I found a spectacularly rubbish statement in an art magazine yesterday, talking about the Chinese contemporary art scene.
The Chinese people have a strong experimental tendency. Their love of things like shopping and dining is a manifestation of this.
What on earth? If a love of shopping and dining proves you have a strong experimental tendency, what nation of people on earth doesn't have this tendency? North Korea? That's about the only example I can think of. And it's hardly the North Korean people's fault that they're not allowed to go shopping and wine and dine. If wining and dining is the benchmark of artistic experimentation, then the avant-garde is dead.
It's one of my goals in the art world to show people that you can write or speak about art and be intelligent without being pretentious (I hate the way these two concepts have become mixed up in England), thorough without being boring, and above all not sink into meaningless artspeak. Artspeak is a constant stream of barely-related abstract nouns which somehow have the effect of cancelling each other out ("oh but daahling, that's the subtlety of it") so by the time you get to the end of a sentence you have learned nothing from it whatsoever.
Here is a fairly standard example of Artspeak:
The work plays a chant-like loop of auditory "glow" and "shimmer". Their audio installation will join the visual to interrogate life "in disarticulated times". This interactive installation allows the viewer to reassemble the relations between the objects, invoking memory and fantasy, and embodying alternative visions of being in the world.
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