Word.ws English Dictionary

artspeak

artspeak noun: the specialist vocabulary and language associated with art and artists, especially when seen as complicated or pretentious.

Noun

artspeak (uncountable)

  1. (derogatory, often) The specialist vocabulary and language associated with art and artists, especially when seen as complicated or pretentious.
    • Mr. Quinn[…] was uptown exploring the new $26 million, 40,000 square foot museum addition because he takes students to museums as part of a course he teaches in New York on what to say about paintings—artspeak.1987 February 4, William E. Geist, “The Art of Artspeak: Be Sophisticated”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
    • Complication is what artspeak is all about. It seeks to confer status and worth on an artist's work by insisting on its obscurity, which it conveys through a grey porridge of abstract nouns.2010 February 5, Jon Canter, “Artspeak? It's complicated”, in The Guardian

Forms of artspeak

alternative formart speak

Origin of artspeak

From art + -speak.

Questions about artspeak

What does artspeak mean?
Artspeak means the specialist vocabulary and language associated with art and artists, especially when seen as complicated or pretentious.
What part of speech is artspeak?
Artspeak is a noun.

Words near artspeak in the dictionary

  1. artsmen
  2. artsmithite
  3. artsome
  4. artspace
  5. artspaces
  6. artspeak
  7. artsploitation
  8. artstyle
  9. artstyles
  10. artsy
  11. artsy-craftsy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: artspeak (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “artspeak.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/artspeak. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.