Necessity of Artspeak The Language of Arts in the Western Tradition

This book breaks new ground in its linguistic approach to the key issues. It situates them within the long-running debate about the arts and their place in society which goes back to the Classical period in ancient Greece. Contributors to the debate included same of the most celebrated artists and philosophers of their day [Plato, Aristotle, Leonarde, Kant. Hegel, Wagner, Baudelaire, Zola, Delacroix ...]. But none of these eminent figures or their supporters provided a reasoned overview examining the multilingual development of Western artspeak as a whole. Nor did they develop any explicit account of the relationship between the arts and language. The Necessity of Artspeak shows for the first time that what have usually been considered problems of aesthetics and artistic justification often have their source in the linguistic assumptions underlying the terms and arguments presented. It also shows how artspeak has been -- and continues to be -- manipulated to serve the interests of particular social groups and agendas. Until the semantics of artspeak is more widely understood, the public will continue to be taken in by the latest fads and fashions that propagandists of the art world promote. Book jacket.

Roy Harris is Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Oxford and editor of the Journal Language & Communication