In a 2004 article for Art AsiaPacific, Simon Winchester reflected on a ‘sermon’ he had attended by Benjamin Buchloh, one of the ‘high priests’ of contemporary art theory and criticism. To his dismay, Winchester found Buchloh’s paper (on the German artist Gerhard Richter) completely baffling. ‘Save for a scattering of prepositions, I understood not a single word of what he said that day. He spoke in a language that I found entirely unfamiliar, about a subject I found impossible to determine.’ Undeterred, Winchester set himself the task of trying to understand Buchloh’s language. After two years of diligent study, however, he remained nonplussed. His conclusion is that Buchloh speaks as Benjamin Disraeli’s ‘sophistical rhetorician’ wrote: as a ‘man inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity’.
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