Dear Greg, why is every gallery press release written in code?

Dear Greg, 

Why is every gallery press release written in code? I try to engage seriously with art, but half the time I read a press release I feel like I’m being pranked. Who is it actually for? Do people in the art world genuinely understand this stuff – or is everyone just pretending so they don’t look stupid?

I used to be a TV documentary researcher – taught to value clarity over camouflage. When struggling to explain a paradoxical legal argument, known as the Prosecutor’s Fallacy, my producer handed me three books by Russell Stannard from the Uncle Albert series, written to explain black holes and Einstein’s relativity to children. The books were charming, lucid and deeply clever, and they lodged in me the uncomfortable realisation that you only really understand something if you can explain it to others.

Which brings me to the gallery press release – those texts with phrases like “the interstitial residue of socio-poetic vectors” or “a liminal exploration of embodied thresholds.” Long, looping metaphors untethered to any visible artwork – so who are they for and why are they written like that?

There’s a short answer: it’s a performance. Not of understanding, but of belonging. A shibboleth. The coded language reassures insiders that they’re inside, while gently (or not so gently) repelling those who aren’t. But I’m convinced it’s also intellectual insecurity dressed up as sophistication. If you can’t explain why a pile of bricks matters without using the word “interrogate” three times, perhaps you don’t really understand why it matters yourself.

I suspect the flourish and fog might often be there to conceal that the writer hasn’t quite landed the thought. You might know the feeling: reaching for a half-understood idea, and then discovering a word that seems to contain it. You hold on. It buoys you. It carries you just enough to feel like you’re swimming. But try offering that word to someone else – try unpacking it – and it slips through your fingers. In the end, it’s not a life raft. It’s a disguise for the fact that you’re still adrift.

The tragedy is that this language actively excludes people. Art should be a conversation, not a secret handshake. When press releases read like academic papers written by AI, they create barriers instead of bridges. They make people feel stupid for not understanding.

I suspect many people in the art world don’t genuinely understand this jargon – they’ve just learned to perform comprehension. It’s a collective delusion, like the emperor’s new clothes, but with more mentions of “praxis” and “otherness.” Gallery assistants copy phrases from previous releases, critics echo the same formulations, and artists feel pressured to describe their work in this approved vocabulary, even when it bears no resemblance to what they’re actually doing.

The press release exists, supposedly, to explain and contextualise. Instead, it often mystifies and excludes. It’s become its own art form – abstract, difficult, occasionally beautiful in its incomprehensibility, but ultimately failing at its primary function: communication.

In 2012, Triple Canopy published a notorious essay on what they called ‘International Art English’ – this pseudo-academic dialect that wafts through press releases, funding applications, and biennale catalogues like stale perfume. It is, by their account, a language more admired for its opacity than its clarity. Words are borrowed from philosophy, theory, and the most impenetrable branches of continental thought, then recast into a slurry of art-speak. No one speaks it at dinner. It exists almost exclusively in the written form, like Latin, or Elvish.

Good art writing does exist. Some critics can make you see things differently without making you reach for a dictionary every sentence. They understand that clarity isn’t dumbing down – it’s opening up.

If the idea is too ephemeral to explain clearly, maybe that’s because it’s not really there – that can be the case… obscurity masking the fact that the work is empty. Or maybe it is just the kind of work that needs a different kind of description. When work is genuinely about feelings, atmosphere, or ineffable experiences, the writing could be more descriptive or poetic. We could be told about the quality of light, the texture of surfaces, the way the space makes you feel. Writers could use stories and metaphors.

The best press releases I’ve read feel like someone genuinely excited about art telling you why you should be excited too. They respect both the work and the reader. They assume intelligence without assuming insider knowledge.

So the solution isn’t to abandon complexity or nuance. It’s to remember that the goal is understanding, not obfuscation. Every time someone uses “praxis” when they mean “practice,” or “liminal” when they mean “in-between,” they’re prioritizing performance over communication. Every unnecessarily complex sentence is a small act of gatekeeping – and, probably, camouflaging a lack of understanding.

Art can be difficult, challenging, even genuinely incomprehensible, but the writing about it doesn’t have to be. The work might interrogate post-capitalist subjectivities, but the press release should just tell us what we’re looking at and why it matters. In plain English.

Press releases shouldn’t be a password, they should be a welcome mat, and if a children’s book can explain the curvature of space-time, I’m fairly sure we can find better words for a series of abstract paintings in a room.