[-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening

[Semitransgenic]

I would tend to focus on the word "inclusive" in that previous quote,
audience engagement is important, IAE doesn't help with this really.

My gripe is not with with considered and qualified "insider" discourse,
people need to build careers somehow, I guess, it's with artists who use
IAE as a distraction; a situation where feigned profundity is coupled with
"art" that's simply not up to the task.

Not wishing to condemn thorough academic writing at all; although the Sokal
affair does come to mind when a comparison between quantum physics and art
is made.


On 20 June 2014 04:11, Christoph Cox <ccox at hampshire.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>  Rule and Levine's analysis of "International Art English
> <http://canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/16/contents/international_art_english>"
> was brilliant and hilarious (AND, it should be mentioned, a project of
> Triple Canopy, one of the key purveyors of contemporary art discourse, or
> IAE, I suppose). It's also certainly worth doing anthropological/cultural
> anthropological analyses of cultural discourses.
>
> But roundly condemning any conceptual or technical discourse about art is,
> I think, simply anti-intellectual. There are certainly bad and obfuscating
> writers of art discourse but also brilliantly illuminating ones. Of course,
> that's true in any field. Why should we expect (or want) art (or
> humanistic) discourse to be more "jargon-free" than any other discourse?
> Should we equally condemn hepatologists or quantum physicists or
> epistemologists for having peculiar insider discourses? That would be dumb,
> I think.
>
> Salome remarks: "I do not think sound is necessarily political, and a
> vista is not per se political either, but listening and looking are. Sound
> is sound and a chair is a chair, but how I look at it or listen to it is
> political." I understand what she means, of course. But I think we need to
> be wary of that sort of distinction, as though the world is inert and
> meaningless until we impose meaning and value on it. Again, this sort of
> world/human, fact/value distinction easily slides into idealism and a
> theological inflation of the human. The world is vast array of forces,
> human and non-human, that impose themselves on us and vice versa, and that,
> each in their own way, are selective, evaluative, etc. It's not some dumb
> thing waiting for me to make (or not make) meaning and politics out of it.
>
> On 6/19/14, 12:06 PM, Semitransgenic wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
>
> Hi Seth,
>
>  not sure I can agree with this : ) "The fatigue with the language of
> conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the
> very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies
> of our times and places" and actually, the very sentence *"**a response
> to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant
> vocabularies of our times and places"* is artspeak ; )
>
>  Unfortunately, like it or not, within the "art-world" IAE is a dominant vocabulary,
> it really has gone beyond a joke at this point.
>
> So:
> <http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide-international-art-english>
> * "**Will the hegemony of IAE, to use a very IAE term, ever end? Rule and
> Levine think it soon might. Now that competence in IAE is almost a given
> for art professionals, its allure as an exclusive private language is
> fading. When IAE goes out of fashion, they write, 'We probably shouldn't
> expect that the globalised art world's language will become ... inclusive.
> More likely, the elite of that world will opt for something like
> conventional highbrow English.'"*
>
>
>
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