I recently saw a degree show of a group of students and saw some nice work in there, but what stood out the most, at least for me, were the art statements. They stood out in a negative way, because I can't imagine that people around the age of 21 have come up with overly complicated words and sentences that mean nothing. At that point I am very tempted to grab one of those students and ask; 'Did this bullshit come naturally or are you taught to write likes this?' But that would be even rude to say for a Dutch person and I have no clue how to give this feedback to British people. Somehow I get this feeling, I don't know because I 'just' ignore established forms of learning, they are being taught to do this. If so, I very very strongly disagree with this policy!
You often see words as: explore, discuss, conversation. Words that are actually meaningless in art. So you are exploring a theme? Pfff, have now idea how that looks like and I don't care. I care about what you have discovered, not how you hopped on a boat to sail the vast oceans of complicated words. They often use these words to avoid being precise, direct and clear. You often see that they are exploring A, B, C while 'having a conversation with 1,2,3 and being influenced by X, Y, Z, creating a matrix of almost endless options. If that is what your work is about, then you haven't decided yet what your work is about and if this is a statement for a finished piece of art, than you failed to reach your goal and are now covering it up by extending the meaning of it so it will always hit something. They basically try to hit the moon with a
Gatling Gun.
One of the reasons why you have an art statement in my opinion is to add to the work. 1. Sometimes to explain, but that shouldn't be too much otherwise you haven't done your job as an artist properly. 2. To add to the message you are expressing.
Any way, you are communicating to an audience and it is pointless to try and do that if; 1. People stop reading halfway through the first sentence, 2. Read it all, but understand nothing. If this is the case, then you are not communicating, you are just sending or better, trying to show of. I have said it before, it seems that for a lot of artists and apparently people that teach them, the art statement is to try to show how intelligent the artist is by using language that makes the viewer feel less intelligent than the artist. Oh, and sometimes the statements are a bit long as if they couldn't decide which was the key message and then decided to add them all and confuse their audience.
These statements have the opposite effect on me, it makes me think the artist is less intelligent, because it is a lot harder to write a statement everybody can understand and still manage to excite people to look at your work more after they have read it. I know I haven't mastered it. I write in understandable English, but so far only managed to describe what I made and why I made it.
If you want to get the feeling of what kind of art statements I am talking about,
check this link and press the 'generate bollocks' button. So every time you read something like that, you have a pretty good chance that the artist is a bit insecure about his or her work.
