Thursday 31 January 2013

pilger on the invasion of Africa - and disney media




A full-scale invasion of Africa is under way. The United States is deploying troops in 35 African countries, beginning with Libya, Sudan, Algeria and Niger. Reported by Associated Press on Christmas Day, this was missing from most Anglo-American media. 

The invasion has almost nothing to do with "Islamism", and almost everything to do with the acquisition of resources, notably minerals, and an accelerating rivalry with China. Unlike China, the US and its allies are prepared to use a degree of violence demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Palestine. As in the cold war, a division of labour requires that western journalism and popular culture provide the cover of a holy war against a "menacing arc" of Islamic extremism, no different from the bogus "red menace" of a worldwide communist conspiracy.







It is as if Africa's proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master's black colonial elite whose "historic mission", warned Frantz Fanon half a century ago, is the promotion of "a capitalism rampant though camouflaged".  






Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, describes a secret presidential directive in 1979 that began what became the current "war on terror". For 17 years, the US deliberately cultivated, bank-rolled, armed and brainwashed jihadi extremists that "steeped a generation in violence". Code-named Operation Cyclone, this was the "great game" to bring down the Soviet Union but brought down the Twin Towers. 

Since then, the news that intelligent, educated people both dispense and ingest has become a kind of Disney journalism, fortified, as ever, by Hollywood's licence to lie, and lie. There is the coming Dreamworks movie on WikiLeaks, a fabrication inspired by a book of perfidious title-tattle by two enriched Guardian journalists; and there is Zero Dark Thirty, which promotes torture and murder, directed by the Oscar-winning Kathryn Bigelow, the Leni Riefenstahl of our time, promoting her master's voice as did the Fuhrer's pet film-maker. Such is the one-way mirror through which we barely glimpse what power does in our name.








http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-real-invasion-of-africa-is-not-news-and-a-licence-to-lie-is-hollywoods-gift

African Art that was too sophisticated to have been created by African hands.


The Olokun Head discovered in Nigeria in 1910 and initially regarded by European scholars as too great a masterpiece to have originated from Africa.










The debate around the head,   at the time of its discovery,  just illustrates the  sheer racism of the West (and its art world) toward the Other. A racism that continues today, even as Africa is being recolonised.

The accepted Art world narrative is the the story of Progress from Primitive African to the  Western Modern. " Primitive" African art was good enough to ' borrow' from by the Great Modernist Masters like Picasso but not taken seriously as an Art that was comparable to  what  the West was creating. 

It has take a long time for the West to accept the fact the African hands could produce Art that was more sophisticated than even European Art during Renaissance 

 Please notice the use of the word "artefact" for a work of obvious Art, in the report below. 


Ever since a pure copper sculpture was found buried in a palm grove near the Nigerian city of Ife, experts from the West have argued that the artefact was a fake that was too sophisticated to have been created by African hands.


Found in 1910, the "Olokun head" left Western curators doubting that such a technically advanced work of art could have been created by indigenous people. 




At the time of discovery, the head was considered too great a masterpiece to have been created by indigenous African artists – a reflection of prevailing attitudes of the early 20th century. Some Europeans even theorised that the work was a remnant from the lost city of Atlantis. A spokeswoman for the British Museum said when the head travelled to the West, it caused a huge stir because "it flew in the face of Western perceptions" (of African heritage and cultural achievements).


It is now accepted by the curatorial community that the advanced artistic techniques used to create the sculpture were "more advanced than those of Renaissance Italy, and comparable to those of [the artist] Donatello".





http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/sculpture-deemed-too-complex-for-africa-could-be-real-after-all-1961485.html

israel. "from holy land to homeland"

 It is Myths that manufacture Nations and National Identities. Man made myths that are given a magical power by invoking and ascribing  Gods in their making.  The foundational myth of  Israel does not really stand up to any serious scrutiny.

This scrutiny by an Israeli historian should shake the the foundations of the state.  It won't, I think.
 Sadly so.







