New Space, New Grammar: Reading the Contemporary Gallery

The wall label is the most-read piece of art writing in the country, and almost nobody edits it.

A gallery's grammar — how it names, dates and describes a work — quietly decides what the work is allowed to mean. When that grammar is imported wholesale, the art starts speaking in a borrowed accent.

Curation is not decoration. It is the argument you make with the walls.

The most interesting spaces of the last two years have been the ones willing to write badly in their own voice rather than fluently in someone else's.