Why is so much visual arts criticism completely unreadable?

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I know this is a popular meme on ILX right now, but "is it some kind of joke" that art critics might care to share? Exceptions made for the guy in the New Yorker and a few others.

― Samuel Glickstein (nordicskilla), Thursday, 14 April 2005 21:04 (twenty years ago)

maybe yer eyes are too close to the page. try standing back a little.

― scott seward (scott seward), Thursday, 14 April 2005 21:07 (twenty years ago)

Why is so much literary criticism so unappealing to the eye? Er, what Scott said.

― M. White (Miguelito), Thursday, 14 April 2005 21:08 (twenty years ago)

the guy in the new yorker is comprehensible but dreadfully boring.

― hstencil (hstencil), Thursday, 14 April 2005 21:10 (twenty years ago)

Matthew Collings is a good example of a coherent modern art critic.

― moley, Thursday, 14 April 2005 21:10 (twenty years ago)

http://s48.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=06LDHAWSLFEMQ0H5J948DJJ6QI

― Open your eyes; you can fly! (ex machina), Thursday, 14 April 2005 21:14 (twenty years ago)

Search: any writings by Mike Kelley

― Amon (eman), Thursday, 14 April 2005 21:17 (twenty years ago)

i mean "search" as in he's an example of entertaining and very readable crit. of both his own work and others.

― Amon (eman), Thursday, 14 April 2005 21:19 (twenty years ago)

agreed, mike kelley rules.

― hstencil (hstencil), Thursday, 14 April 2005 21:26 (twenty years ago)

writing about architecture is like dancing to music!

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Friday, 15 April 2005 00:22 (twenty years ago)

I get press packs for art openings like 4-5 days a week and the writing/critics' blurbs etc are worse than rave flyer DJ profiles. I live in Vancouver too so I get so many from 'skateboard art collectives', so many fucking images and t-shirts with BIRD STENCILS. FUCK ALL BIRD STENCILS

― LeCoq (LeCoq), Friday, 15 April 2005 00:40 (twenty years ago)

Actually while yall at it, FUCK ANY ART LINKED EVEN BY A TINY STRING OF BLOODY SINEW TO SKATEBOARD CULTURE, you pieces of shit and your OLDE TYME FONTS

― LeCoq (LeCoq), Friday, 15 April 2005 00:42 (twenty years ago)

its because we went to art school, where they dont teach you how to write. sorry.

― maria tessa sciarrino (theoreticalgirl), Friday, 15 April 2005 00:43 (twenty years ago)

im just kidding. there's some good writers out there.

― maria tessa sciarrino (theoreticalgirl), Friday, 15 April 2005 00:44 (twenty years ago)

OMG OMG don't even get me started on the hand-drawn balloon fonts. I got half a mind to start telling kids on campus that "the Volcom stone represents the penis and the Roxy diamond represents the vagina, and that's why all the car stickers, it's how white kids mate"

― LeCoq (LeCoq), Friday, 15 April 2005 00:44 (twenty years ago)

i blame space1026 for the current state of indie art. and graff thugs, of course.

― maria tessa sciarrino (theoreticalgirl), Friday, 15 April 2005 00:46 (twenty years ago)

Actually while yall at it, FUCK ANY ART LINKED EVEN BY A TINY STRING OF BLOODY SINEW TO SKATEBOARD CULTURE, you pieces of shit and your OLDE TYME FONTS
-- LeCoq (leiffe...) (webmail), April 15th, 2005 6:42 PM. (LeCoq) (link)

OMG 100% OTM

― Tyrone Willie Demetrius DeAndre DeShawn (deangulberry), Friday, 15 April 2005 01:01 (twenty years ago)

Well it was a bit angryman of me, but seriously, last year when I saw a RVCA shirt I liked, I told the sales homo I liked his store's selection, and he goes, Oh, IT"S PRONOUNCED "RUCA" not R V C A, and I was so speechless all I could do was shoot him a cold steel look like OH NO I HAD NO IDEA THERE'S A CHICANO INFLUENCED OLDE TYME DESIGN CLUB ON RIGHT NOW, I SHOULD *TOTALLY* KILL MYSELF NOW RIGHT!?!?

