This past weekend I was able to attend one day of the two-day symposium “Art Speech” at MoMA, organized by Pablo Helguera, MoMA’s Director of Adult Education, and art historian and critic James Elkins. Billed as “A Symposium on Symposia” it promised to “anatomize art historians’ and artists’ habits at the podium,” presenting possible models by which lectures, gallery talks, slide presentations, and other conventions of communication in the field (such as museum audio tours and multimedia presentations) might be analyzed and their effectiveness assessed.

Sounds pretty basic—at least to the WAC-oriented among us—but it generated plenty of excitement across the field from the moment it was announced, and the sold-out auditorium held a pretty diverse range of people across the field: from academics, journalists, and bloggers to artists, museum directors and curators. Since accusations of impenetrability and obscurantism are leveled at so-called “artspeak” from within and without its many and varied institutions, and have been for some time—at least since the dawn of postmodernism—an interrogation of its forms seems well overdue at this point. (Of course, there may well have been such investigations that I’m just not aware of, but not by a preeminent institution like MoMA. Somewhat embarrassingly, the only one that comes to mind was featured in the one-off parody rag November, a spoof of the entrenched art history journal October: it featured the transcript of a roundtable on the perks that roundtables afford neo-Marxist intellectuals.) As the organizers pointed out in their opening remarks, the catchall concept of “performativity,” to which discussions on the conventions of art speech are usually relegated, has thus far not been tremendously useful.

Philosopher and critic Jonathan Gilmore, in a brief historical survey of the slide lecture, read a quote attributed to a student of legendary Swiss critic and “master of extemporaneous speaking” Heinrich Wölfflin: “[He]… places himself in the dark and together with his students at their side. He thus unites all concerned and becomes the ideal beholder, his words distilling the experiences common to everyone… Wölfflin’s speech never gives the impression of being prepared, something completed that is projected onto the art work. Rather it seems to be produced on the spot by the picture itself. The art work thus retains its preeminent status throughout. His words do not overwhelm the art but embellish it like pearls.” As anyone on the receiving end of the average art history survey course cam attest, this is one nineteenth-century straw man that may, in fact, still need a bit of demolishing.

This question of audience, and the pitfalls and practicalities of imagining such an “ideal beholder” was a problem to which speakers and the audience would continually return. In dishing out interpretation to an artificially “unified,” authoritative voice to an equally constructed recipient, what happens to the cacophony of argument that comprises the field in actuality—and how do those conversations move forward, rather than being preemptively shut down? Writer, curator, and editor Monika Szewczyk, whose ongoing “Art of Conversation” series centers on the interruptions of speech in and around art, focused on this problem in the context of a prosaic form: the museum audio guide. Deconstructing MoMA’s audio text for Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (by its chief curator of painting and sculpture, Anne Temkin), she pointed out that it “fails to ask a single question” or “provide more than one perspective.” To avoid perpetuating both the common disdain for the guide format and the dismissive, unproductive notion that one cannot pack any nuance at all into two minutes of speech, she took a stab at producing an alternate entry. Briefly, it pointed out that the work was an interpretive battleground, and touched on the Cubist struggle to present multiple points of view on a single picture plane and the picture’s confusion of feminine, masculine, and supernatural signifiers. It ended with a reference to Serge Guilbaut’s now-canonical assessment of New York’s replacement of Paris at the hotbed of the modernist avant-garde. In a discussion that followed, an audience member fantasized about furthering audio guide options to include brief examinations by other methodologies: ie, “Press “2” for a feminist interpretation of this work; press “3” for a psychoanalytic interpretation..” I, for one, love this idea—at least for some of the museum’s most iconic works.

Artist Carey Young presented the most original examination of “art speech” by inverting its context completely: instead of interrogating the speech practices of art experts, her Speechcraft project asked non-experts to engage in object analysis through the organization Toastmasters. (Toastmasters is an international club in which members, striving for greater success as “leaders” in what seems to be a primarily business context, learn to communicate authoritatively and charismatically by means of regular meetings and peer critique.) Among the objects Young had members interpret: a red candle in the shape of Lenin, a clear rubber ball encasing MoMA’s logo, and “Wall Street” brand cigarettes. Would lay persons produce more interesting critique around these objects than the artist herself might have? From the limited video I watched, sometimes yes and sometimes no. The real potential to the project, for me, is the affective explication of the values associated with the speech of a “successful” leader in “business:” clear, authoritative, and well-rehearsed—but with the impression of being absolutely extemporaneous. Laid bare in the context of an artwork, the efforts of Toastmasters members, even when wholly and charismatically competent, seem unusually, surprisingly poignant.

Much of the rest of the symposium day involved an analysis, through a sort of de-construction and re-construction, of a snippet of a talk by famed Marxist art historian TJ Clark. Swiss economics and management professor Claus Noppeney attempted to strip away Clark’s rhetorical flourishes and present his main arguments (on Paul Cezanne’s critique of his teacher Camille Pissarro’s changing style) in Powerpoint, resulting in laughably banal bullet points like: “History is Valuable; Great apprentices find unique ways to learn; and Imitation can lead to Innovation.” A fun diversion, but an unnecessary one: I’m not sure anyone present would have argued for the respective absolute autonomy of style and content. Happily, English scholar Ellen Levy followed with an insightful analysis of Clark’s style: his liberal use of value judgments in his speech (things are “wonderful” or “brilliant” and historic predecessors “surely wrong” in their analysis) as appealing to a primal desire in listeners; his use of the first person, building the impression of the art historian as primal excavator of meaning; and his denigration and characterization of the idea of artworks as harboring a single, unified idea as “lyric.” (The latter, though not meant as an actual dismission of poetry, irked at least one poet in the audience.) Levy gave a really convincing assessment of the agonism inherent to Clark’s speaking style, in which he conjures, by inference, the polyphony of debate and political superstructures that comprise the construction of meaning.

There was much touched on that was valuable and potentially useful that day. However, after Levy’s beautifully nuanced model, the conversation devolved somewhat into a discussion of the “best” art talks that the audience and remaining panel members had ever experienced: a conversation which ultimately, and somewhat uncritically, began to privilege an art-speech model of narrative surprise-fact-unearthing and case-making: art history as detective novel with a surprise twist ending. This slide from modes of analysis to modes of experience was, for me, premature and disappointing: I had hoped for more and further revealing insights on the constructions of language around art; for example, the many rhetorical crutches we all (sometimes detrimentally) rely on in the field. Levy’s insights come from the study of language and poetry; perhaps more people outside the field were needed: a linguistic anthropologist, maybe? Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to follow up on Saturday’s discussions: I’ll have to wait til the symposium shows up on MoMA’s website (or until someone enlightens me in comments).