In July, digital art magazine Triple Canopy published a comprehensive examination of the language we use to talk about contemporary art. Authors Alix Rule and David Levine aren’t the first to identify the pretentious, sometimes absurd language among art folks—called “artspeak” in some circles—but they are the first to argue it is a dialect, a variety of language so ingrained within a particular group that we can identify a certain structure across its speakers. Their clinical approach, taking on the tone of an academic linguistic study, outlines the lexical and syntactical makeup of International Art English, or IAE. While the article borders on satire, none of it deviates from truth; examples come from a thorough analysis of gallery press releases, culled from online art news digest e-flux. The dialect depends on the overuse of certain vocabulary (such as “space,” both physically and metaphysically) and an adherence to ...

Knuckle tattoos, a raised fist in the air, fisting, fighting, flexing, the grip of the hand. The knuckles' power comes from the space between the hand and the outside world, a way of considering the mutual contingency of individual and collective, subjective and universal, personal and political, symbolic and material.

I love knuckles. I especially appreciate the formal constraints of the knuckle tattoo of typically two, four-letter words.  Despite the fact that knuckles never go flaccid, my knuckle tats read "LIMP DICK."  It's not the irony that I'm after, it's about insisting on forms and symbols that cannot be reduced to sloganeering.

My round and knobby knuckle mountains become smooth, flat plateaus--launch pads for disaster and desire. They're perfect for drawing lines. There are invisible geometries - the trajectory of the punch or the fist thrust into the air. The slow push of your fist inside of ...

 Critic Dave Hickey's advice to young artists: go to the point where you know art was good and pick it up from there. At dOCUMENTA (13), the most recent iteration of the international art exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany, Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev appears guided by a similar wisdom. The works in the show, while largely contemporary, span the course of modernism. One entry, the small figurines known as the Bactrian Princesses, dates from the second millennia B.C. dOCUMENTA (13) is a sprawling exhibition with dozens of venues and over 2000 events that take over the entire city center during the exhibition's 100 days. The show's expansiveness, however, is not limited to chronology, duration, and geography, but reaches to the very definition of artist. The exhibition, which includes close to 200 named "participants," includes philosophers, anthropologists, poets, zoologists, and even a physicist, Anton Zellinger ...

Il Sodoma - St. Sebastian

Apparently JM Coetzee said this, and it’s where Jonah Lehrer ends his essay about the way negative emotion heightens creativity.

Lehrer’s citing from a new paper in which subjects were given either positive stimulus in the form of a smile and a vertical nod, or negative stimulus—a frown and horizontal shake. After stimulus, subjects were asked to make a collage. When the collages were evaluated by professional artists, it turned out that the frown-and-shake crowd made more interesting and thoughtful work. Lehrer ties this to Steve Jobs’ capacity to deliver devastating criticism to employees, and suggests that the feeling of sadness improved the subjects’ ability to focus and made them more capable of persisting with a creative challenge.

This resonates on a number of levels, and presents a number of problems.

I come to my work as a practicing artist, and I’ll ...

Maud Newton took to the New York Times on Sunday to diagnose the whole blogosphere and internet’s use of language with a rambling, equivocal-yet-epiphanic style problem that she kind of pins on David Foster Wallace. She rightly pointed out that the blog format, Dave Eggers, postmodernism and of course DFW, that poor guy you can blame for everything now that he’s left the building, created a language that leaned so much into its own subjectivity that it turned into something loopy and defensive. That wanted so much to be simultaneously readable and literary that it settled for wishy-washy.

Mark Twain

Newton’s right when she calls for the clarity of Mark Twain in this moment. In doing so, she reminded me of a conversation I had yesterday with a brilliant thinker who has been using art to make the world a better place for some time. We turned ...