Dear Babs, 

I’m sick of the BS-way people in the art world talk so that most of us can’t understand them. Why can’t they just be okay with calling stuff beautiful and cool? Has the art world always been like this? Is it just to be exclusive, or is there a point I’m not getting?

—Disillusioned in Denver

Dear Disillusioned,

The BS-talk you refer to is called International Art English or IAE for short—a term coined by Alix Rule and David Levine to describe the particular language spoken in the gallery-to-museum, pipeline-driven contemporary art world. Writing for the magazine Triple Canopy in 2012, the authors attempted to use data analysis to explore the structure and use of language in thousands of press releases distributed since 1999 by the e-flux newsletter, which was (and is?) the place where art PR starts. They pointed out features of IAE, like the persistent use of single and double adverbial phrases and dependent clauses that go on and on, and hiding a sentence’s meaning deep in its syntactical bowels. One of their more interesting assertions is that IAE began with bad English translations of French Post-structuralist and German Frankfurt School writings from such theorists as Roland Barthes and Theodor W. Adorno. These original translations provided inspirational ways of thinking about the world but were also nearly impenetrable to everyday readers. After working through academia and influential such publications as October, this way of writing became the norm adopted by an international art world linked together through the internet. Eventually, according to the authors, you get press releases written by “ … French interns imitating American interns imitating American academics imitating French academics.”

Yes, IAE is exclusionary, but it’s not useless; there are many cool ideas in the gobbledygook. My advice is not to let IAE get to you. Call it out when you see it and try to engage. Who knows? Perhaps one day, you might find yourself hermeneutically excavating discursively charged understandings of perception masking the “real” that fetishistically lurks beneath post-internet systems of cognitive exclusion.