Shlomo Sand is a history professor at Tel Aviv University. His charismatic, readable style was evident in his previous book The Invention of the Jewish People, the English edition of which kicked up quite a controversy in 2009. The title alone seemed designed to shock.




That book was a fascinating journey through centuries of Jewish history, much of it swept under the carpet by Zionist historiography. Sand’s new book, The Invention of the Land of Israel, is essentially a direct sequel, focusing on the nature of an idea central to Zionism: the “Land of Israel” — Eretz Israel in Hebrew.
Sand explains that in Israel, “in the Hebrew-language edition of foreign books, the word ‘Palestine’ is systematically replaced with the words Eretz Israel … Even when the writings of important Zionist figures such as Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Ber Borochov and many others [who also used ‘Palestine’] … are translated into Hebrew” (23).

In the Hebrew Bible (known to Christians as the Old Testament), the geographic area roughly corresponding to the land of Palestine (between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea) is mostly called the “land of Canaan.” The area “never served as a homeland for the ‘children of Israel,’ and for this reason, among others, they never refer to it as ‘the Land of Israel.’” Most Israelis, Sand argues, are not aware that the term is not found in the the Hebrew Bible “in its inclusive meaning” of a wide geographic area (86).
Later Jewish religious law “does feature the debut of the term ‘Land of Israel’ ” but, Sand explains, this was a “holy land” rather than a “homeland”
Furthermore this Eretz Israel was traditionally considered by mainstream Judaism to be so holy the devout were positively forbidden to move there (183). Even pilgrimage was a rare, and later phenomenon. Between the years 134 and 1099, “we know of no attempts by the followers of rabbinical Judaism to make pilgrimages to the holy city” of Jerusalem (123).
All this stands in stark contrast to the 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence which claims that “the Jewish people … never ceased to pray and hope for their return.” In contrast to this “mythos,” Sand writes: “most of the world’s Jews … did not regard Palestine as their land … they did not strive ‘in every successive generation to reestablish themselves in their ancient homeland’ ” .



“Settlement Zionism, which borrowed the term ‘Land of Israel’ from the Talmud, was not overly pleased with the borders it had been assigned by Jewish law … extending only fromAcre to Ashkelon … [it was] not sufficiently contiguous to serve as a national homeland,” argues Sand (214).
He then reviews the history of the ever-shifting definition in Zionist thought of where exactly its “Land of Israel” is — something undeclared till this day.


It’s a useful book for debunking Zionist myths, which, due to the legacy of Protestant Christian Zionism in the west are surprisingly resilient. But as Sand’s slightly flaky post-Zionist politics demonstrates, a more realistic knowledge of history doesn’t necessarily translate fully to a rights-based understanding of the Palestinian plight.
Still, there is much to enjoy and learn in the evidence in the potentially incendiary material he assembles here

http://electronicintifada.net/content/new-book-tel-aviv-historian-uncovers-land-israel-myths/12116




Wednesday 30 January 2013

of "5 broken cameras" , non violence and Gandhi


Today  is the 65th Death Anniversary  of Mahatma Gandhi. It is 65 years since the icon of Non Violence fell to an assassin's bullets. 



We have to remember that he did not approve of the creation of Israel on land that belonged to someone else. And he objected to the creation of the state through violence - with the help of British Guns.

This documentary should make every decent Israeli ashamed of being an Israeli. It should be shown in civics classes and heritage classes. The Israelis should know, at long last, what is being done in their name every day and every night in this ostensible time of no terror. Even in a West Bank village like Bil’in, which has made nonviolence its motto.

The soldiers – the friends of our sons and the sons of our friends – break into homes in order to abduct small children, who may be suspected of throwing stones. There is no other way to describe this. They also arrest dozens of the organizers of the popular weekly protest at Bil’in. And this happens every night.




