Meg Onli and Chrissie Iles (Photo: Bryan Derballa; Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art)

Earlier this week, I received the Whitney Museum’s press email announcing the artists featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial, titled Even Better Than the Real Thing. Rather than the names, copious pronouns (the first time I recall those being included in a biennial list), or the fact that the exhibition is named after a fucking U2 song, I fixated on another part of the press release: the baffling language. Or more specifically, one quote from the upcoming show’s curators Meg Onli and Chrissie Iles that is such a head-spinning jargon-filled tongue-tangle that it’s basically transcendent. It reads:

“We sought to create an exhibition in the form of what artist Ligia Lewis calls a ‘dissonant chorus,’ unharmonious in its collectivity,” said Iles and Onli. “It is striking how many artists are contending with relationships between the psyche and the body, and the precarity of the past few years. Artists are continuing to grapple with history and identity; we have made an exhibition that unfolds as a set of relations, exploring the challenges of coming together in a fractured moment. We are thrilled to be working with such a rigorous and thoughtful group of artists to create a space where ideas and the materiality of the world can be examined and engaged.”

Uh…what?

Let’s break this down a bit, shall we? Attempting to get to the root of what is being said here, it seems like they’re trying to communicate that they…curated a contemporary art survey exhibition? All survey shows, which bring together a random assortment of artists seen as important to individual curators, are technically a “set of relations,” no? I also particularly like the choice of “unfolding” as if walking around a museum is akin to playing with a paper fortune teller. So mysterious! What is inside?! At least, though, I understand what a “set of relations” means. I can’t say the same for the “dissonant chorus” (ok, I get that part) that is “unharmonious in its collectivity,” a statement reprinted in nearly every article about the show announcement without caveat or explanation. Does this just indicate the works don’t make any sense together?

Naturally, just about every biennial—or survey exhibition—since at least Trump’s election in 2016 has referenced “precarity” and/or our “fractured moment.” Will there ever be a time in which that doesn’t apply? Has there really ever been? Yet this is an aggravatingly generic stance—a hesitation, it seems, to actually name any sociopolitical issues or artistic concerns directly, which would require having to say, well, something of substance. However, I cannot be too monomanically mad at this as the final sentence is so astonishingly vague that it reaches a level of pure artistry, not to mention outright parody. Again:

“We are thrilled to be working with such a rigorous and thoughtful group of artists to create a space where ideas and the materiality of the world can be examined and engaged.”

Who wrote this? Chat GPT?! My couch is also a space where ideas and the materiality of the world can be examined and engaged, not to mention my bed! Why would I leave my apartment to see this show?

Now, I don’t want to seem like I’m picking on Onli and Iles (And yes, FINE, I will get off the couch to see the show). They’re not anywhere near the only curators to talk like this. Mostly, the press release passage is notable because it’s formatted as a quotation as if both curators began suddenly artspeaking in tongues. Otherwise, it’s simply a perfect representation of the type of art-school lingo brain-twister, almost heroically saying nothing in the most complicated terms imaginable, that maintains its stranglehold on curators of biennials, triennials, and other international contemporary exhibitions.

Just look back at the previous 2022 Whitney Biennial, entitled Quiet As It’s Kept. This biennial, curated by David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, sought to “pursue a series of hunches,” meaning, “Don’t blame us if we didn’t think this through completely!” A perfect sleight of hand! And if you don’t particularly grasp how an exhibition can be a hunch, try sussing out what a set of symbols means: “We also adorned the exhibition with a symbol, ) (, from a N. H. Pritchard poem, on view in the exhibition, as a gesture toward openness and interlude.” Makes sense to me! Why can’t YOU figure it out!

And it’s not just the Whitney Biennial or other New York surveys either. Take the 2022-2023 Carnegie International, Is It Morning For You Yet?, curated by Sohrab Mohebbi and Ryan Inouye with Talia Heiman. This exhibition, which has the distinction of being the most depressing survey show I’ve ever seen, billed itself as “an ensemble of erratic, cunning, unruly, disobedient, undisciplined, and intractable attitudes and gestures that overwhelm the ambition of any one organizational intent.” Whew! Someone had fun with a thesaurus!

