us common folk.

Of course, all words can have multiple contexts. But this is an art sub-forum.

Originally Posted by René Artois

And I think people who pretend modern art (Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst etc) actually means anything, have the biggest superiority complex, because they pretend to understand it whilst more intelligent people see it for what it is (crap).

lol, the closed minded cynicism............arrgg........it's burning...........no more..............aaarrrgghhh.

Originally Posted by René Artois

And I think people who pretend modern art (Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst etc) actually means anything, have the biggest superiority complex, because they pretend to understand it whilst more intelligent people see it for what it is (crap).

That is a pretty ironic thing to say.

the enplein air makes me laugh

Originally Posted by Kanaric

the enplein air makes me laugh

If I heard someone say that to me it would be nigh impossible to keep a straight face. Can just imagine it with a frivolous hand gesture. Stuff like unmade beds and stacked bean cans.

Originally Posted by CescPistols

If I heard someone say that to me it would be nigh impossible to keep a straight face. Can just imagine it with a frivolous hand gesture. Stuff like unmade beds and stacked bean cans.

i would just take art and put en plain air on it at that point, its ridiculously silly to base price on that lol

Originally Posted by Kanaric

i would just take art and put en plain air on it at that point, its ridiculously silly to base price on that lol

I think art should be free anyway, and patrons can donate what they judge to be fair.

Originally Posted by Rene Artois

I'm not closed minded, it's just a bed full of rubbish isn't a work of art in my book. Neither is a tank of urine with a picture of Jesus inside.

You see, that's what I'm talking about. Tracy emins bed wasn't shown as a bed, it was shown as a self portrait, a self-depricating portrait: that "rubish" as you called it were the things she found by her bed after blanking out from drug and alcohol abuse, there were sentimental things like a stuffed animal from her child-hood and used needles and brushes.

And the piss christ was not a self-portrait, it was a total extention of the artist (it was a frozen cast of a crusifix made with his own fat, suspended in a vat of his own urine) it was a comment on how religion was being treated by the church/politicians in the states and freedom of speech.

I apologise for calling you closed minded, I don't know you, but you'd have to be made of stone not to be moved by these pieces, I'm not saying you should be overwhelmed, but you have to look past the superficial "ugliness" or "beauty" to see what's being said by it.

I'm not closed minded, it's just a bed full of rubbish isn't a work of art in my book. Neither is a tank of urine with a picture of Jesus inside.