Can’t figure out what you’re reading? Use our handy Artspeak glossary to get a handle on all those three-dollar terms used in the art world!
Abstract Expressionism: Americans turned to it’s own form of domestic emerging abstract art devoid of representational imagery. Socialist and Nazi re-institution of Realism confirmed modern abstraction as the preferred style of the democratic free world.
Automatism: junking of all traditional rules of art in favor of chance as the direct creative access to the unconscious.
Constructivism (1914-1920): abandonment of easel painting in favor of kinetic art and technical design.
Content: the component of the artwork not based on formal elements such as the idea or ideas, the narrative, meta-narrative, subtext, political agenda, etc.
Diachronic: Concerns with the changes of language over a period of time.
Dialectic: Debate, discourse.
Discourse: extended speech, the code of language used to express personal thought.
Formal Qualities: design elements such as: line, shape, texture, size, color etc.
Hegemony: leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others.
Hyper-reality: exaggerated in comparison to reality; when the reproduced takes the place of reality.
Interesting: You have nothing else to say because it’s anything but interesting.
International Style: Universally applicable “modern” style, reproducible anywhere, transcending all national cultures.
Kinetic Art: relating to or involving motion.
Machine Aesthetic: an optimistic belief in the role of abstraction in human life, and an emphasis on machine-like, undecorated flat surfaces.
Metonymy: naming an attribute or adjunct of the thing instead of the thing itself. “Crown” for Royalty.
Metalanguage: a technical language, such as structuralism, devised to describe the properties of ordinary language.
Modern: Latin Modo “Just now.” Distinguished by a singular drive through novel technological advances to achieve a utopian state. Ideas of individualism, the sublime, formal purity, aesthetics, perfection and hegemony were prevalent.
Moneme: word.
Naked: without clothes.
Nihilism: Total rejection of value statements or moral statements, absolute destructiveness toward the world at large and oneself.
Nude: idealized version of the naked human form.
Paradigmatic series: (also called selection or substitution) the relationship between elements in a sentence and other elements that are syntactically interchangeable.
Phoneme: is the smallest unit in the sound system that can indicate contrasts in meaning. “Cat” has three phonemes.
Postmodern: Literally “after just now”. First an architectural term used to distinguish the eclectic use of many architectural styles within one structure from the Bauhaus style. Later, the term was used to describe work antithetical to Modernism. In the end, the term became weighted with a vitriolic disdain of modernism, especially characteristics associated with hegemony. Eclecticism, multiculturalism, disdain for aesthetics, deconstruction, simulacra were prevalent components.
Relational Art. Relational Art is an emerging movement identified by Nicolas Bourriaud, a French philosopher, who recognized a growing number of contemporary artists used performative and interactive techniques that rely on the responses of others: pedestrians, shoppers, browsers—the casual observer-turned-participant. Over the course of writing editorials for the French magazine Documents sur l’Art, Bourriaud came to terms what he was seeing — or more accurately, experiencing — as a movement in Relational Art.
Semiology: (from the Greek Semeion) a mark, sign, trace or omen.
Signification: the process which binds together signifier and signified to produce the sign.
Situationalism: recontextualizing the mundane in order to value the real. Events based upon experience rather than the object, but unlike postmodernism, the simulacra and meta-narrative are devalued.
Simulacrum: a vague representation; semblance; image; likeness.
Socialist Realism: 1930’s Stalinist propaganda style of heroic realism.
Sublime: of such excellence, beauty, perfection as to inspire awe. Often accompanied with a sense of mortality.
Suprematism: the Russian abstract art movement developed by Kazimir Malevich c. 1915, characterized by simple geometric shapes and associated with the idea of spiritual purity.
Synchronic: concerned with language at a given time without reference to historical antecedents.
Synecdoche: naming the part for the whole.
Syntagmatic series: (also called contiguity or combination) the linear relationships between linguistic elements in a sentence.
Thin: possessing insufficient content.