IAE has a distinctive lexicon: aporia, radically, space, proposition, biopolitical, tension, transversal, autonomy. An artist’s work inevitably interrogates, questions, encodes, transforms, subverts, imbricates, displaces—though often it doesn’t do these things so much as it serves to, functions to, or seems to (or might seem to) do these things. IAE rebukes English for its lack of nouns: Visual becomes visuality, global becomes globality, potential becomes potentiality, experience becomes … experiencability.
On International Art English, by Alix Rule and David Levine. (via The Null Device)
I am truly sick of reading or watching stuff made by wannabe sophisticates acting as if they invented the wheel, when in fact are just repackaging and reframing stuff made not much long ago by a not-dissimilar sort of people. The materialization of abstract concepts is to be expected then, as plagiarized works are to be seen as new by the inclusion of these invisible new raw materials. In this context, Art English is just a tiresome, predictable symptom of the fact that art the ‘creative industries’ are all just about posing an attitude and about packaging irrelevancies in a way that conveys a feeling of being a (take your pick:) sophisticated / interesting / mysterious / fabulous person, and not about making art at all, not about communication at all, not about sharing and empathizing with other humans at all.
Not even about just showing something cool.
I feel more and more that, in the same way as all professional sports tend to become like Wrestling, so does Contemporary Art constantly tends to become Advertising (of itself and of the artist) and a sad affirmation of exclusivity. Not that this is, mind you, a new critique, people have been making the same sort of point since before Pop Art opened the floodgates of artistic capitalism. And therein, perhaps, lies the root problem. Just say no!
