Yesterday I visited the Newspeak:British Art Now exhibition in London. (Stop holding your head Kalleh, I'm not about to discuss art) and I bought the guide book.
It''s a remarkable piece of work and I intend to post at length about the use of language in it, both on my blog (where I will also be talking about the art) and here (where I will confine myself to the language.)

Purely for wordcraft though is this little trailer of forthcoming attractions, a small selection of the random gibberish that makes up the guide. I thought I could speak art bullshit quite fluently, but apparently not.

quote:

(his) paintings flirt between abstraction and figuration, their tranquil scenes merging unstable ideas of memory, conjoined histories and cross-culturalism...conveying a sense of disorientation and displacement.

quote:

The faint linear squares instantly flat-pack the painting revealing all as mere plan or projection; their endless repretition an application of measurable maths, disproving the assertion of chaotic geometry.

quote:

(It) is bound by a concern with elucidating various phases of the fictive, the apparent and the real... holding in equilibrium the fantastical with the blunt actualities of junk, emphasisng this in the reordering of things known, producing new and surprising value out of meagre means.

Or to put that last one another way as my friend did - "it's a red light in a black box". - a rather more succinct and accurate description of the piece.

The guide describes more than 120 pieces, all in similar terms. It's absolutely hilarious, though I suspect the authors don't think so. Much more on this later.

I've made my first blogpost on the subject. It's in the form of a little quiz. Here are five quotes from the guide. All you have to do, and you can do this in your head without writing or replying, is try to picture the artwork. They are all quite conventional - one sculpture and four paintings.


Through this literal hybrid, Claydon incites the current revivals of genetic engineering and post-modern eclecticism as plausible validation of [J.G.] Frazer's theories.

From this consumerised reproduction. MacKinven crafts a twisted and contorted portrait that conceptually merges the forefathers of communism and today's hyper-capitalism, addressing selective appropriation of ideology and history's romanticised cycles and ill-fitting precedent


Her knitted jumper appears to be a structure both containing her body and stiffly holding it together.


Any true sense of time or place is discarded as one iconic image crashes into another to leave a chaos of chronology and open-ended associations.


All the weight is in one knuckle as if the foetal figure is a chyrsalis in transformation.

Do we get to see how right we are? Those descriptions are hilarious. I loved reading the description compared to your friend's!

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:
...all as mere plan or projection; their endless repretition an application of measurable maths,

Is "repretition" a typo, or is the writer also a writer for Sarah Palin?