Baffled by words – the snobbery of hype #SundayBlogShare

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Sue Vincent

Image by Hanif Shoaei, Istanbul Modern Art Museum

We’ve all read them and felt utterly inadequate. We cannot even aspire to be writers because we cannot read them with any real understanding… yet they obviously make sense. It must be that our intellect is lacking…or our education… or something. Whatever it is, they go way, way above our heads…

I’m talking about artists’ statements. You know the type that delves into concepts you haven’t the foggiest idea about. You don’t know whether to smile sagely or just back away quietly with a superior expression glued to your face. Inside you are cringing and want to laugh nervously or run away… or both.

Whatever you do, you are impressed almost in spite of yourself… they must be good to write something like that…or be worthy of having it written about them. When you see them in galleries, the fact that their work is incomprehensible and has titles you would need a degree in philosophy to even approach, it just confirms the fact… Especially as the critics are raving about them.

You are almost made to feel old-fashioned and out of touch because you actually prefer the old masters or the impressionists…and don’t get the artistry in that huge blank canvas with what looks like a bird-dropping in one corner.

But these artists’ statements are impressive. It is obviously you that is the problem. Even worse, they seem to be becoming a requisite for writers too…

Maybe you should have one? People might even believe you are a successful writer/artist and buy your work. That would be novel…

That is a bit of a double edged sword, especially for the Indie. Look desperate  and no-one even looks at your stuff. Look successful and people might not think they need to bother buying, reviewing or promoting your work… not realising it is just a gloss, a veneer over the cracks in the plaster of the traditional garret. Like the penny in the beggar’s hat that ‘primes’ it before he holds it out.

Well, if you want such a penny, apparently you can have one… so I got one. Have  a read…

bio 500 letters

That is baffling enough to be almost convincing. If it hasn’t convinced you by the end of the first line, then your eyes will probably have glazed by the end of the first paragraph and will skip through the rest in a panicked attempt to find something familiar. Enough multi-syllabic words to ensure you don’t look too closely and plenty of those arty terms to make sure you feel out of your depth. Throw in the odd reference to obscure literature (that you are supposed to ‘get’ immediately but won’t in a zillion years) and sprinkle in just enough plausible terms to make it sound real. That should do the trick.

That this vile verbosity was produced by a wicked and tongue-in-cheek artist statement generator should be obvious, but sadly it isn’t, not to everyone. While this programme is, I sincerely hope, designed to poke fun at the overblown pomposity in some corners of the creative world, there are those who will take such stuff seriously and will feel the panic and shame of inadequacy at their lack of understanding what they feel sure they should understand…because the experts, the critics and the rest of the buying public seem to do so.

To prove their grasp of such high-flown verbiage and abstract concepts, their hand may well edge towards the plastic. Or they will learn those obfuscating terms and trot them out when they feel the need to impress, thus perpetuating the misleading miasma of snobbery that seeks to put creativity in a fashionable pigeon-hole and forge an artistic elitism that is against the very nature of creativity itself.

This barrier of  perceived authenticity, the hype generated by those who know how to manipulate our emotions,  can be a huge hurdle for the Indie artist or author trying to break into the market. We can’t compete with the marketing professionals and opinion shifters of the creative world.

Regardless of their efforts, though, our galleries still allow the connoisseur of art to stand cheek by jowl with the ‘uncultured’ majority and gaze in wonder at paint on canvas and our library shelves still sort their books by genre and author rather than by number of copies sold.

Great marketing and promotion may create a bestseller. For the author, that’s wonderful, no doubt about it. Few of us would refuse a decent royalty cheque! But for most writers, although the dream would be to earn enough to write full time, the reality is well enough known…that few achieve that dream.

That isn’t why we write… we write because we love the process, because we have a story to share or just because the words won’t let us sleep until we let them play on the page.

Take a step back for a moment and look around your own room. You live with what you like…not what the fashionable magazines tell you is ‘in’. Granny’s outmoded dresser may well sit next to a sleek, steel table and the pictures on the walls are a personal choice. Why should our taste in books be any different? When it comes right down to it, I don’t think it is. We may well read the odd bestseller, just to see what all the fuss is about, in the same way as we might go to a celebrated modern art exhibition yet really prefer the musty museum or nature’s own artistry.

Most of what we read, we choose to read because it appeals to us. And the chances are that the best thumbed, most beloved books on our shelves are not the bestsellers that made headlines, but stories woven by half-forgotten writers whose words spoke straight to our hearts. For most writers, that would be accolade enough and to see one of your books, well thumbed and dogeared on a shelf of much-loved tomes, a prize greater than any artistic award.

