Mind Your Language - Alex Against Art Speak

Show Notes

Summary

Alex takes aim at the evils and excesses of art speak via Tolstoy, Artificial Intelligence, and the science of Bullshit.

Artspeak. The Bullshit Language of Art
ChatGPT is Bullshit
On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
What is Art? by Leo Tolstoy. This is a PDF of the original text.

Transcript

I’ve got a fun challenge for you. I’m going to read to you two excepts of descriptions of works of art. Your challenge is to guess who the artist is in each case.

Descriptions number one:

The juxtaposition of the saturated hues—an ethereal crimson juxtaposed against a somber umber—invites a dialectical engagement with the viewer’s psyche, invoking a liminal space that oscillates between the corporeal and the metaphysical. This chromatic dichotomy serves not merely as a visual stimulus but as a conduit for existential contemplation, prompting an introspective traversal through the labyrinthine corridors of the subconscious.

Well that was bracing. On to description number two:

The compositional structure, characterized by a harmonious juxtaposition of verdant hues and cerulean skies, evokes a sense of serene equilibrium, yet it is precisely this equilibrium that invites a critical examination of the artist’s intentionality. The brushstrokes, while ostensibly gestural, reveal a paradoxical tension between the immediacy of expression and the calculated precision of execution.

Heady stuff. Maybe pause this and take a minute to think about it. To consider the nuances and observations within each paragraph. Go back and listen again. Really bathe in them. Really think.

So whaddaya think? Number one sounds like an abstract piece. Something based on fields of colour. Gotta be someone like Mark Rothcko with his giant serene squares, right?

Number two? Serene verdant skies? Gestural yet calculated? Constable maybe? JMW Tuner perchance?

What did you guess? Don’t tell me, I don’t care. I know who these relate to. If, for the first one, you guessed Rothcko, then you were totally correct. Well done. A big tick with a letter “A” with a star next to it.

And if you guessed Constable or Turner for the second one, then -fail klaxon-. You’re not only a bit wrong. You’re wrong right off the edge of the canvas and on to the floor. The second description was of a work by none other than the afro-adorning king of serene painterly schmaltz - Bob Ross. He of the Joy of Painting off the telly. The guy that conjures up formulaic woodland scenes using nothing but the power of his mind and a giant palette.

Maybe Bob is your idea of the panacea of fine art. But I think most would disagree, not least the type of people who would write a description like that above. So who would write such a thing?

It won’t surprise anyone to discover that both descriptions were written by ChatGPT, lord of the chatbot AIs. The prompt I used was:

write a critique of a Bob Ross painting using the most incomprehensible and pretentious art speak possible

And that’s what it came back with. Just for the sake of balance, here’s a description of Ross’s work from Google’s Gemini AI:

The almost aggressively uniform application of pigment speaks to a deep-seated fear of the unpredictable, a desperate attempt to control the chaotic flux of the creative process. The resulting effect, while superficially pleasing, ultimately exposes a profound ontological insecurity, a yearning for a stable, immutable reality that is, of course, fundamentally unattainable.

What does this tell us about how art is portrayed in the art world?

It’s usually impenetrable, pretentious gobbledygook that seems aimed at alienating the reader
It’s so ubiquitous and homogeneous that two (and I assume any) dumb AIs designed to regurgitate text stolen from the web can reproduce it convincingly and in basically the same language and even using basically the same words
It can be used to describe any work in pseudo-academic terms that render its use meaningless
It’s called Art Speak, and I hate it!

Yay for me for cutting right to the chase for a change!

Why am I talking about Art Speak? Well, I was actually researching for the next article in my “How to be creative” series which is to be about the tension between mastery and creativity. The research process tends to lead my ever-inquisitive squirrel brain down many a rabbit hole. This particular rabbit hole lead me to a bunch of books, websites and articles about various artists and I was forcefully reminded why I am not an art scholar.

I plan to do a whole episode on art books sometimes soon. I own lots of art books, and I love them. I’d buy more but I lack the space and the money. But if I hate art speak, why do I own so many art books? Very simply: it’s about the pictures. I very rarely read any of the accompanying text because I find it arduous to the point of physical pain.

