To avoid clichés in art writing, swap every stock phrase for an observation that could only be true of the work in front of you: its materials, its size, the order in which it was made, what your eye does as you look. A cliché names an effect (“haunting”, “bold”, “a dialogue between”) without naming its cause, so the fix is almost always to find the cause and write that down instead. The rest of this guide shows where art clichés come from, what serious critics and editors have said about them, and a practical routine for cutting them out of a draft.
Where the habit comes from
A cliché is language somebody else has already shaped, and the writer is only pressing it onto the page. It feels safe because it has been used before, and that is exactly why it carries no information about the work you saw.
Art writing is unusually exposed to this. Much of what critics read before a visit is promotional: press releases, wall texts, auction and sale catalogues. In 2012 the artist David Levine and the critic and sociologist Alix Rule published an essay in the journal Triple Canopy that gave this house style a name, International Art English. As Andy Beckett explained in a Guardian guide to artspeak, they built their case on thousands of exhibition announcements published since 1999 by e-flux, the New York subscriber network for art professionals, and ran them through Sketch Engine, a corpus tool developed in Brighton.
Their findings are a catalogue of what to avoid. According to the Guardian’s account, they found that “the real”, used as a grand abstract noun, appeared 179 times more often in International Art English than in standard English, and that fashions in vocabulary came and went by year. In their words, “usage of the word speculative spiked unaccountably in 2009; 2011 saw a sudden rage for rupture”. They also observed that the style “always uses more rather than fewer words”. If you soak in press releases before writing, those words will arrive in your draft uninvited.
What Orwell said about art criticism
The sharpest warning is eighty years old. In “Politics and the English Language”, first published in Horizon in April 1946 and reproduced by the Orwell Foundation, George Orwell singled out art criticism by name. Words such as “romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless,” he wrote, “in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader.”
His example still stings. One critic praises “the living quality” of an artist’s work; another notes its “peculiar deadness”; readers shrug and call it a difference of opinion. If the words were black and white, Orwell argued, everyone would see that language was being misused. The lesson for reviewers is that a judgement made of vague words cannot be tested, and so it cannot be trusted.
The same essay lists six rules. The first is the one that matters most here: “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” The third, “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out”, is the editing principle behind the checklist further down. The sixth, “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous”, is a reminder that the aim is clarity, not a new set of taboos.
Phrases to retire and the questions that replace them
Most art clichés fall into a few families. Each one can be broken by a question that forces you back to the object.
- Effect words such as “striking”, “haunting”, “evocative” and “powerful”. Ask: what did you look at first, and what made you keep looking? Write that.
- Inflation such as “a bold statement”, “masterful”, “breathtaking scale”. Ask: how big is it, in metres, and what does that size do in this particular room?
- Relationship formulas such as “a dialogue between”, “explores the tension between”, “interrogates”. Ask: what are the two things, where are they placed, and what happens visually where they meet?
- Timelessness such as “timeless”, “universal”, “speaks to us all”. Ask: when was it made, what was it responding to, and who was it made for?
- Texture fog such as “rich surface” or “painterly”. Ask: what is the paint actually doing, and with what tool?
A useful test is portability. If a sentence could be moved into a review of a different show without changing a word, it is a cliché, however elegant it sounds.
Use the vocabulary of making
The quickest route away from mood words is the language studios and conservators use, because it describes things you can see. The National Gallery glossary defines impasto (from the Italian for dough) as areas “heavily built up with paint layers”, where “brush or palette knife marks are usually clearly evident”. That gives you a concrete sentence where “textured” gave you nothing.
The same glossary separates a glaze, a transparent film laid over a lighter colour that modifies it without hiding it, from a scumble, a thin layer lighter than what lies beneath. It explains that the ground beneath a painting changes how every later colour reads, noting that Poussin used reddish grounds and Rembrandt brownish ones. Once you know those terms, “glowing” can become “glazed over a pale ground”, which is both more accurate and more interesting.
Tate’s Art Terms glossary is useful for the same reason. Its entry on chiaroscuro gives the literal meaning, light-dark, and adds a point many writers miss: the term is generally only worth using when contrast is a prominent feature of the work. Technical words are a tool, not decoration. Use one when it tells the reader something they would otherwise have to see for themselves.
This approach suits other media too. For sculpture, say whether something is cast, carved, welded or assembled. For photography, name the print process and the paper if the label gives them. For video, give the running time and whether it loops.
Let verbs carry the description
Adjectives are where clichés breed, because they let you report your own reaction. Verbs push you to describe an action, either the artist’s or the image’s. “A dynamic composition” says very little. “The diagonal drags the eye from the bottom left corner to a single lit window” says what the composition does.
Two cautions apply. First, flashy verbs can become clichés of their own; “interrogates”, “unpacks” and “problematises” are the action words of International Art English. Second, one strong verb per sentence is plenty. If every line is busy, the reader stops seeing the work and starts watching the writer.
Comparisons need the same discipline. Saying a young painter “recalls” a famous name is a shortcut unless you say precisely what is shared (a palette, a way of cropping the figure, a type of brushwork) and where the two part company.
Read writers who look hard
The best protection against borrowed phrases is a stock of good models. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, first published in 1972 and based on the BBC television series of the same name, remains a model of plain sentences used for complex ideas. Its opening argument, that “the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled”, is a better starting point for a review than any adjective.
Gallery professionals are aware of the problem too. In the Guardian piece, Polly Staple, then director of Chisenhale Gallery in London, observed that many visitors “don’t even look at the programme sheet” because they do not want to read writing about art. That is a commercial and cultural cost of jargon, and it is a reason to write differently rather than to stop writing.
Outside the art world, the Plain English Campaign, which officially began in 1979 to campaign “against gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information”, offers a broader frame. Its targets are public documents rather than exhibition reviews, but the principle transfers: if a reader cannot act on or picture what you wrote, the sentence has failed.
An editing routine that works
Clichés survive drafting; they are removed in editing. Read your draft with suspicion, ideally the next day.
- Highlight every adjective and adverb. Keep only those that add information (size, colour, material, date). Cut or replace the ones that add only emphasis.
- Search your draft for the usual suspects: “explores”, “dialogue”, “tension”, “striking”, “evocative”, “timeless”, “the viewer”. Each hit is a prompt to ask what you actually mean.
- Apply the portability test sentence by sentence. Anything that could describe another artist’s work needs a specific detail or a deletion.
- Check every technical term against a reliable glossary such as the National Gallery’s or Tate’s, and drop any term you would struggle to define aloud.
- Compare your text with the press release. If any phrase matches, rewrite it in your own words or quote it openly and say what you think of it.
- Read the piece aloud. Inflated phrases often sound fine on screen and hollow when spoken.
None of this demands a special talent. It demands time in front of the work and a willingness to replace a comfortable phrase with a harder, truer one.
Further reading and practice
If you write reviews regularly, keep a private file of phrases you catch yourself using, and check new drafts against it. Revisit Orwell’s six rules before a big piece; they take a minute to read. For a wider sense of how independent critics approach exhibitions, browse the reviews and essays on Visionary Art, and the criticism collected by the writer and editor Maria Bregman at mariabregman.com.
The goal is a review a reader could check by walking into the gallery: every claim pinned to something visible, every judgement backed by a reason. Fresh language follows from that, not from hunting for unusual words.
Photo: Tomidaooooooo, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons