But I Know What I Like
/The late Robert Hughes, author and art critic for Time, presented a TV series I watched avidly in the 1980s: The Shock of the New. I remember learning more from the show than from my art history classes, but it wasn’t all about Rauschenberg and de Chirico. Hughes was good at language.
How good was he? Here is a sentence from the book he wrote to accompany the series, analyzing van Gogh’s The Starry Night: “Sight is translated into a thick, emphatic plasma of paint, eddying along linear paths defined by the jabbing motion of his brush-strokes as though nature were opening its veins.” All the words are familiar, and the language somehow mirrors the art itself. Especially if you can hear him saying it, and even if you can’t, it’s a great line.
(A couple others from the series have stayed with me for all these decades: compulsory fun, to describe a children’s museum; and Sex is the poor man’s opera, which as an opera buff I found hysterical. In my mind’s ear, in an Aussie accent, it sounds like this: “Six is the poo min’s Oprah.”)
I don’t know much about art, but I can detect bullshit in writing. My un-arty view is that if you have to write an Artist Statement for someone to understand your work, you have problems no mere Statement can solve. For instance, it’s hard for me to want to run out to the gallery, museum or dry river bed to see art that “responds to the crisis of the Anthropocene,” even if the artist’s “durational performative actions build non-hierachical [sic] relationships within the creative community and engender transformation that can build.”
(For what must be the top take-down of this kind of crap, see John Seed’s The Artist Statements of the Old Masters. Or if you want some of this crap for your own, see this nicely designed and cool English artist statement generator.)
“I feel that if a person can’t communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up.”
Every field has jargon that allows its practitioners to save time and mystify the uninitiated. If they’re lucky, those same practitioners also have straight-talking communications people who make sure members of the lay public (customers, most funders and so on) never need to puzzle out the buzzwords.
Like, say, these:
In order to disrupt systems of oppression inherent in our current educational model, we must attend to the ways racialized, classed, and gendered assumptions of students play out in the lived school experiences of students who come from trauma or students who are often labeled as EBD or placed in special education settings.
I think I agree with the writer on this, but I have to stop and figure it out, and I shouldn’t have to. Nor should you. I always wonder about lived experiences of any kind, because in my lived experience, any experience that isn’t vicarious or imagined is something you’ve actually, well, lived.
Plain language is a wonderful thing.
