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International Art English

by Alix Rule (/contributors/rule_alix) & David Levine


(/contributors/levine_david)
On the riseand the spaceof the art-world press release.
International Art English was produced by Triple Canopy as part of its Research
Work (/projectareas#project_areas) project area, supported in part by the Brown
Foundation, Inc., of Houston, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York
City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
The internationalized art world relies on a unique language. Its purest articulation is
found in the digital press release. This language has everything to do with English, but it
is emphatically not English. It is largely an export of the Anglophone world and can
thank the global dominance of English for its current reach. But what really matters for
this languagewhat ultimately makes it a languageis the pointed distance from
English that it has always cultivated.
In what follows, we examine some of the curious lexical, grammatical, and stylistic
features of what we call International Art English. We consider IAEs origins, and
speculate about the future of this language through which contemporary art is created,
promoted, sold, and understood. Some will read our argument as an overelaborate joke.
But theres nothing funny about this language to its users. And the scale of its use
testifies to the stakes involved. We are quite serious.

Hypothesis
IAE, like all languages, has a community of users that it both sorts and unifies. That
community is the art world, by which we mean the network of people who collaborate
professionally to make the objects and nonobjects that go public as contemporary art:
not just artists and curators, but gallery owners and directors, bloggers, magazine
editors and writers, publicists, collectors, advisers, interns, art-history professors, and
so on. Art world is of course a disputed term, but the common alternativeart industry
doesnt reflect the reality of IAE. If IAE were simply the set of expressions required to
address a professional subject matter, we would hardly be justified in calling it a
language. IAE would be at best a technical vocabulary, a sort of specialized English no
different than the language a car mechanic uses when he discusses harmonic balancers
or popper valves. But by referring to an obscure car part, a mechanic probably isnt
interpellating you as a member of a common worldas a fellow citizen, or as the case
may be, a fellow traveler. He isn't identifying you as someone who does or does not get
it.
When the art world talks about its transformations over recent decades, it talks about
the spread of biennials (http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/9th-gwangju-biennalestheme-is-roundtable/). Those who have tried to account

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