Every so often there is a flurry of indignant Letters to the Editor in the national press deploring the overworked or incorrect use of certain words and phrases in the media, public announcements and daily talk. Overused words, current for a while, generally disappear, to be overtaken by equally irritating replacements. Incorrect usage has a habit of sticking, sometimes absorbed into the language. We can still hear and see ‘Five items or less’ at the supermarket checkout; that a train is reaching its ‘final destination’ (on Amtrack this is ‘your last and final stop’); that we could be the lucky recipient of a ‘free gift’ which would be an ‘added bonus’; and someone’s masterly novel or performance is ‘masterful’ (unfortunately, an increasingly blurred distinction). All such are the day-to-day dandruff of language. Constantly overused words can often mask a more exact meaning: ‘issue/issues’ (which have to be ‘addressed’) is currently (even ‘presently’) universal for ‘topic’, ‘question’, ‘problem’, ‘disaster’. This and other words are not quite euphemisms, more a lazy shorthand that furs the arteries of language and leads to restrictions of thought.

Writing on art by no means escapes such linguistic fluffiness and unconscious cliché. But here some distinctions must be made. Any specialist subject will have its own vocabulary, and the more specialised it is, the more technical this becomes. This refers more to the theoretical terms in which art is now invariably discussed than to the physical properties and look of a work. The obscurities arise when a relatively straightforward work is the support for a mass of speculative contextualisation, often solipsistic and tendentious.

A recent article in the Guardian reported on a private initiative by two Americans, an artist and a critic/sociologist, who have investigated the language of contemporary art description, culled from wall labels and gallery press releases from 1999 onwards.1 Their survey is analytic rather than satiric, and they trace the origins of what they call ‘International Art English’ to much French post-structuralist theory. They make excellent, deadpan fun of the commercial gallery press release which now goes well beyond its earlier professional constituency to reach a broad emailed audience. At the Burlington, where we receive thousands of such releases each year from many countries, we can testify to the universality of this artspeak obscurantism. But even in the more comprehensible releases, for exhibitions or books, the clichés mount up: the works are ‘brand new’; the exhibits are ‘iconic’; the paintings are ‘vibrant’ (and also, of course, ‘masterful’); the artist is never less than ‘award winning’; and the new book (invariably a ‘comprehensive overview’) is ‘groundbreaking’, ‘lavishly illustrated’ and ‘thought-provoking’. These all accumulate into a prose of deadly conformity.

The museum wall label is generally less offensive from the point of view of impenetrability or cliché. But it has its own lowering style. Increasingly the curator responsible for the text has been urged to give a subjective spin on the work described, as though to woo the viewer. Factual statement is often ousted by opinion; but the depths are reached when ‘accessibility’ becomes synonymous with kindergartenese. We cannot resist quoting once more on this page the label for a still life by Braque in Glasgow: ‘If Georges Braque was struggling with a complex painting, he would often paint still lifes to clear his mind. The bowl of fruit in his studio also provided a handy snack!’. It is extraordinary how many questions are begged by this jocular label, quoted in full.

Moving on from the artworld’s peripheral flotsam, we reach the inner circle of art-historical books and publications. Here, what is striking is not so much the cliché but the inventiveness of the language used, the reckless extensions and elaborations of words, the adverbial decor, the nifty transformation of noun into verb, the plain sentence got up in grotesque academic drag. We have recently witnessed ‘the narrativisation of subversion’ and ‘the spatiality of viewership’, among other portly neologisms. And the more the argument concerns art’s inclusiveness, the collective memory or the demotic gaze, the more the language seems to retract into hermetic exclusivity. Critical and historical writing must in some way be shaped by an intended audience. Style – whether it be complex or succinct, expository or descriptive – is a writer’s personal expression inflected by a sense of that audience. In a good deal of recent art history, felicitous style is rarely a consideration, but the imagined reader is there, drawn from a restricted circle of fellow academics (who will, incidentally, nod knowingly at the fashionable names quoted and cited that give the writer a spurious authority). Articles are couched in a careerist language to be peer read for renewal of tenure. An initial distrust of plain English turns into a positive fear of it, in case of reprisals.

It is well known that the Burlington did not put its back behind the New Art History nor its subsequent developments. As far as one can discern, this was more from a preference for read­ability and comprehension than from any outright antagonism. But it would be an illuminating project to discover the influence of theoretical art history, as taught in several university departments, on contributions in the Magazine since the 1970s. Fortunately, it will mostly be in the matter and not the manner.

These remarks on language have come into pertinent focus with the publication this month of The Books that Shaped Art History, a collaboration between the Burlington and Thames & Hudson.2 The book is a collection of essays by sixteen different writers that re-review classics of modern art history and which first appeared as a series in the Magazine. In the context of this Editorial, the selected books – from Berenson and Wölfflin to Alpers and Krauss – have lasted not only for their subject-matter, methodology and innovation, but – for the most part – their readability, their way of taking us onwards in a style that envelops and reassures, even when the argument is complex or rebarbative. The tone of voice – of Fry and Clark, of Baxandall and Haskell, of Gombrich and Belting – is instantly recognisable. In part, this accounts for their influence and durability, beyond the subject to hand. They are indeed far more than ‘thought-provoking’, ‘vibrant’ and ‘iconic’.

1    A. Beckett: ‘Er, anyone know what transversal means?’, Guardian (28th January 2013), pp.16–18 (G2).
2    The Books that Shaped Art History. Edited by Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard. 264 pp. incl. 54 b. & w. ills. (Thames & Hudson, London, 2013), £24.95. ISBN 978–0–500–23895–0.