Art Bollocks Revisited.
The term ‘art bollocks’ was first introduced into serious art writing in
the 1999 essay by Brian Ashbee, published in Art Review. A Beginners
Guide to Art Bollocks and How to be a Critic was a popular, witty and
widely quoted piece of journalism that the casual reader might suppose
would have drawn a line under the worst excesses of 1990’s artspeak. In
fact, in the past seven years the situation has grown much worse. Art
bollocks has become institutionalised, normalised and is now practically
the default way of writing about art and culture for seasoned
journalists and A-level students alike. Like Orwell’s Newspeak, art
bollocks is variously used in a knowing way, as an in-joke, a private
language, a posture, or maybe out of fear – to maintain some
questionable status among equally questionable peers. This particular
critical idiom has also spread from an increasingly politicised world of
art theorising to adjacent areas of political and cultural criticism.
Beyond Parody.
If some readers find it hard to believe that academia has actually been
churning out people who can no longer distinguish between coherent
argument and vacuous patois, it’s worth casting an eye over some of the
more fashionable quarters of art theorising and cultural study. A
cursory scan of Mute magazine (issue 27, January 2004) revealed the
following nugget, from an essay titled Bacterial Sex written by Luciana
Parisi, a teacher of “Cybernetic Culture” at the University of East
London: “This practice of intensifying bodily potentials to act and
become is an affirmation of desire without lack which signals the
nonclimactic, aimless circulation of bodies in a symbiotic assemblage.”
If you think you misread that sentence, try reading it again.
Elsewhere in the same issue, I found this: “To be mediatised literally
means to lose one’s rights. Hence, what happens to the idea of
government by the people and for the people if the ‘false’ is produced
as a third relation which is not the synthetic union of two ideas in the
conscious mind of the citizen or the general intellect of the organic
community, but is a statistical coming together of variables?” The
article in question, Bombs and Bytes: Deleuze, Fascism and the
Informatic, was written by Anustup Basu, a Cultural Studies Fellow at
the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of English.
more...
http://fp.ignatz.plus.com/artboll.htm
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