This documentary proves that, for the locals, the reality of the occupation is that there is no such thing as nonviolent struggle. For the information of those who preach nonviolence (from the Palestinians ): The Israel Defense Forces soldiers and the Border Police will ensure that it becomes violent. Just one thrown stone, despite the pleas of the demonstration organizers, will suffice; just one verbal altercation will also suffice to open the most advanced weapons arsenal in the world – to pull the pin, to release the gas, the rubber bullet and the skunk gas, and sometimes the live fire, and to cut off the impossible dream of a nonviolent struggle.

Anyone who watches this film understands that it is very difficult to face the wall, the settlement project and the soldiers – all of which scream “violence” – and remain nonviolent. Nearly impossible.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33763.htm

no film as immoral, vile and self-righteous as the Torture tale

More on the West's approach to Torture.   The justification of it - as long as they do it. Hollywood will hasbara it.



Now I must say this – in decades of watching Israeli and international war cinema, I don’t remember a film as immoral, vile and self-righteous as Zero Dark Thirty. This narcissistic movie, with all its aesthetic portraits of torture and assassinations, not only enjoys and fetishizes the violence it depicts but also justifies and rationalizes it. It is not – as some more naïve viewers said – a “complicated” or “controversial” way of promoting “a debate” on torture, but the other way around. Torture and assassinations are presented as effective though unpleasant ways of preforming heroic acts.




When you take ZDT and The Hurt Locker together, you understand that Bigelow actually thinks that in the more than 11 years of wars in three countries, the sole and only victims were Americans. This is the worst kind of propaganda, one which is directed at the bleeding hearts and liberals who seem to enjoy their action flicks with a sauce of “moral dilemmas” and remorse. Be sure – the old style of war films was way more honest and moral because it praised the hero’s actions and therefore assumed at least certain responsibility for them. Naturally, the Arabs are just as dead in both genres.


http://972mag.com/zero-dark-thirty-is-the-most-vile-and-immoral-war-film-ive-seen-in-years/64872/

"Keep them naked if they do not follow commands."

Get them naked," the PowerPoint aid says. "Keep them naked if they do not follow commands."

Naked power ! That was, and  is, the point of it. The power to command. Command the world's wealth.  Its resources and its  People . All through the use of the most brutal power at mankind's, not so kind, command.

The brutality of the powerful is not called to be called Torture, of course.That is a term reserved for what the Others do. The weaker Others. Others  like the Nepali colonel that Britain has arrested and aims to try even as it joins the Americans  in covering up its own brutality. Its own Torture. 

Selective Lawfare  - that is  the name of the new warfare on the world's poor and on  their incredible wealth. The resource wealth that the West wants to control. 
  

An Iraqi detainee of the British military in al-Ma'aqal prison, Basra, in  2004.
An Iraqi detainee in al-Ma'aqal prison, Basra, in 2004. More than 1,000 former prisoners say they were severely mistreated by the British military during the five-year occupation. Photograph: Hani al-Obeidi/AFP/Getty Images


Allegations that British troops in Iraq were responsible for the widespread and systemic abuse of detainees through "terrifying acts of brutality, abuse and intimidation" were raised in the high court today as lawyers representing hundreds of former prisoners demanded a public inquiry.
More than a thousand former prisoners complain that they were severely mistreated after being detained by the British military during the five-year occupation of the south-east of the country, while others – including women and children – say they were abused when their male relatives were being detained.
"Enough is enough," said Michael Fordham QC, for the former prisoners. "There must be a public inquiry in relation to credible and prima-facie cases of human rights violations perpetrated by the British military in Iraq between 2003 and 2008."


Many of the individual claims investigated by IHAT have resulted in the payment of substantial sums in compensation. Last month the department announced that it had paid a total of £14m to 205 claimants. A further £1.1m was paid to 22 more people in recent weeks. Payments to about 180 more former prisoners are being negotiated, and further 700 cases are thought to be in the pipeline.