The most moving paintings are born of passion, the best books are written from the heart and the words we weave into stories spring from the honest core of the soul. It doesn’t matter if you sell one or ten thousand books… it matters only that your words are read, enjoyed, and perhaps  speak to the heart of the reader.

Unknown's avatar

About Sue Vincent

Sue Vincent was a Yorkshire born writer, esoteric teacher and a Director of The Silent Eye. She was immersed in the Mysteries all her life. Sue maintained a popular blog and is co-author of The Mystical Hexagram with Dr G.M.Vasey. Sue lived in Buckinghamshire, having been stranded there due to an accident with a blindfold, a pin and a map. She had a lasting love-affair with the landscape of Albion, the hidden country of the heart. Sue  passed into spirit at the end of March 2021.
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67 Responses to Baffled by words – the snobbery of hype #SundayBlogShare

  1. LionAroundWriting's avatar LionAroundWriting says:
    April 10, 2016 at 03:16

    I gave it a try and got my own equally long winded verbose bio, but you are right it looks and sounds so convincing.

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  2. john flanagan's avatar john flanagan says:
    April 10, 2016 at 03:17

    Love this, Sue, love it

    Big hugs

    john

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
  3. Bradley Corbett's avatar Green Embers says:
    April 10, 2016 at 03:49

    True story, I read two sentences and then skipped the whole thing to see what you would say about it, which made what you wrote all the more funny to me. 😆

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  4. Marilyn Armstrong's avatar Marilyn Armstrong says:
    April 10, 2016 at 03:59

    I admit it. I don’t even read those statements. I went to college. I use big words. I’ve got a demonstrably high IQ and stuff like that just annoys me. It’s probably why I was so bad at doing publicity, even for myself. Maybe especially for myself.

    When I was younger, I pretended to be interested. Now that I am officially old, I have zero patience for pretension. It’s one of the very few benefits of age.

    Liked by 1 person

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    • Sue Vincent's avatar Sue Vincent says:
      April 10, 2016 at 07:50

      I don’t either… such pretentious rubbish and quite obviously only done to ‘baffle with bullshit’ as the saying goes. It really tickled me how effective an imitation the computer generated one was and it made just as much sense as the official ones 🙂

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  6. Smorgasbord - Variety is the Spice of Life.'s avatar Smorgasbord - Variety is the Spice of Life. says:
    April 10, 2016 at 08:16

    It reminds me of the story of the Emperor’s new clothes…and several marketing pieces that I have red penned over the years… three paragraphs to promote one very small upgrade!! I once heard a conversation between to art gallery patrons standing in front of the most horrendous blob on the wall and I had to leave I was laughing so much.. I am afraid I am an old fashioned girl and love a good landscape.. finely shaped horse or anything that tells a story. Great post Sue.

    Liked by 1 person

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  7. Phillip T Stephens's avatar Phillip T Stephens says:
    April 10, 2016 at 08:16

    This is the statement generator’s review of my work as a performance artist in the eighties, not far from the kinds of texts I used to play with in my performances just to see how many members of the audiences would tell me how inspired the work was:

    “His works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, he tries to create works in which the actual event still has to take place or just has ended: moments evocative of atmosphere and suspense that are not part of a narrative thread. The drama unfolds elsewhere while the build-up of tension is frozen to become the memory of an event that will never take place.”

    The punchline to one of my pieces was, “He was so brilliant she didn’t understand a word, and she loved him for it.”

    And yet, I read a work like Gravity’s Rainbow, which Pynchon never came close to matching, and it’s no joke. It’s every bit as brilliant as promised. Finnegan’s Wake, which I have never had the energy to finish, is always a delight when I wade into the passages. I simply can take only a few pages at a time. Ulysses, not so much. It seems too much like a game that’s not worth playing (until we get to Molly’s free flow).

    The problem is to learn when we are having our leg pulled, when we are being bullshitted and when we really are in the presence of brilliance. The line “The drama unfolds elsewhere while the build up of tension is frozen to become the memory of an event that will never take place,” is actually a brilliant spoof of post-modern theory. I can’t help but think someone wrote these lines while riffing with friends on wine and weed and then programmed them to be generated by key words in random sequence.

    Consider my leg pulled by a post-modern metaphoric chiropractor deconstructing our artistic and cultural prejudices.

    Liked by 2 people

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    • Sue Vincent's avatar Sue Vincent says:
      April 10, 2016 at 13:47

      I think you’ve hit the nail on the head about the programme’s creators, Phillip. I hope so anyway…I would hate to think anyone could take this guff seriously. But it does draw upon someone’s real knowledge of the theories behind art…which is what makes it so scarily close to the ‘real thing’…if reality could possibly be part of these statements when used in all seriousness.
      Your parting shot left me laughing out loud though.