I’ve never been good at reading. As a kid I really struggled and didn’t read a novel cover to cover until my early 20s. When presented with a field of text, by brain just sort of seizes up. I’ve since learned that is likely down to a combination of my ADHD lack of patience as well as, it seems, unrecognised dyslexia. I can read, but I tire of it quickly and rarely finish whole books, even when I’m interested in the subject. It takes too long, is too taxing and I just move on.

So I like writing that it concise, clear, uncomplicated and meaningful. This is not a matter of taste, it is a matter of necessity. So needless to say that the verbal excesses of writers like of Jane Austen, or the wilfully-never-getting-to-any-pointery or Proust and Joyce are not near the top of my literary picks list.

Conversely, I find science speak generally easy to understand. Can gobble up whole wikipedia pages without much stress. I like science fictions writing for it’s breadth of ideas and general lack of flowery prose. To repeat, I don’t have a problem with expressive or complicated language, I simply can’t parse it. Shakespeare is a complete no-go zone for me.

So imagine what happens when I try and earnestly consume some art speak. Fuses start to blow immediately. It causes me something like physical pain. Not only is it overly redundant, convoluted, bloated and unintelligible, it also contains almost no useful information. It’s a literary abomination.

Here’s a real example that I found in one of the books in my beloved collection, found pretty much at random:

his use of delicate colour, treated more often in terms of nuances and assonances rather than of contrasts, together with cobweb-like graphics that seem to irrigate the whole surface of the canvas. The split between drawing and colour, which becomes increasingly subtle the more in the same work both elements alternately predominate as if in a musical composition with a dominant tone at each moment, provided thus a new solution to the eternal dilemma of content and form.

I can barely even say it, let alone understand what it’s waffling on about! That was from a book about the work of Chinese abstract painter Zao Wou-Ki, oen of the few abstract painters that I really love. I genuiniely want to tear out those pages so I’m only left with the glorious pictures.

Art speak is an abomination.

Don’t take my word for it. In his 2021 paper, Artspeak. The Bullshit Language of Art, Pascal Unbehaun makes the following observations

Artspeak sounds bloated and preposterous.

Many texts strongly resemble each other.

They seem to be only loosely related to the artwork in question.

The content appears incoherent and obscure.

Texts feel like they might be auto-generated by an algorithm

I’d already constructed my AI examples and the basic structure of my argument when stumbled across this paper. I almost spat my soy latte across the room. I thought it was just me that thought this way!

As a minor, but important aside, it should be noted that Unbehaun is not being profane or flippant when he uses the word “bullshit”. It’s actually an accepted scientific adjective.

In his 2005 book “On Bullshit”, American philosopher Harry Frankfurt argues that bullshit is a distinct phenomenon from lying. He postulates that while lying involves a deliberate attempt to deceive by stating something known to be false, bullshit is characterised by a lack of concern for truth.

Bullshitters are not primarily interested in whether their statements are true or false; rather, they are focused on creating an impression, often of competence or authority.

So basically it’s the old maxim that “anything stated with sufficient convictions may as well be the truth to most people”.

As an aside to the aside, given that I started off this episode with some texts generated using ChatGPT, it’s amusing to note that Large Language Models’ propensity to assert bullshit by way of “hallucinations” has not gone unnoticed. In their 2024 paper “ChatGPT is bullshit” Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries and Joe Slater build on Frankfurt’s ideas to suggest that:

insofar as both lying and hallucinating require some concern with the truth of their statement…LLMs are simply not designed to accurately represent the way the world is, but rather to give the impression that this is what they’re doing

They go on to coin two new terms. Quote:

We draw a distinction between two sorts of bullshit, which we call ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ bullshit, where the former requires an active attempt to deceive the reader or listener as to the nature of the enterprise, and the latter only requires a lack of concern for truth. We argue that at minimum, the outputs of LLMs like ChatGPT are soft bullshit.

It’s hard to disagree. I’ll put links to these books and papers in the show notes. You should definitely check them out. They are mercifully free of bullshit.

Back to the matter in hand. It should be obvious how the term bullshit applies to art speak.

So what is art speak exactly and why does it exist?

I asked ChatGPT to explain it to me like I was a 5 year old, and here’s what it said:

Imagine you’re playing with LEGO, and you build a really cool spaceship. But instead of saying “I built a spaceship!”, you say something like, “My construction utilizes interdimensional spatial vectors to explore the deconstruction of traditional aeronautical paradigms.”

