An artist unveils three paintings to an audience of connoisseurs, who are appalled to discover pictures of things they can recognize on the canvases, with no political content at all. This artist will not be represented at the Carnegie International. He may not leave this room alive.
☛We are indebted to our longtime correspondent “kyp” for the phrase “curatorial prose.”
The art world is just about the most jargon-infested business there is, because there is literally nothing to say about most current art. Much of it is just a bumper sticker or printed T-shirt enlarged to take up more gallery space. Museum curators really have only one message for the public about current art they place in their museums: “This art is good and not bad.” Perhaps we should interpret the one message more precisely as “This art is virtuous and not wicked,” since art is to be judged only by its utility.
Are we being unfair to the curators? Perhaps we are. So, in the spirit of fairness,(1) every so often we shall take a bit of these curators’ writing and see what it really means by analyzing the meanings of the words and applying the rules of grammar and syntax to their arrangement.
Today we take only one sentence, but this one sentence should give us enough to think about for a while.
The projects emerge through everyday acts, materials, and environments, offering spatially expansive portraits of collective life in the present.
Right away Dr. Boli should confess that he is bumbling about in the dark here, because he has not yet seen any of the exhibits. He can only take the words as they come to him, and add to them his knowledge of what commonly goes on in these exhibitions.
Let us start with the first subject and verb: “The projects emerge…”
Most of these works will be installations of some sort—sculptures, paintings, found objects, overturned garbage cans. Leaving the performances off to one side for a moment, in what way do these projects emerge? Well, they probably emerge from a big truck. After they get to their designated spaces, they just sit there.
But the projects do not emerge from in our text. They emerge through. Specifically, they “emerge through everyday acts, materials, and environments.”
First, the acts. Since these works are created by working artists, whatever those artists do for their art is an everyday act. For Michelangelo, hacking David’s foot out of marble was just another day on the job. So we can agree that these projects do indeed emerge through everyday acts.
We also have no quibble with the everyday materials, because we do, from our experience with past Internationals, expect to see a lot of things that would have ended up in the recycling bin if they had not been snatched up by an artist with an idea.
We can probably apply the same logic to the everyday environments, because—again—working artists spend every day in their studios doing art stuff, which eventually emerges from (though perhaps not through) the studio to go to some exhibition or recycling plant, depending on how successful the artist is.
But you may have noticed that, insofar as this part of the sentence says anything, it says nothing interesting. It tells us that artists did what they always do to create art out of things.
However, it was important for the curator to get that word “everyday” in there somehow, because it was important to show that we are not elitists here. A museum curator can imagine nothing more evil than elitism. “Elitism” usually turns out to mean the uneducated opinions of ordinary people, which are bad, and need to be corrected by the salutary application of Art as practiced by people who have earned doctorates from recognized art schools.
The real meaning of the phrase so far, therefore, is This art is virtuous and not wicked.
We go on: “…offering spatially expansive portraits…”
It is the “projects” that are “offering,” if we parse the grammar of the sentence correctly. They are offering portraits, which is different from being portraits, and these portraits are spatially expansive.
“Expansive” is often used metaphorically to mean “high-spirited,” but modifying the adjective with the adverb “spatially” seems to cut off all possibility of metaphor. We must take “expansive” in the literal sense of “growing to occupy a good bit of space.” That is probably true of many of the works, which come off the truck in kit form and are assembled into large displays that take up more space than the unassembled pieces did when they were crated.
In other words, the projects are offering big portraits.
Even though that is what the words mean, however, that is almost certainly not what our curator meant to say. In fact, the curator almost certainly did not mean to exclude small works. What probably happened was this: the word “expansive” came to the curator’s mind as a synonym for “good,” but it suggested the idea of physical space, and since the phrase without an adverb sounded too much like a thing someone who hadn’t been to art school would say, “spatially” stepped up to do its job of prolonging the sentence and making it sound as though the curator had some carefully thought-out ideas. It added dimension and heft and other good things. It did not add meaning.
But what kind of portraits are they? Not portraits of your Aunt Minerva, you may be assured. They are “spatially expansive portraits of collective life in the present.”
These are portraits that tell us something about life, but not a particular life—not the life of some special person—but collective life, the life we all live together. There are no elitists here: that is the message of the word “collective.”
And there is no past. The past is bad, and only the present is morally defensible. Therefore, every single one of these works is a portrait of collective life in the present. You will not find any pictures of historical events, like Julius Caesar crossing the Delaware, because the past is all bad and anyone who cares or knows anything about it must be repudiated. All this art exists in the present, because it is virtuous, and virtue lives only in the present.
So we have looked at one sentence from a curator’s description of the Carnegie International and found that, reduced to its essence, it says nothing at all, except that, if you are an habitué of the art world, the art will not challenge your preconceived notions of what is good and proper. Now, you may see some promotional literature from the Carnegie describing the art as “challenging,” but “challenging” is a code word in the art world. It means “not challenging.”
Perhaps in a few days we can spend another few hundred words picking apart another sentence, but it would be naive to expect any other meaning to come out of it.
Footnotes
- This is probably a lie. We really mean in the spirit of sarcasm and mockery. (↩)