Art Critics’ Vocabulary July 2, 2009
Posted by cantueso in art, market, writing.trackback
If a professional art critic is clueless or can’t find a thing to say, he strings up his wordies :
“……… a firm persona
and a myth ……….. interacted amusingly………. … highly labile…….no less explosively, but as starkly….. subtle ……contrasts…….. agitate a frenzy ……. a frantic crawl across a flagstone floor in darkness, with a bullet slicing the terror like a surge of adrena…….”
That is style for those who until recently paid big money for those things to hang on their walls:
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Rauschenberg is maybe too deep for most:
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On Jasper Johns he even had the guts to say “frankly”:
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On de Kooning :
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The cartoons are from a video where the muppets talk about art ↓ 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDo_vs3Aip4
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The text quotes are a random selection of people who are poorly paid to write whatever will please the galleries. The pictures are also random, but even so you can probably see the difference between Kooning and the others.
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By the way, have you seen Chris Madden’s modern art gallery yet?
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Let’s take a little pity on those professional critics, hmm? To earn their bread they have to crank out words quickly by the hundreds or thousands. We who offer our critiques gratis can afford to be a little less expansive.
This kind of writing is mostly bribed.
I did not look for these text samples. They were simply the first I came across when I looked up these famous names. I discarded only one, because it was at Wikipedia and seemed anonymous as to origin.