“The more sceptical among us might suspect that the unintelligible nature of much postmodern ‘analysis’ is a convenient contrivance, if only because it’s difficult to determine exactly how wrong an unintelligible analysis is.”

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.