― LeCoq (LeCoq), Friday, 15 April 2005 01:13 (twenty years ago)

because lots of time art deals with ideas that require a specliased language, like cars or maths

also dave hickey to thread (or david rimenalli (sp) or even hal foster)

― anthony, Friday, 15 April 2005 01:28 (twenty years ago)

specialized language = making shit up. thinking about the stuff my classmates would spew during critiques... excuse, i must go barf right now.

― maria tessa sciarrino (theoreticalgirl), Friday, 15 April 2005 01:32 (twenty years ago)

I had a similar problem at a RVCA opening.

― Tyrone Willie Demetrius DeAndre DeShawn (deangulberry), Friday, 15 April 2005 01:33 (twenty years ago)

LeCoq, you're saying things that I'd never realized I agree with completely. It's not so much the old timey fonts and specific stuff though as it is how totally conformist most internet-propagated youth culture art stuff is.

― Dan I. (Dan I.), Friday, 15 April 2005 01:34 (twenty years ago)

lecoq, youre OTM. i was making the same arguments about this kind of work a few years ago and people looked at me like i was crazypants.

― maria tessa sciarrino (theoreticalgirl), Friday, 15 April 2005 01:36 (twenty years ago)

*WARNING* old-tyme kitsch fonts galore *WARNING*

― Amon (eman), Friday, 15 April 2005 02:12 (twenty years ago)

but the thing is, thazt if you are talking about lets say baseball no one bitches about people talking about rbis and strike percentages and all of that (i have never talked about baseball in my life) anbd people dont mind people talking bullshit--ketvching or gossipping

why does thsi mean in art

old timey skate board art is shit though

― anthony, Friday, 15 April 2005 02:37 (twenty years ago)

Agreed, you can't do away with all technical language, but someone like Dave Hickey is eminently readable without compromising his ideas or relying on lazy jargon.

― the krza (krza), Friday, 15 April 2005 02:54 (twenty years ago)

heheh . can i just syndicate lecoq rants on my art blog?
big words suck ass

― lolita corpus (lolitacorpus), Friday, 15 April 2005 02:55 (twenty years ago)

Anth, there's a big difference between talking about chiaroscuro or other techinical jargon and talking about "making the absence present" (which Ann Hamilton kept yammering on about when I saw her talk the other day) or even worse forms of dribbledy-drab.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 15 April 2005 04:14 (twenty years ago)

This question is pretty relevant to me right now since I've been writing an art book for Thames and Hudson. It's about photoblogging, and the book's style is to run pictures that were originally posted on internet blogs, together with some of the comments people made when the photos were posted. Since the pictures and the comments are pretty loose, fresh, informal, personal, I've tried to keep the texts in a similar style. The kind of thing you might leave in a Comments slot. Now, that doesn't mean that the ideas involved have to be small or trivial. I think there are ways to talk about big subjects without using academic jargon. I think Andy Warhol did this very well. A lot of Andy Warhol's writing is a bit like something someone would leave in blog comments. I'm also influenced by Matthew Collings. I like his directness, his sense of contingency, his presentation of himself as an actor in the scenes he's describing (rather than using the dreaded academic "we"), his emotional involvement.

So I'd like to propose that whereas the template for art criticism used to be, say, French theory, now it's blogging, or soap opera. But this is in fact a fulfillment of French theory rather than a refutation of it. You know, Debord was right about "the society of Spectacle", but rather than mentioning that in a footnote, we embody it.

― Momus (Momus), Friday, 15 April 2005 04:32 (twenty years ago)

is Walter Pater still respected/read by academics and intellekshuals?

― milozauckerman (miloaukerman), Friday, 15 April 2005 04:47 (twenty years ago)

six years pass...

I was too shy to start a new thread, but I wondered if we could talk about any interesting or alternative curatorial strategies that you may have witnessed or even just read about.

― Elderflower Gimcrax Flores (admrl), Friday, 12 August 2011 00:41 (fourteen years ago)

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