Hilariously, all three examples I’ve provided here seem to employ language—all these hunches, erratic attitudes, and dissonant choruses—to provide an explanation for why none of the shows have a strong central thesis (which is really unnecessary for a survey show anyway). I use hilariously as these curatorial proclamations are delivered with such utmost seriousness that they become unintentional satire. After laughing, though, it’s worth asking: Why do curators talk and write like this? Who is the intended audience for this kind of writing about exhibitions? Certainly not the general public—a kind of insider-speak that doesn’t offer anything of significant content or worth. So, who is this for?

I’m aware that pointing out the uniquely bizarre language of artspeak is a bit of an old argument, one that has fallen by the wayside in art world debates in recent years for a focus on identity politics and decolonization (two topics also helpfully filled with buzzwords). When I first began writing about art, how we spoke about art was a major topic of discussion, largely inspired by a 2012 Triple Canopy essay on International Art English (IAE) by Alix Rule and David Levine. Rule and Levine analyzed the nuances of International Art English through the language of exhibition press releases collected on e-flux. In doing so, they managed to pinpoint some major recognizable quirks:

“IAE has a distinctive lexicon: aporia, radically, space, proposition, biopolitical, tension, transversal, autonomy. An artist’s work inevitably interrogates, questions, encodes, transforms, subverts, imbricates, displaces—though often it doesn’t do these things so much as it serves to, functions to, or seems to (or might seem to) do these things. IAE rebukes English for its lack of nouns: Visual becomes visuality, global becomes globality, potential becomes potentiality, experience becomes…experiencability.”

Returning to the essay more than a decade since I first read it, these observations still apply. So much so that some of their more rigorous findings directly fit with the language of the 2024 Whitney Biennial. For instance, in the same press release, the 2024 Biennial is described as “a thematic exhibition focusing on ideas of ‘the real’ to acknowledge that, today, society is at an inflection point, in part brought on by artificial intelligence challenging what we consider to be real, as well as critical discussions about identity.” Turning back to Rule and Levine: “The real appears 2,148 times per million units in the e-flux corpus versus a mere 12 times per million in the BNC [“British National Corpus (BNC), which represents British English usage in the second half of the twentieth century”]—about 179 times more often.” Looks like we just can’t quit the real! Or this type of writing!

Unsurprisingly, Rule and Levine attribute the pervasive use of IAE to an insistence on authority and power in a field as subjective and exclusive as art. “Whatever the content,” they write, “the aim is to sound to the art world like someone worth listening to, by adopting the approximation of its elite language.” More than their Triple Canopy essay itself, I much prefer the blunt two-fold observations both Levine and Rule provide in a related interview in The Guardian. “You can’t speak in simple sentences as a museum and be taken seriously,” says Levine. Likewise, Rule asserts, “IAE has made art harder for non-professionals.”

Both of these statements remain true today. Which would be less remarkable if we also didn’t inhabit a time when museums and other institutions pay so much lip service to inclusion and widening the scope of their audience. Even in the early 2010s, other art writers were quick to point out that International Art English is not neutral and can be wielded as “a real language spoken by real people who use it to sanctify oppression,” as Mostafa Heddaya articulated in Hyperallergic. Yet, these arguments about artspeak seem to have been set aside in the intervening years. We’ve just accepted it. In fact, it seems as if curators have somehow become even more reliant on opaque language. A glance back at the 2017 Whitney Biennial text reveals a clearer, more direct articulation of their vision:

“The 2017 Whitney Biennial, the seventy-eighth installment of the longest-running survey of American art, arrives at a time rife with racial tensions, economic inequities, and polarizing politics. Throughout the exhibition, artists challenge us to consider how these realities affect our senses of self and community.”

Hey! I got that!

So, again, why are curators still so stuck on proclaiming their own authority through their exhibition descriptions? Why are they so attached to speaking in this way? To me, the adherence to this language reveals a fallacy in museums’ dedication to inclusivity. Of course, we knew this. Just look at how many New York museums, including the Whitney, have raised their prices over the past year. But it is interesting to see it continually play out linguistically as well as financially. This is not to say that the general public is dumb and uneducated, but they, like me, can smell bullshit when they read it. And if I don’t have any idea what the fuck you’re talking about, neither do most people who haven’t done the required MFA reading. And anyway, if the times are so fraught and everything is so precarious, wouldn’t it be better to bring as many people into the fold as possible and let them know what the hell you’re talking about?