There is currently a debate cycling through the art world, following the Whitney Museum's Biennial, which opened sometime in April and runs through June.
An unusual happenstance occurred amongst some of the reviewers and art critics...
They didn't write about the art
They wrote about the artist summaries and the museum statements that speak about the art (these are mainly written by Curators, and sometimes entail words from the artists themselves). Most museums and arts institutions have a placard available for those literary minded individuals that want more information about what they are seeing. Its also a means to communicate what a person is looking at exactly - to walk away with more knowledge of the piece and the artist who created it. It is a common occurrence and an acceptable form of public relations. Any museum, gallery or arts organization employs this method of communication. How else can we learn about the art and the artist?
But...
Over the course of time, these statements have become, in more words than less - a flowery, overly intellectualized method of describing art and flouting intelligence, which in my opinion, even the intellectual, literary individuals out there would barely be able to understand let alone digest during a trip to the museum without a thesaurus stashed in your back pocket.
Here are a few examples:
Writing about a table with objects placed upon it, with a picture of earth hung on the wall behind it:
"…invents puzzles out of non sequiturs to seek congruence in seemingly incongruous situations, whether visual or spatial…inhabits those interstitial spaces between understanding and confusion…" (Trinie Dalton on Amanda Ross-Ho)
On a photographer's pictures of trees:
...Thomson's inherently conversational practice both gamely Pop-ifies its often antiaesthetic historical precedents and resituates that generation's thought experiments in the social realm. (Suzanne Hudson on Mungo Thompson)
On an installation of wooden dowel rods:
... Bove's "settings" draw on the style, and substance, of certain time-specific materials to resuscitate their referential possibilities, to pull them out of historical stasis and return them to active symbolic duty, where new adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings." (Jeffrey Kastner on Carol Bove)
Statements and "descriptions" like these (if you dare to call them a description even) are a detriment to the arts. Why? Because it is already hard enough to get people out to see art - let alone understand what they are looking at. It seems to me that the individuals writing these statements (artists and curators and museum workers alike) are trying too hard to describe things that simply do not exist, or exist in their minds only.
It has gotten to the point where these writers are even leaving out what the art is made out of, or what year it was made - although this is base information, some of us still like to know these simple things. It seems to this viewer and artist that applying heaps of 10 syllable words that no one uses (even in polite society) to work that is already hard to understand will only result in pushing people away from coming out to see art (let alone trying to understand what they are looking at). I might say it even scares people from researching more about the piece or the artist.
As an arts lover, a creator and a writer, I think that these statements should not be "dumbed down" per say, but be more inviting to both the intellectuals and the "common folk" who want to enjoy art. Descriptions should entail both "base" information and intellectual meanderings. They should seek to gently pull the uneducated viewer into understanding, with the hope that the viewer will want to seek more information for themselves.
In the present state, and if we continue down this road, we are certain to lose more viewers in the process - the results leaving us in an "interstitial" place of miscommunication.