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  9. jwebster2's avatar jwebster2 says:
    April 10, 2016 at 10:25

    my artist’s statement reads “Jim has an irrepressible urge to eat three meals a day and keep a roof over the heads of himself and his family. Contribute generously to assist him in this wild and cutting edge artistic project!”

    😉

    Liked by 3 people

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  10. Jaye Marie & Anita Dawes's avatar jenanita01 says:
    April 10, 2016 at 10:29

    But do ordinary people really take any notice? None of which even remotely helps us lesser mortals come up with anything that will generate book sales… unfortunately.

    Liked by 1 person

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  11. Paul F. Lenzi's avatar Paul F. Lenzi says:
    April 10, 2016 at 11:31

    there was a time when I considered my curriculum vitae to be my bio – what a fool I was

    Liked by 1 person

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  12. vanbytheriver's avatar vanbytheriver says:
    April 10, 2016 at 12:35

    Seriously…there is an artist’s statement generator ? Who knew ? Thanks for sharing, and I agree with your thoughts here. If one person is moved….golden. ☺

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  13. Annette Rochelle Aben's avatar Annette Rochelle Aben says:
    April 10, 2016 at 14:04

    Succinctly put. 🙂

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  14. tyrysch's avatar Woebegone but Hopeful says:
    April 10, 2016 at 14:39

    Does this mean all those poor critics for ‘prestigious’ journals now have to go out and find real work? (That’s where I went wrong, not including the word ‘Kafkaesque’ in my last publicity drive)

    Liked by 1 person

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  15. TanGental's avatar TanGental says:
    April 10, 2016 at 14:53

    Sounded fine to me. Most of the contracts I drafted were more conceited and unintelligible than this.

    Liked by 1 person

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  16. franklparker's avatar franklparker says:
    April 10, 2016 at 15:44

    Here’s a quote from an interview with an acquaintance of mine who is a professor of English and has made and published a major study of the works of Beckett: “in Beckett’s writing empty language is privileged over what is sensed in an existential world which cannot be proved to exist. Empty language will ‘go on’ to be real once it has divested itself of its connection to that which is perceived through the senses.”
    Says it all! I love your deconstruction of this kind of meaningless claptrap.

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  17. Eliza Waters's avatar Eliza Waters says:
    April 10, 2016 at 19:56

    Goodness, the world never ceases to amaze me! Computer generated bios? It reminds me of the bs that college students use to boost their word count and end up really saying not much at all.

    Liked by 1 person

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  18. Mary Smith's avatar Mary Smith says:
    April 10, 2016 at 22:51

    Loved your artist’s statement 🙂 I must have a go and see what the generator comes up with for me.
    I totally agree with why we write and I know I’ll carry on writing as long as the impulse (compulsion?) to put words on paper is there. However, I do want more than one person to read those words. For this reason I indulge in the occasional promotion on Kindle Countdown to help get my books in front of more eyeballs. I like the little best seller flag Amazon has stuck on No More Mulberries this week (in the Asian literature category!) even though I know it will soon disappear when the Countdown is over. A few more people have come across the book – and may even read it. If I bake a cake, I want people to eat it.
    Having said that, I agree with what you say about the pretentious twaddle some ‘creatives’ come out with. I’m off to see what the generator produces for my artist’s statement. Maybe I could use it in a funding application to Creative Scotland – I’m sure they like pretentious twaddle! 🙂

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  19. Adele Marie's avatar adeleulnais says:
    April 11, 2016 at 08:36

    Oh, I have come across this type of bs a lot in all walks of life. There are fourteen years of age difference between my brother and I. He was brought up in Scotland while I was Orcadian, and proud of it. However, he left his home at 19 and moved to London to work in advertising so as you can imagine the many holidays to London let me look at a world that was as plastic as the teaspoon given to you by British Rail. My brother, however, is a shrewd man and he took these people very tongue in cheek, he has a habit of being sarcastic without the other noticing, I guess that`s how he survived. Anyway, one particular holiday, I was a bit more grown up and my friend Karen had come with me. My brother and his girlfriend were having a barbeque full of, yep you guessed, plastic teaspoons. We were attempting to talk to this one, plastic teaspoon, when I asked what he did. His reply? “Oh, I`m in effluence.” I turned to Karen and said, “Whit`s that?” Karen took a drink of her lager and said in a very loud voice. “Shite.” That sums it up I think in one word. lol

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  20. olganm's avatar olganm says:
    April 16, 2016 at 14:53

    Bravo! Love the posts and the comments.

    Liked by 1 person

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