The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way.
JOHN RUSKIN, 18561
Instinctively we know there is no formula to any kind of writing, so How to Write About Contemporary Art seems at first an impossible book title. Even if you follow to the letter every suggestion gathered here, and try earnestly to write well about art, the truth is that anybody who ever succeeded invented their own way. Good art-writers break conventions, hold a few sacrosanct, innovate their own. They measure their limits by instinct, not by rote. Mostly they learn by seeing miles of art, and reading good literature in bulk. There is no substitute, for a writer, for possessing a natural ear for language; a rich vocabulary; a flair for varied sentence structures; an original opinion; some arresting ideas to share. I can teach you none of that. Finally, no book can teach you to love art. If you dislike contemporary art, put this book down right away. It is not for you.
Art in the 21st century—online and off—is experiencing a phenomenal boom, with the demand for written accompaniment raised to fever-pitch. Museum and art fairs boast ever-spiralling visitor numbers and expansions, while new art schools, specialized MA programs, international biennales, commercial galleries, art services, artist’s websites, and gargantuan private collections seem to gain ground every day. Every role in the expanding art universe demands its own class of art-copy, whether aimed at artists, curators, gallerists, museum directors, bloggers, editors, students, publicists, collectors, educators, auctioneers, advisers, investors, interns, critics, press officers, or university lecturers. A worldwide virtual audience now absorbs art primarily through on-screen text-and-image, and artworks created by the youngest generation of post-postmodern, post-medium, post-Fordist, post-critique artists require decoding even for specialists.
As the readership swells and the need for communicative art-writing skyrockets, we notice that—although some art-texts are well-informed, imaginatively written, and genuinely illuminating—much contemporary art-writing remains barely comprehensible. Banal and mystifying art-writing is a popular target for ridicule; scrolling through yards of unfathomable verbosity on Contemporary Art Daily—an art-information website with an open-submission policy—I too despair at what passes for plausible art-language. However, having taught and edited art-writing for years, I also hear the strain of raw inexperience behind these indecipherable texts. Odds are these struggling authors have been tossed into the art-writing deep-end without any help in navigating their difficult task: translating visual experience into written language. Make no mistake: for most newcomers, that job does not come easy. The purpose of this book is to provide some guidance to the art-writing novice—and perhaps offer the experienced writer a refresher as well.
In my opinion, contrary to popular belief, most indecipherable art-speak is not written for the purpose of pulling the wool over non-cognoscenti’s eyes. On occasion art-impenetralia is penned by a big name, attempting to mask undeveloped ideas behind slick vocabulary or hawking substandard art; but the worst is often written by earnest amateur art-writers, desperately trying to communicate. Art-writing is among this industry’s poorest paid jobs; this explains the fault-line running through the art-world, whereby fairly advanced art-writing tasks are assigned to its least experienced and recognized members. The cause of much bad art-writing is not so much pretentiousness, as is commonly suspected, but a lack of training.
Writing well about art is an intensely skilled job, yet even top art-writers’ salaries pale next to successful artists’ and dealers’. Four digits count as big money on the art-writing circuit. Usually people get what they pay for, and much art-writing is barely remunerated. The writers of the much-maligned and often inscrutable gallery press releases—which to me read like cries for help from the industry’s hard-working junior ranks—rarely even benefit from the input of a professional editor. Routinely these raw texts are blithely distributed online in all their first-draft glory. A common misconception can emerge that because some art-texts seem meaningless—because their writers are wrestling with clear expression—so too must be the art. If there’s one single best reason to learn to write well about art, it’s because good art deserves it. And sharp art-writing can make art-viewing all the better.
While I cannot correct lopsided pay scales, I can—for the benefit of those attempting this satisfying but underrated task—share everything I know. Having spent a quarter of a century professionally writing, editing, commissioning, reading, and teaching contemporary art-writing, I have reached the following paired conclusions:
Good art-writers, despite countless differences, essentially follow the same patterns:
+ their writing is clear, well structured, and carefully worded;
+ the text is imaginative, brimming with spicy vocabulary, and full of original ideas, which are substantiated in their experience and knowledge of art;
+ they describe what the art is; explain plausibly what it may mean; and suggest how this might connect to the world at large.
Inexperienced art-writers repeat similar mistakes:
+ their writing is waffly, poorly structured, and jargoned;
+ their vocabulary is unimaginative, their ideas undeveloped, their logic flawed, and their knowledge patchy;
+ assumptions are not grounded in the experience of art, which is ignored;
+ they fail to communicate believably the claimed meaning behind contemporary art, or its relation to the rest of the world.
