It seems to happen very often these days, that the textual editorials that accompany an art exhibition give the impression of having been created randomly, using some sort of lorem ipsum 1 generator, distinctive perhaps to the gibberish of the art world. Sometimes, it even looks as if it’s egregiously mangling arbitrary philosophical terms, throwing ontological significance at random intervals, without any aesthetic sense — nor, sometimes, even literary — whatsoever.
It approaches frightening extremes when it just reveals its utter lazy intellectualism, that builds truth for itself and then holds it to universal value, applauding its own empty wit. Every phrase seems to be more mindful about displaying a glossary of terms than in saying something relevant about the art it’s supposed to comment on. It’s always vehemently self-aware, but in absolute denial of its ephemeral nature and vagueness. Generalities, which abound, are laid out with a pretentious sense of morality, a pretentious sense of urgency in its aesthetic irrelevance. To whom?, once should ask. Because, in turn, this means such thoughts can easily be applied to any art display; and it would make no difference at all. It would appear they are battling against the actual artwork to achieve their status, to be considered themselves works of art.
What results is almost reminiscent of a surrealist cadavre exquis composition — this time with all the veils of a truly thoughtful discourse shaped by a single mind. Let’s be clear — it’s building connections to a work just because it’s physically connected to the art pieces it’s supposed to refer to, and because the reader is vehemently interested in making those connections work while nodding at the pace of its ridicule. All the correlation is drawn by the fact it’s in the same spatial context. Remove it from that context and it becomes a generic mix, of more or less persuasive ideas, but with no particular coherence. Move the walls of text from one exhibition to the other, and you would be hard pressed to spot any mismatch — so generic that they are not saying anything at all.