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Necessity of Artspeak: The Language of Arts in the Western Tradition

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Author Roy Harris is a Professor of Linguistics at Britain's Oxford University. In "The Necessity of Artspeak", he attempts to dissect the way that humans have spoken and written about the arts since the earliest surviving documents (at least as far back as Classical Greece). This rather specialized study is an admirable effort, and Professor Harris does a good job of reframing our understanding of historic art-speak.

The first third of the book examines archaic and antique views of the arts, and the second portion focuses on the "modern" (from the mid-19th century onwards). I found much in these two sections that was informative, even if Harris' style isn't as lucid as one might wish it to be. His tone is a bit dry--which is not perhaps surprising given his academic milieu. Still, the wit of Robert Hughes would've been most welcome here.

The third section, which rests directly upon the first two, soon sharply branches off into contemporary semantic tendencies. Harris asserts that today there are three basic modes of art-speak (and those who employ these art-speaks): "surrogational", "contractual" and "integrational". He lays the groundwork for their differences and occasional commonalties admirably, but where his thesis founders is in his absolutism. In the interest in neatly sewing up his assertions, Harris essentially says that these are the only three positions being used for communicating modern aesthetic theory, and that they are mutually exclusive. The anecdotes he cites would seemingly bolster his thesis, but they are always selected from the absurd extremes.

Speaking as one whose profession is that of a contemporary artist, and one who often participates in forums about art and aesthetic theory, I feel that Harris has widely overstated the divisions between these competing "art-speaks". Many artists--myself included--take a far more pragmatic and synthetic position, accepting elements of each of the three camps Harris describes, and successfully applying them to the arts. His determination to support integrationism eventually becomes somewhat didactic, where he stakes out his theoretical territory as zealously and uncompromisingly as in any manifesto.

There is much that "The Necessity of Artspeak" has to say, and it does an good job of informing the reader of the history of the practices of art-speak. But anyone who is mostly interested in contemporary aesthetic theories would be wise to recognize Professor Harris' clear bias and his rather narrow perspective of art today before accepting his pronouncements as gospel.