Which I think pretty much encapsulates it. Using convoluted and overly-intellectualised language to describe something. Seeming to say something profound, but failing to really say anything at all.

Such language can be found in art gallery brochures, art journals, pamphlets and magazines anywhere you go in the world. Every art student has their art speak blurb which eruditely explains their unparalleled approach to whatever artistic form they chose.

So we are expected to accept that an artwork was channelled from the deepest recesses of the artists soul via the medium of culture, while also being a deeply considered, reflective study on the interplay between dark and light as a deeply considered philosophical commentary on the nature of sentient existence. All with a straight face.

Most artists that I’ve ever come across are intuitive individuals. It comes with the territory. Yes, bodies of work can develop underlying philosophical narratives and commentaries, as can individual works. But does that 5 meter wide abstract work of planar colour really reflect the banality of war? Most people will simply look at it and think to themselves “I like that colour”. And since most art is intuitive in nature it’s unlikely that the artists was thinking about the horrors of war while painting it, except, I suppose, if they were in a war zone when they made it, rather than a warehouse studio in New York.

I suspect that the majority of such descriptions were dreamt up after the fact by the artist or their agent or a gallery owner in an attempt to project some depth on something that is largely aesthetic in nature. I don’t have a problem with this. I just wish that:

a) The art community was honest about this, and, b) they would do it in a less bloody unintelligible and alienating way.

But that’s precisely the point isn’t it? The hoi poloi are supposed to feel alienated and patronised by such texts. It’s a thinly veiled strategy to gatekeep by using faux-intellectualism. This keep the art fraternity exclusive and gives wealthy art buyer something to feel clever about at dinner parties.

In short, it really has nothing to do with the art at all. It’s a parasitic cultural meme that perpetuates itself by taking over the mind of the those exposed to it and turns them into eloquent sounding drones.

Leo Tolstoy doesn’t mince his words on this subject. This is the bloke who wrote War and Peace, the book that, by cultural convention, all other works of text are not, had to say about art criticism.

Quote:

The artist, if a real artist, has by his work transmitted to others the feeling he experienced. What is there, then, to explain?

If a work be good as art, then the feeling expressed by the artist—be it moral or immoral—transmits itself to other people. If transmitted to others, then they feel it, and all interpretations are superfluous. If the work does not infect people, no explanation can make it contagious. An artist’s work cannot be interpreted. Had it been possible to explain in words what he wished to convey, the artist would have expressed himself in words. He expressed it by his art, only because the feeling he experienced could not be otherwise transmitted. The interpretation of works of art by words only indicates that the interpreter is himself incapable of feeling the infection of art.

The quote, from his 1897 book What is Art?, not only says that art cannot by definition, be explained, but that anyone who tries to do so if singularly incapable of appreciating that art! Don’t hold back Leo!

He goes on to say:

As soon as art became, not art for the whole people but for a rich class, it became a profession; as soon as it became a profession, methods were devised to teach it; people who chose this profession of art began to learn these methods, and thus professional schools sprang up: classes of rhetoric or literature in the public schools, academies for painting, conservatoires for music, schools for dramatic art.

In these schools art is taught! But art is the transmission to others of a special feeling experienced by the artist. How can this be taught in schools?

Tolstoy received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 so he knows his stuff, although I doubt he was without his critics, so no doubt there’s some sour grapes fermenting somewhere in there.

It’s a surprisingly lucid and accessible book given its subject matter and time of writing. I’ll definitely be returning to it.

Many of his views on this stuff really resonates with me. Which is kind of ironic since I’ve never read any of his fiction, and given my distaste for long texts, it’s likely I never will. I could never understand the existence of art schools and have always struggled to not only understand art criticism itself, but why it exists at all, at least in the predominant form.

Art is about feeling. And feelings are hard to convey. It’s why so many people rely on it, either by the production or consumption of art, to communicate and experience emotions. In most cases, that job is done the moment the viewer sees the artwork. If it fails to elicit some emotional response from the viewer it’s either bad art, or just not something that resonates with that viewer. As I said before, you cannot simply divorce the artwork from the artist, and context really matters. So some informations about the artist that made the item and the context surrounding this, may well enhance the impact of the piece. But this is exactly that, context. You can just use normal human language to do that. There’s no need for pseudo-intellectual drivel.

