Recently writer Gouri Dang, author of 3 Zakia Mansion was more than a bit peeved when she came across catalogue text that offended her sensibilities. “At a time when I should be concentrating on my own writing and not trying to apply the mind to the writing of others, I couldn’t but help dwell on more gobbledygook under the name of art reviewing,” wrote Dang in her blog.

The catalogue reads: “The function of colour in her palette is like a mooring of moments, of deeper shades or shifts that create a vortex of lines around the contours of a heady sprinkling of forms to the articulation of a surface and the evocation of more than a fleeting shadow. Full dense volumes in tiny notations oscillate happily with solid forms.”

More often than not, a strange convolution occurs in the text deemed as catalogue essays which makes one ask: What of the art going junta who admit it’s perplexing? Are we shutting out all possibilities of communicating with a larger audience when not only the art but also the text accompanying it needs deciphering?

Artists like Rekha Rodwittiya are against dumbing-down of writing on art. “One needs to encourage people to make the effort to open the dictionary and learn a new word, or to make the effort to introduce a new idea into their repertoire,” Rodwittiya once said, however,

it needs to be noted that her catalogues, though academic in nature, remain highly readable.

“A catalogue needs to present a position on the artist’s work. Additionally it should clarify his/her intentions and must incorporate the artist’s viewpoint. Lucidity is key to writing and this is true of catalogues written outside India,” says curator and writer Anupa Mehta.

Very often in the effort to be stylish, the syntax is awry and the tendency is to believe that a dense catalogue is more impressive. “Quoting a Hegelian point of view is all well and good, but one needs to provide Indian contexts,” adds Mehta.

A standing joke is that once Prabhakar Kolte complained to a fellow art critic: “Some times I really do not understand what the critic is getting at. I do not see all those references in my work and I do wish they would consult with me first.” Interestingly, the artist has written his own book From Art to Art which is very readable.

Isn’t communicating the idea more important than the name of the critic at the bottom?

Recently, one came across a rather audacious wall text (an excerpt displayed on a wall) at the show third_life at the

Bombay Art Gallery that mimicked incoherent SMS and chat lingo. Since the show was about cyberspace and art in the age of computers, the essay emerged from that idea but viewers commented it was too confusing and gimmicky.