The purpose of How to Write About Contemporary Art is not to dictate how you should write, but gently to point out common mishaps, and show how skilful art-writers avoid them. By laying bare successful and weak practices, you might steer clear of poor habits from the start, and set off thinking and writing about art in your own smart style. If that ambition appeals, then this book is for you.
fig. 1 BANK, Fax-Back (London: ICA), 1999
In the summer of 2012, the website Triple Canopy published a controversial essay titled ‘International Art English: On the Rise—and the Space—of the Art-world Press Release’ by artist David Levine and Alix Rule, a sociology PhD student.2 In a bid to provide a scientific analysis of the linguistic quirks of what they dubbed ‘IAE’ (‘International Art English’), the pair computer-fed press releases collated from the online art journal e-flux, and discovered such IAE tics as:
+ habitually improvising nouns (‘visual’ becomes ‘visuality’);
+ hammering out fashionable terminology (‘transversal’, ‘involution’, ‘platform’);
+ abusing prefixes, with para-, proto-, post-, and hyper- leading the pack.
Levine and Rule’s exposé was met with applause from some camps, but some insiders were skeptical of both its methods and results, and a heated debate ensued.3 Poking fun at substandard gallery press releases was viewed by many as easy target-practice. Levine and Rule’s ‘outing’ of contemporary art’s dense verbiage illuminated an art-world curiosity that had, in fact, been a running joke for years. In a project called Fax-Back (1999; fig. 1) the British artists’ collective BANK returned abysmal press releases to the guilty galleries, complete with corrections and comments (‘Totally meaningless sentence. Well done!’). Aficionados and laypeople alike had grown wearily accustomed to the white-noise murmur of art-gibberish (which enlivened the ‘Pseud’s Corner’ section of magazines from Private Eye to Flash Art), and instinctively diverted their attention to the smart art-writers also at work.
This bemused tolerance for the silliest art-writing may now have reached an endpoint; in the wake of Triple Canopy’s ‘International Art English’ smear, it seems open season has been declared on pretentious writing.4 In an Artforum book review responding to a pair of recent books on curating—two well-respected tomes from reputable publishers and written by professionals, not gallery print-outs by entry-level enthusiasts—critic and historian Julian Stallabrass lamented the ‘thick and viscous vocabulary’ he found there, rewording some sentences in plain English:
For instance, here is [the] concluding section: ‘Exhibitions are a coproductive, spatial medium, resulting from various forms of negotiation, relationality, adaptation, and collaboration between subjects and objects, across space and time.’ Rough translation: people work together to make exhibitions using objects. They exist in space and time.5
Stallabrass’s Dick-and-Jane rewrite, ‘people work together to make exhibitions using objects’, leaps from the page as the plain-speaking language conspicuously absent from much art-writing. The chorus of complaints about off-putting art language, coupled with the flourishing of specialist MA courses,6 suggests that the field may be poised to attract the scrutiny that curating earned in previous decades. The professionalization of the art-world could hardly leave its writers and critics behind.
My purpose here is not to join the ranks of the anti-‘International Art English’ brigade, and mock the dialect’s familiar features: a preference for complex sentences stuffed with specialist terms where a few simple words would do; the forced servitude of ordinary words like ‘space’, ‘field’, and ‘real’ to assume convoluted, alien functions; and a baffling disconnect between what we see and what we read. My aim is to offer practical advice to escape the IAE cul-de-sac. This book is not a bluffer’s guide to artspeak. Bad art-talk (like bad music-speak, or clichéd movie-talk, or faked literary theory) can be mimicked in seconds, mastered in an afternoon. Instead, writing about art plausibly, succinctly, in an enjoyable and believable manner, demands some thought and effort. My aim here is to focus on the happier examples, whether academic, historical, descriptive, journalistic, or critical, to show how they succeed and help you to learn from them.
This book includes extracts that range from a short 19th-century treasure to a Walter Benjamin extract from 1940, to texts from the 1980s and 1990s; but the chief focus is on recent examples. How to Write About Contemporary Art is not a compendium of ‘best-ever’ art-writers. Many excerpts are not by art-critics, but historians, academics, curators, journalists, novelists, bloggers, even a fashion writer, in texts published in magazines, books, and blogs. By including a broad range of examples, it offers a sampling of viable approaches, accompanied by short analyses. I adopt the term ‘art-writer’ for anyone tackling art as their written subject—partially, as a short-cut to avoid the streams of prefixes (‘artist/dealer/curator/critic/blogger/“Kunstworker”/journalist/historian’, see section 1.3) otherwise required to describe polyvalent art specialists today.
