Make yourself clear. This is risky. To say clearly what you think is to risk being more clearly wrong. To fudge what you think – to qualify it, complicate it, overload it – is usually a defensive move. It’s a strategy for getting partial credit: you figure you may be wrong but at least you’re clever, you’re eloquent… and maybe not that far wrong.
I work in a field – art history – that is rich in adjectives, poor in provable statements, just right for somebody who hides from clarity behind vivid, entertaining language. The best antidote I ever heard prescribed to writers came from the art historian Howard Hibbard, who told us students what to do when we’d written a sentence: “Take your favorite word and strike it out.” Hibbard meant that often we put the word there not for clarity but for vanity …
During the past generation, art history has been preoccupied with questions of art theory and the social and economic and political contexts of art, which can be answered from illustrations in books. This has made the field richer intellectually, but it’s excused faculty members and graduate students from going to real works of art in the original and dealing with them, looking hard and long, trying to grasp their peculiar way of communicating, enjoying their pleasures, appreciating how they elude simple classification and undermine theories.
John Lackman
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