If you looked up the words “orange and teal” ten or fifteen years ago in your favorite search engine, you would have found a number of essays complaining about how certain directors had adopted an all-orange-and-teal color palette, and how very annoying it was to sit through a whole movie with such a dull and limited range of colors.

At some point, however, orange and teal froze into a dogma—a dogma in the religious sense, with fanatical evangelists and even inquisitors. Now if you look up the words “orange and teal,” you will see that it is scientific fact that orange-and-teal color grading looks better in movies and videos. One of the top results when Dr. Boli tried the experiment was a video called “Why Teal & Orange Is Scientifically More Cinematic.” Even Adobe, the monopolistic titan of the design business, has an article entitled “Why you should use orange and teal color grading” (although, to give them credit, they have recently toned down the title to “Why you should try orange and teal color grading for videos”).

It is very difficult to find other colors than shades of orange and teal in a film these days. It’s the revenge of two-strip Technicolor.

Dr. Boli is not the only one who is thoroughly tired of the orange-and-teal look, but it is hard to make go away, because a generation of filmmakers has grown up knowing that film and video must go through a postprocessing stage in which all the colors are pushed into the orange and teal ranges.

And why orange and teal? Because orange and teal are complementary colors, and complementary colors look good together. Most artists would tell you that. But why not other pairs of complementary colors? Because human flesh is in the orangish range; and since movies are usually about humans, teal must be the other color. “Many skin tones fall into the orange spectrum,” says Adobe, “so pushing blues into the shadows will help those skin tones stand out.”

And that gives us our one word to bring the whole house of orange-and-teal cards tumbling down. Orange-and-teal is racist.

There is absolutely nothing a Hollywood filmmaker fears more than being called a racist. (In Dr. Boli’s experience, it is usually racists who are afraid of being called racists; but he will not pursue that line of thought further at the moment.) The orange-and-teal dogma assumes that European flesh is the default tone for human flesh. It is as transparently racist as it can possibly be.

So there, if you have entered a debate with a videographer or filmmaker about the necessity for orange-and-teal color grading, is your Big Bertha. Use it wisely—but you’ll probably have to use it.

Meanwhile, if you would like to see how it is possible to make a film that looks beautiful without restricting yourself to orange and teal, you can look at La Cucaracha from 1934, the first live-action film shot entirely in the new three-strip Technicolor process. In the very first shot after the titles, you will see a woman wearing orange and teal. And then you will see green, and purple, and red, and deep blue, and yellow, and violet, and magenta—all the colors that could not be rendered in two-strip Technicolor. You will fall in love with color as a sensation, perhaps enough to make you forget that you are watching an otherwise mediocre two-reeler. It made the Academy forget: La Cucaracha won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject in the Comedy category in 1934.

No. 4.—Pheme, goddess of rumor, launched on her way by Ossa, goddess of social media.

If you were a lazy satirist, you could come to any major exhibition of contemporary art (such as, for example, the Carnegie International, of which we are preparing a more extensive review for some time in the indefinite future) and just write down the text of the signs you see, and then you would not need to trouble yourself to write a prompt that would obtain a good satire of the art world from an AI bot.

Artworks convey a range of experiences and perspectives through images, language and form. Please pace yourselves and make choices based on age, interests, preferences, and sensory needs.

Falling clay is present in this installation. Please move through with care.

Please be advised that an artwork in this gallery features loud sounds and flashing lights that may disturb some viewers.

This artwork contains visually graphic imagery that the artist developed using video game engine technology.

Of course, you would not be that lazy. But if you were, you could do it.

No. 3.—Offended by a substandard grain offering, Thamnophis, god of serpent-tired vehicles, causes all the bouquets in Thebes to wilt at once.

No. 2.—Two Furies buy discounted designer fashions from a street vendor, unaware that the clothes are cheap knockoffs with counterfeit labels—a transaction the vendor will come to regret.

No. 1.—Antimonos having accidentally felled a shepherd on a hunting expedition, Mentholatos suggests chicken wings instead.

Many beggars are kept from reaching their full potential by undistinguished, ill-designed, and even downright amateurish signs. As a service to the community, Dr. Boli now offers these handsome signs for beggars at very reasonable prices. Write for price list and easy payment terms.

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.

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☛We are indebted to our longtime correspondent “kyp” for the phrase “curatorial prose.”

The main purpose of jargon is to give people something to say when they have nothing to say, which allows them to join the interminable conversation in their businesses and justify their salaries. The jargon allows them to live productive lives, in the sense of bringing home enough money to keep eating, without any conscious thought.

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, 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.