There is no uniformity of approach in the examples gathered here, which vary from politics to the artist’s biography; studio methods; form and materials; the market; sociology; personal reflection; philosophy; poetry; fiction; art history, and more. Plenty of the finest art-writers—Yve-Alain Bois, Norman Bryson, T.J. Clark, Douglas Crimp, Geoff Dyer, Hal Foster, Jennifer Higgie, David Joselit, Wayne Koestenbaum, Helen Molesworth, Caroline A. Jones, Lucy Lippard, Pamela M. Lee, Jeremy Millar, Craig Owens, Peggy Phelan, Lane Relyea, David Rimanelli, Ralph Rugoff, Anne Wagner, and other notables—are absent. Discover your own ‘best’. Like them, you will have to determine your own role in and angle on the art system. Good writing is good writing whether published in ink or online. (However, given that so much Internet-based commentary can be endlessly modified or deleted, often just vanishing into thin air, future art historians will struggle to find the range of texts that accumulated around a 21st-century artist’s work—a disappearing act that is cause for concern for serious researchers.) My idea is to celebrate good art-writing rather than chime in about the bad, offer some basic advice to those just starting out, and maybe liberate a new generation from believing they must be leaden to be taken seriously. The finest art-writers enjoy their work; they love art, and their pleasure—emotional, intellectual, visual—multiplies when writing about it.
Section One looks at the myriad purposes for art-writing, and a brief history of art-criticism in relation to shifts and expectations today. Section Two is a ‘how to’, listing the most common pitfalls as well as offering problem-solving techniques. Section Three concentrates on particular formats—academic essays, museum website entries, reviews—and delineates the tone and content usually expected for each, relaying some tested strategies and options, ending with a selection of comparative examples about one artist, American painter Sarah Morris. I look at short extracts, often by legendary critics, but plenty are less starry examples, in some instances competent, basic-level art-writing aimed at a general readership. The final Resources section suggests key magazines, blogs, and books for building a contemporary art library, so you can read and learn more; and lists some essential grammatical rules of the English language—still the art-world’s lingua franca (but for how much longer?).
For the very green, my ‘good’ specialist examples may be as tough-going as the ‘bad’. Art-writing is specialized, and some formats require fluency in terminology and proximity to current debate. This contrasts heavily with garden-variety ‘International Art English’ blather, which leaves both the outsider and the art expert in stitches. Novice art-writers (like inexperienced readers), despite their good intentions, can genuinely struggle to distinguish between tangled, unsubstantiated platitudes and a lucid, flawlessly argued editorial by their hero/heroine, be that Dave Hickey or Hito Steyerl. Good art-writers can enhance art’s complexity: clearheaded writing should not be confused with oversimplification. This book aims to help you discern the difference, but does not advocate that all art-writing be geared toward the average open-minded kindergartner. If you are not yet fully conversant in contemporary art, that’s OK; the ‘how to’ section of this book begins with a focus on basic-level formats, such as academic essays and short descriptive texts, usually encountered by the newcomer.
Nonetheless, a paradox haunts this book: How to Write About Contemporary Art is an introductory primer for an intensely specialized and complex job. Seasoned critics penning the more advanced art-writing texts included here (such as newspaper reviews and op-ed journalism) don’t just write well. They raise the best questions and make the most pointed observations, skills drawn from an unquantifiable combination of experience, wisdom, and curiosity—qualities not acquired by reading ‘how to’ books. Notice too, in the best examples, how the author’s sheer imaginative verve brings the text and the artworks to life.
Intuition tells me that the most fertile new art-writing ground may be that currently being charted at the fringes—such as art-related fiction both about art and behaving as art; or philosophy at the intersection of art and literature—yet these daring examples are the least represented here. Any attempt to roadmap this experimental territory would be absurd; a hypothetical chapter ‘How to Write Critico-Fiction’ (as this new genre is sometimes called) would be the art-writing equivalent of ‘How to Make Art’. Discover and experiment with these variants yourself.7 Moreover, I have come to the conclusion that, weirdly enough, much contemporary art-writing is probably not actually meant to be read—much less scrutinized—at all, but fulfills mostly ritualistic purposes. ‘I don’t care what they write, only that they write something,’ one artist friend confided to me. In the words commonly attributed to Andy Warhol, ‘Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches’: a marvelous but devastating comment for an art-writer of any stripe.
Just as anyone can learn to draw competently, anyone can learn to write about art. Learning to draw takes practice (daily, if possible), and the gradual understanding that you must draw what you see, not what you think you see. Drawing is about understanding visual experience, not mechanical skill. The same is true with art-writing. This requires practice (daily, if possible), and entails writing what you see, using the process of writing to understand art.
Begin by concentrating on the art. Help yourself by learning about how artists work and how art is seen. Keep your language varied, but straightforward. Exert your imagination. Enjoy yourself. Edit your texts ruthlessly. Look at the art for yourself, with curiosity. Learn as much as you can; write only what you know.