Many, if not most, artworks are self-explanatory, and/or are in no way improved by convoluted explanations. This goes for titles too. In some cases, the title of a piece is integral to the artist’s interpretation of the work - need and example here - but it’s often not necessary, and many artists don’t name artworks at all. I see a lovely seascape watercolour, it’s nice to know that it’s the harbour at Padstow in Cornwall, especially if you happen to be located there at the time, but it’s not essential.

But then, delicate landscape watercolours aren’t the types of artworks given the art speak treatment, are they? It’s usually abstract, supposed think-pieces or room sized installations. They need explaining because they need to justify their existence. They need it to justify the price tag.

Understand that I’m neither denigrating contemporary or modern art here, or the thousands of galleries organisations that power the real art industry, or the publications and institutions that support artists, heritage and history.

To be honest, I’m not even sure I’m denigrating the people writing this drivel. I just wish it would go away. I wish the prevailing conventions and consensus of how to talk about art would sod off.

I’m also not suggesting that all writing on art is bullshit, just that the art world is particularly acceptable to it.

This is not a small niggle. As you might have noticed, I take the broadest possible interpretation of what constitutes art and creativity due to my conviction that the production and consumption of art is vital to a functional society and one of the most effective means of managing mental health. My intention is to be as inclusive as possible. If your creativity drives you to make stop motion animation with models made of horse dung, then good on you! As I said in my episode on identity in art, you need to pour yourself, the essence of you, into your art for it to be fulfilling and to come across as authentic to the viewer.

How are you are you going to feel free to express yourself in the way that you need to if you feel compelled to describe it in terms that bear no meaningful relationship to it?

How is writing a bunch of pretentious waffle going to make you seem more authentic? It’s likely to do the opposite. And all the while fuelling imposter syndrome. If these are not the words that describe how you fell about your own work, then aren’t they a lie? A misrepresentation?

What concerns me is how this type of language leads truly creative people to feel they have no place in the artistic community. To think that you need to have been to art school to create wonderful things. You might worry that if everyone thinks and speaks like this and that you’ll be ridiculed if you show your art to anyone who professes knows what they’re talking about. You might convince yourself that this mindless babble actually represents what art is, and how artists think.

You might conclude that you need to make works that can be spoken of with such words. You might decide just not to bother at all.

None of this is the case. The art world needs you, an artist, or you an art lover, but it most definitely does not need these outriders and hangers on. You’ll know a genuine art professional, a genuine art enthusiast when you meet them precisely because they don’t communicate their thoughts like this.

Many artists do feel compelled, or are expected to produce this type of hollow prose when displaying their works. You may have little choice other than to do so in certain circumstances. In such cases, do what you have to. But don’t kid yourself that in any way elevates your work. In reality, the opposite may be true. Either way, I can recommend not wasting your time carefully crafting such nonsense. Just get ChatGPT or Google Gemini to do it for you, as we’ve seen, they’re very good at it.

And indeed, on the latter point, I do wonder if professions that involve producing art speak will find their days doing so numbered. I don’t consider this to be a good thing - less people working in the art industry seems like an inherently bad thing to me - so I do hope anyone that this unseats finds another role in the industry.

There’s as ever, a lot more going on here, not least in terms of understanding the value and purpose and criticism in the wider sense. I’m using sweeping statements and general allusions here to make my point, and likely including talented, passionate individuals doing great things for the artistic community. But I think that those folks likely feel the same way as me anyway.

How, then, should you talk about your or anyone else’s work? Well, how do you talk about anything else? How do you talk about that simply incredible pizza you ate last night? How do you explain to someone why you thought the novel you just finished was so amazing? Simple, you find the words that come naturally to you, and you use those. You try your best to match you word and phrase choice to the person that you’re talking to. If they are an experienced art practitioner, or a seasoned art lover, then perhaps you can be a bit more flowery and use some words like “juxtaposition” and “dichotomy”. To anyone else you might say something like “I saw Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières and I just couldn’t stop staring at it. It made me feel so emotional.”

Conversely you could say:

The juxtaposition of industrial elements with the natural landscape subtly underscores the burgeoning tension between urban expansion and pastoral retreat

But then, you might get a blank look, but at least you’ll sound clever. Your choice.