The Divine Brushstroke: On Jargon, Access, and the Business of Sounding Deep

I want to talk about something that tends to make artists uncomfortable when it is said directly: the art world has a vocabulary problem, and that vocabulary problem is not accidental. It serves a function. Understanding that function is useful, both for artists navigating the contemporary market and for audiences trying to figure out what, if anything, is actually being said.

The problem is not that art writing is difficult. Difficulty can be earned. When a critic draws on philosophy, visual theory, or art history to illuminate something about a work that the work itself doesn’t immediately reveal, the difficulty is justified — it is the appropriate response to genuine complexity. The problem is the use of complex-sounding language to say things that are either simple or empty, deployed in ways that make them hard to challenge without appearing unsophisticated.

This is a different kind of difficulty. It is strategic rather than necessary.

What Mystification Does

Mystifying language in art criticism serves several functions simultaneously.

It creates barriers to entry that distinguish insiders from outsiders. If you can speak the language, you belong; if you can’t, you don’t. This is not a bug in the system; it is a feature. Art markets depend on the perception of specialized knowledge, and specialized vocabulary is one of the primary ways that perception is produced and maintained.

It provides a form of immunity from criticism. If a claim cannot be clearly understood, it cannot be clearly challenged. The statement that a work “engages with the liminal spaces between materiality and immateriality in a post-colonial context” is difficult to argue with not because it is right but because it is unclear. The demand for clarity can itself be weaponized: the person who asks what a claim means can be made to feel that the failure of understanding is theirs, not the writer’s.

It inflates perceived value. Work described in elevated theoretical language acquires a kind of intellectual prestige that is distinct from its visual or conceptual content. The description performs depth whether or not the work possesses it. In a market where reputation is a primary driver of price, this matters more than it should.

The Calligraphy Version

Calligraphy is not immune to this. It has its own version of mystification, one that draws on the spiritual and historical weight of the tradition to perform a depth that may or may not be present in specific works or claims.

The invocation of the sacred is the most common form. When every calligraphic work is described as a “meditation on the divine,” when every stroke is “a prayer,” when the entire practice is wrapped in the language of spiritual transcendence, something is happening that deserves scrutiny. It may be that the artist or critic is genuinely trying to describe a spiritual dimension of the work. It may also be that the language of spirituality is doing rhetorical work — creating a kind of sanctified zone around the work that makes critical engagement feel inappropriate or sacrilegious.

I am not arguing that calligraphy has no spiritual dimension. The tradition's relationship to the sacred is real, deep, and historically specific. But the spiritual dimension of the tradition is not automatically transferred to every work made within it, and the language of the sacred can be deployed strategically, to exempt work from the kind of scrutiny it might not survive.

Similarly, the invocation of tradition — the implied authority of an unbroken chain of transmission going back to the Prophet's companions — can function as a way of closing down questions rather than opening them. If a work is “rooted in fourteen centuries of tradition,” the implied message is that interrogating it requires fourteen centuries of qualification. This is not always the intent, but it is sometimes the effect.

What Honest Writing About Art Looks Like

I want to be careful here, because I am not arguing for a purely technical or formalist criticism that strips art of its historical and spiritual context. Context matters. The relationship between calligraphy and Islamic intellectual history is not decorative background; it is constitutive of the practice's meaning. A critic who ignored it would be missing something essential.

What I am arguing for is honesty about what is being claimed. When a critic says that a work engages with the sacred, they should be able to say specifically how — through what formal or conceptual means, in what relationship to the tradition's own account of the sacred, with what kind of success. When an artist says that their practice is a form of prayer, they should be able to engage with the question of what that means for the formal and conceptual decisions they make in the studio.

Honest writing about art is demanding because it requires the writer to commit to specific claims that can be evaluated. Mystifying writing is easier because it floats above the level at which evaluation is possible. The art world has developed powerful incentives to reward mystification and relatively few incentives to reward clarity. This is a structural problem, not a personal failure, and it applies across traditions.

The Market Dimension

I should be direct about something that usually goes unsaid: the production and maintenance of mystifying language around art is economically rational for many of the people who engage in it. Galleries, critics, auction houses, and artists all have interests in inflating perceived value, and complex language is one of the most reliable tools for this.

This does not mean that everyone who uses complex language about art is cynically manipulating their audience. Many people have internalized the vocabulary of the contemporary art world and genuinely believe they are communicating meaningfully when they use it. The ideology has done its work. But the structural incentives are what they are, and they shape the vocabulary whether or not individual speakers are conscious of them.

For artists, this creates a genuine dilemma. The language of the contemporary art world is not optional if you want to participate in it. Certain institutional contexts — galleries, art fairs, grant applications, artist statements — require a kind of writing that follows the established conventions. Refusing to write in these conventions is a form of marginalization. But writing in them without examining what you are doing is a form of capitulation to a system that often does not serve the interests of honest communication.

I don’t think there is an easy way out of this dilemma. What I try to do in my own writing is to use the vocabulary when it is genuinely the most precise available tool for what I want to say, and to avoid it when it is serving a rhetorical rather than a communicative function. This is harder than it sounds, because the distinction is not always clear, and the incentives run in only one direction.

A Note on Audiences

One thing I have noticed in my own practice is that the people who respond most directly and honestly to the work are rarely the people who are most fluent in art world vocabulary. Workshop participants who have never read a piece of art criticism, collectors who came to calligraphy through a personal connection to the script, viewers who encounter the work in non-art contexts — these are often the people who say the most interesting things about what they are seeing.

This is not a romantic celebration of the naive viewer over the sophisticated critic. Training and context matter; they allow you to see things that are genuinely invisible without them. But it is a reminder that the audience most fluent in specialized vocabulary is not necessarily the audience with the most direct access to what the work is actually doing.

The work’s relationship to its audience is not well served by language that performs depth for insiders while excluding everyone else. If calligraphy has the reach that I believe it has — if it genuinely speaks to people across vast cultural and linguistic distances — then that reach is not served by mystification. It is served by honesty about what the work is, what it is doing, and why it matters.