The wrong kind of unreadability

International Art English

Alix Rule, a sociologist, and David Levine, an artist, [created] a website called e-flux where all of the art galleries from round the world put their press releases through it. They put it through a language analyser and they came up with a few observations about what they called international art English. “International art English rebukes ordinary English for its lack of nouns. Visual becomes visuality. Global becomes globality. Potential becomes potentiality. And experience of course becomes experienceability.” Now they describe the kind of metaphysical seasickness you get from reading this sort of text, or it sounds all a bit like inexpertly translated French.

From Democracy Has Bad Taste -- Reith Lecture by Grayson Perry