Key Concepts
Art Speak (International Art English)
Jargon-heavy language used in art world press releases and criticism, characterized by verbification, stacked dependent clauses, liminal framing, and academic buzzwords that prioritize complexity over meaning.
Central subject of the essay; examined as a social, linguistic, and economic phenomenon
Literary Horseshoe Theory
The irony that modern art, in rebelling against the literary narrative of Renaissance painting, paradoxically became more dependent on written text as the work itself dematerialized.
Primary historical explanation for art speak's emergence by the late 1960s
Elite Overproduction
Peter Turchin's term for societies producing more credentialed elites than their power structures can absorb, generating competition, status anxiety, and credential inflation.
Structural explanation for why art speak escalates in complexity as BFA/MFA graduates far outnumber available jobs
Flatness
Clement Greenberg's aesthetic ideal: a painting that exists entirely on the canvas surface with no illusionistic depth, foreground, or background.
The theoretical benchmark that triggered an arms race of dematerialization across successive art movements
Verbification
Art speak's core technique of assigning active verbs to artworks — interrogates, queers, decolonizes, reframes — to simulate an active, transformative relationship between the object and the viewer.
Primary grammatical mechanism that creates art speak's imaginary world of artistic agency
Dematerialization
The progressive removal of physical, pictorial, and spatial qualities from art across successive movements, from abstract expressionism through earth art and conceptual art.
The historical process that made written justification for art increasingly necessary
Credentialism
The escalating demand for higher credentials as existing degrees lose distinguishing value: BFA to MFA to residency to PhD, in an endless cycle of status competition.
Drives art speak's increasing complexity as a proxy signal for elite educational achievement
Goodhart's Law
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure; in art speak, incomprehensibility becomes the goal rather than an incidental feature.
Explains the perverse incentive whereby more bewildering art speak confers higher perceived status
Audience Wish Fulfillment
Art speak's tendency to presume and dictate the audience's emotional and intellectual response in the past tense, bypassing actual viewer engagement.
Root of art speak's pretension; also reveals the absence of real audiences who care about the work
Dependent Clause Overloading
The grammatical piling of subordinate clauses before the main clause, making sentences nearly impossible to parse orally and obscuring the subject.
Key structural technique responsible for art speak's notorious unreadability
Liminal Space
Art speak's near-universal framing of artworks as existing between states — always in transition, spanning from one pole to another — rather than having fixed, falsifiable meaning.
Creates conceptual vagueness that resists scrutiny and invites infinite interpretation
Academic Gerontocracy
The domination of tenured university art positions by aging baby boomer professors, blocking career pathways for younger MFA graduates and intensifying elite overproduction.
Structural bottleneck that traps artists in a cycle of credential-seeking and art speak performance
People Mentioned
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Brad Troemel
Video essayist and artist; narrator and author of The Art Speak Report
Self-described 15-year art speak user seeking recovery; shifted to plain-language communication when his work required a general audience
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Tom Wolfe
American author and journalist; cultural critic of the art world
Wrote The Painted Word, describing how modern art paradoxically became dependent on written theory despite rejecting literary painting
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Clement Greenberg
Influential American art critic
Championed flatness as the highest ideal of modern painting; Jackson Pollock's primary critical advocate
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Jackson Pollock
Abstract expressionist painter
His drip-painted canvases were championed by Greenberg as exemplifying flatness
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Jasper Johns
American painter; key figure in Pop Art
Painted flags and numbers, achieving a meta-level of flatness that Steinberg used to argue Pop Art surpassed abstract expressionism
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Leo Steinberg
Art historian and critic; champion of Pop Art
Argued abstract expressionism was still literary and Pop Art achieved a higher flatness by rendering already-flat objects flat once more
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Frank Stella
American minimalist painter
Removed frames from paintings, turning the canvas shape itself into the frame — a step in art's progressive dematerialization
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Sol LeWitt
American conceptual artist
Bypassed hanging pictures by painting directly on gallery walls; name transcribed as 'Solowit' in the video
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Hilton Kramer
Chief art critic of The New York Times
1974 review quoted demanding theoretical justification as a baseline requirement for exhibitions, marking art speak's shift from elite competition to universal expectation
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Peter Turchin
American-Russian complexity scientist and cliodynamicist
