I think it became clear to me in my formative years, that beyond good writing and bad writing, there was a style of writing that was meant to obscure. As a fine arts and graphic design student in college, I would sometimes try to decipher the convoluted gibberish about Abstract Expressionism in pretentious magazines like ArtForum and eventually give up, concluding that, either there were human beings (who, for the most part, lived in New York) so vastly superior in intellect than I or that this was all just a load of crap.

The late, great Tom Wolfe wrote a book, The Painted Word, about the pseudo-intellectual poseurs of the New York art scene who pushed great loads of self-indulgent and plainly awful art down the throats of Americans who couldn’t make heads or tails of it and those museum curators and collectors eager to be relevant. As he put it:

There were brave and patriotic collectors who created a little flurry of activity on the Abstract Expressionist market in the late 1950s, but in general this type of painting was depreciating faster than a Pontiac Bonneville once it left the showroom. The resale market was a shambles. Without the museums to step in here and there, to buy in the name of history, Abstract Expressionism was becoming a real beached whale commercially. The deep-down mutter-to-myself truth was that the collectors, despite their fervent desire to be virtuous, had never been able to build up any gusto for Abstract Expressionism. Somehow that six-flight walk up the spiral staircase of Theory took the wind out of you.