Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

  • AMMpro
  • AMM Fantasy Collecting Game
  • Podcast
  • Contact Us

‘French interns imitating American interns imitating American academics imitating French academics’

January 31, 2013 by Marion Maneker

David Levine and Alix Rule are taking ArtSpeak seriously, according to The Guardian:

“Art English is something that everyone in the art world bitches about all the time,” says Levine, a 42-year-old American artist based in New York and Berlin. “But we all use it.” Three years ago, Levine and his friend Rule, a 29-year-old critic and sociology PhD student at Columbia university in New York, decided to try to anatomise it. “We wanted to map it out,” says Levine, “to describe its contours, rather than just complain about it.”

They christened it International Art English, or IAE, and concluded that its purest form was the gallery press release, which – in today’s increasingly globalised, internet-widened art world – has a greater audience than ever. “We spent hours just printing them out and reading them to each other,” says Levine. “We’d find some super-outrageous sentence and crack up about it. Then we’d try to understand the reality conveyed by that sentence.”

Next, they collated thousands of exhibition announcements published since 1999 by e-flux, a powerful New York-based subscriber network for art-world professionals. Then they used some language-analysing software called Sketch Engine, developed by a company in Brighton, to discover what, if anything, lay behind IAE’s great clouds of verbiage.

Their findings were published last year as an essay in the voguish American art journal Triple Canopy; it has since become one of the most widely and excitedly circulated pieces of online cultural criticism. It is easy to see why. Levine and Rule write about IAE in a droll, largely jargon-free style. They call it “a unique language” that has “everything to do with English, but is emphatically not English. [It] is oddly pornographic: we know it when we see it.”

A user’s guide to artspeak (The Guardian)

More from Art Market Monitor

  • Sotheby’s London Cont Evening HighlightsSotheby’s London Cont Evening Highlights
  • Sotheby’s London Sees 1800 Bidders from 72 Countries in London Spring SalesSotheby’s London Sees 1800 Bidders from 72 Countries in London Spring Sales
  • Channel Four Goes to FriezeChannel Four Goes to Frieze
  • Old Master Sales in MaastrichtOld Master Sales in Maastricht
  • Who Just Bought Into Paddle 8 and Will They Disrupt the Art Market?Who Just Bought Into Paddle 8 and Will They Disrupt the Art Market?
  • What's the Right Price in the Koons Market?What's the Right Price in the Koons Market?

Filed Under: General

About Marion Maneker

LiveArt

Want to get Art Market Monitor‘s posts sent to you in our email? Sign up below by clicking on the Subscribe button.

  • About Us/ Contact
  • Podcast
  • AMMpro
  • Newsletter
  • FAQ

twitterfacebooksoundcloud
Privacy Policy
Terms & Conditions
California Privacy Rights
Do Not Sell My Personal Information
Advertise on Art Market Monitor