Developed elite overproduction theory as a root cause of political instability; Trimell applies it to art speak's proliferation among over-credentialed MFA graduates
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Alix Rule
Cultural critic; co-author of International Art English
Co-wrote the 2012 Triple Canopy essay analyzing art speak's linguistic patterns; name transcribed as 'Alex Rool' in the video
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David Levine
Performance artist; co-author of International Art English
Co-wrote the 2012 Triple Canopy essay with Alix Rule documenting art speak's wordiness and syntactic habits
Wikipedia ↗Books & Works Referenced
The Painted Word
The Painted Word
Argues modern art became paradoxically literary and theory-dependent; source for the literary horseshoe theory; title transcribed as 'The Painter Word' in the video
International Art English
International Art English
Essay published in Triple Canopy (online); linguistic analysis of art speak's characteristic wordiness, syntax, and vocabulary; no ISBN
Movements & Periods
c. 1400–1700
Renaissance Painting
Literary, illusionistic painting illustrating biblical stories and historical events with realistic depth, positioning the viewer as if entering the scene — the tradition modern art defined itself against
c. 1860–1970
Modernism
Broad movement rejecting illusionism and literary narrative; artists made the canvas surface and means of construction visible, setting off the dematerialization arms race
c. 1943–1965
Abstract Expressionism
American movement defined by gestural brushwork and the drip technique (Pollock); championed by Greenberg for embodying flatness, though later critics called it still too literary
c. 1955–1970
Pop Art
Used already-flat commercial imagery (flags, numbers) to achieve a meta-level of flatness that, per Leo Steinberg, defeated abstract expressionism at its own game
c. 1950–1970
Color Field Painting
Removed gestural brushstrokes from abstract painting, eliminating the personal narrative implied by the painter's hand
c. 1960–1975
Minimalism
Stripped art to geometric forms that divided and defined gallery space itself, turning the entire building into an extension of the artwork
c. 1967–1980
Land Art (Earth Art)
Removed the gallery building by creating permanent large-scale works outdoors, requiring written documentation for the work to be known at all
c. 1965–1975
Conceptual Art
Removed permanent physical objects; work could exist as documentation of an idea or instructions — the movement most reliant on written text and most responsible for institutionalizing art speak
1960s–present
MFA Academic Art World
The expansion of BFA and MFA programs replaced Bohemian culture with academic critique culture, making art speak the lingua franca and universities the art world's primary economic engine
1970s–present
Postmodern Theory in Art
French postmodern philosophy and New Left identity politics filtered into MFA curricula, providing the vocabulary — subaltern, the political, radicality, liminality — that forms art speak's DNA
Memorable Quotes
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by instantiating a self-reflective discourse of communicative modalities, we can equitably interrogate liminal notions of difference within writerly technologies
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Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does lack a persuasive theory, and given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial. — Hilton Kramer, New York Times, 1974
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Her canvases adopt an interplay of repetition and variety, exploring the relationship between the digital and the gestural within the medium of painting.
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The photographs resist the instantaneous and resided a place of tension, striving to poetically reframe an essential part of the mystery of a global tribe.
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encoding blackness as a para-history, the sculpture radically decolonizes the white cube as a racially homogeneous space.
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This harbor of aesthetic ambiguity stretches across temporalities, transforming viewers gaze with nuanced visual enunciations.
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Working with such quasi-absolute practices, which speak of past economies and ecologies, could easily culminate in conservative and retroactive proposals, but the work successfully avoids a nostalgic rescue and or fetishization of these modes of production.
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Whether clinging to the wall or freely suspended, these objects turn codified binaries beyond expectation. They are visceral, yet epidermal, prosthetic, yet native, sensuous, yet aversive, permeable, yet plasticine.
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Like an insect, or the wounded, or even a fugitive, the artist moves forward with their signature combination of skill and awkwardness.
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veering away from linear and deterministic communication processes while passing along the curvatures of a matrix, these sequences of poetic computation are a choreography of visceral compositions arriving from algorithmic rituals.
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The medium is the message and the message is pick me.
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What arts speak offers is a chance to imitate the symptom of genius without replicating the cause to create the same confusion but without the artistic payoff.