Humanities-speak gone wild

Over at Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green links to the College Art Association's list of papers to be presented at its annual conference, summarized here by the Art History Newsletter. This is the kind of thing I love to read, simply for the utterly confounding, intentionally obfuscating and always entertaining terms certain writers and academics sometimes use to sex up the titles of their papers.

My fave: “Pray, Sir, Whose Dog Are You? Nobility and Animality in Eighteenth-Century French Hunting Pictures.”

This list, which is definitely one for the ages, reminds me of Gary Kamiya's much-circulated essay for Salon, jokingly titled "Transgressing the Transgressors: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Total Bull***," available here. It documents a successful attempt by physicist Alan Sokal to place a completely invented paper into a prestigious cultural journal simply by couching it in terms that appeal to what Sokal characterized as a group of lazy intellectuals.

Truth be told, a good deal of academic writing in university art history programs is sound, intriguing and intellectually curious in the best sense. But there is plenty of stuff out there that's just a lot of talk. Some of that, unsurprisingly, has trickled into segments of the art world, where curatorial speak run amok can have the effect of confusing the viewer about art rather than informing him.

Lists like this help us distinguish between what's useful and what's pointless jargon. It's sometimes awfully tough to decipher, given the complex concepts contemporary art provides, but it's good to know there are folks out there (MAN, Sokal and others) actively working to point out the difference.

--Colin Dabkowski