How To Talk About Art

Miriam Shenitzer (b. 1962)

How to talk about art, 1994

Digitally Printed

A tongue-in-cheek pop-up book in which the narrator, a rat, offers a short tutorial on how to talk about art. The black and white drawings and interactive elements take you through the different ways you can sound like you know what you are talking about and, in doing so, cheekily mock the highfalutin art terminology used in art criticism. Miriam Shenitzer highlights the incomprehensibility and inaccessibility of the high art world and uses satire to undermine the way in which this language has legitimised its exclusivity. Ultimately, the reader is compelled to question the validity of the metrics he/she has been taught in rating or appreciating art.