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How to Talk Through Your Hat (5)

Can it be sheer coincidence that this standardization of thought and expression in both visual and verbal modes came out of the same environment? I think not. They emerged at almost exactly the same time, from within the same hothouse ― the international post-secondary art-education system. Their virtually simultaneous birth merely manifests that sheltered microcosm’s belated recognition of something the hardscrabble working class has known for millennia: bullshit makes effective and inexpensive fuel, and if everyone’s using it the smell soon goes unnoticed. […]

How to Talk Through Your Hat (4)

Most art-related press releases get written by people who aren’t just art-world wannabes but individuals who have never laid eyes on the work in question. That is, they’re exercises in “How to Write about Art You Haven’t Seen.” That’s because the publicity cycle in the art world runs on a three-month time lag. Let me explain. […]

How to Talk Through Your Hat (3)

It’s conceivable that any given postmodernist text you happen upon in print came from The Postmodernism Generator, a website that generates endless postmodern essays via an algorithm. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say, since postmodern theory hypothesizes that no original ideas exist, only recycled ones. A recycling machine for the standardized locutions of postmodernist theory comes as a logical extension of that philosophical position. […]

How to Talk Through Your Hat (2)

Pierre Bayard’s formulation applies no less to photography than it does to books. To what extent do we ― and, if we teach, do our students ― talk about photographs we don’t know at all, or have looked at carefully sometime in the past but since forgotten, or have only glanced at, or have merely heard of? […]

How to Talk Through Your Hat (1)

Pierre Bayard’s book, “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read,” represents a spirited defense of ― nay, an energetic advocacy of ― talking through one’s hat. Nowadays we use a more blunt locution the name that act: Bullshitting. […]