Former JFIT prisoners allege that in between the video-filmed interrogation sessions they would be blindfolded and dragged by their thumbs around an obstacle course while being kicked and struck with rifle butts. One former JFIT guard has confirmed to the Guardian that this was routine practice.
The court has heard that custody records show guards were ordered to wake prisoners every 15 minutes: a practice known as Operation Wide Awake.
There are also allegations that JFIT's prisoners were beaten and forced to kneel in stressful positions for up to 30 hours at a time; held for days in cells as small as one metre square; that some were subjected to electric shocks; and that others suffered sexual humiliation by female soldiers.





A PowerPoint training aid created in 2005 and a manual dating from 2008 instructs trainees that they should use threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions. "Get them naked," the PowerPoint aid says. "Keep them naked if they do not follow commands."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/29/iraqi-detainees-demand-uk-inquiry

Tuesday 29 January 2013

'cyberwars' for the soul of the internet.


The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net-neutrality ISPs, it’s Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence.
McConnell’s not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering. He’s the nice-seeming guy who’s willing and able to use fear-mongering to manipulate the federal bureaucracy for his own ends, while coming off like a straight shooter to those who are not in the know.




We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same.
Re-read that sentence. He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded. Or the tech could be useful if a computer got hijacked without your knowledge and used as part of a botnet.



Make no mistake, the military industrial complex now has its eye on the internet. Generals want to train crack squads of hackers and have wet dreams of cyberwarfare. Never shy of extending its power, the military industrial complex wants to turn the internet into yet another venue for an arms race.
And it’s waging a psychological warfare campaign on the American people to make that so. The military industrial complex is backed by sensationalism, and a gullible and pageview-hungry media.


The internet is a hack that seems forever on the edge of falling apart. For awhile, spam looked like it was going to kill e-mail, the net’s first killer app. But smart filters have reduced the problem to a minor nuisance as anyone with a Gmail account can tell you. That’s how the internet survives. The apocalypse looks like it’s coming and it never does, but meanwhile, it becomes more and more useful to our everyday lives, spreading innovation, weird culture, news, commerce and healthy dissent.
But one thing it hasn’t spread is “cyberwar.” There is no cyberwar and we are not losing it. The only war going on is one for the soul of the internet. But if journalists, bloggers and the security industry continue to let self-interested exaggerators dominate our nation’s discourse about online security, we will lose that war — and the open internet will be its biggest casualty.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/cyber-war-hype/#ixzz0jZTBbm1b



cyber bombing freedom


Pentagon's new massive expansion of 'cyber-security' unit is about everything except defense

Cyber-threats are the new pretext to justify expansion of power and profit for the public-private National Security State
NSA headquarters Maryland
The National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Among other forms of intelligence-gathering, the NSA secretly collects the phone records of millions of Americans, using data provided by telecom firms AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth. Photograph: NSA/Getty Images






It is the US - not Iran, Russia or "terror" groups - which already is the first nation (in partnership with Israel) to aggressively deploy a highly sophisticated and extremely dangerous cyber-attack. Last June, the New York Times' David Sanger reported what most of the world had already suspected: "From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons." In fact, Obama "decided to accelerate the attacks . . . even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet." According to the Sanger's report, Obama himself understood the significance of the US decision to be the first to use serious and aggressive cyber-warfare:




This significant expansion under the Orwellian rubric of "cyber-security" is thus a perfect microcosm of US military spending generally. It's all justified under by the claim that the US must defend itself from threats from Bad, Aggressive Actors, when the reality is the exact opposite: the new program is devoted to ensuring that the US remains the primary offensive threat to the rest of the world. It's the same way the US develops offensive biological weapons under the guise of developing defenses against such weapons (such as the 2001 anthrax that the US government itself says came from a US Army lab). It's how the US government generally convinces its citizens that it is a peaceful victim of aggression by others when the reality is that the US builds more weapons, sells more arms and bombs to more countries than virtually the rest of the world combined.






Threats to privacy and internet freedom

Beyond the aggressive threat to other nations posed by the Pentagon's "cyber-security" programs, there is the profound threat to privacy, internet freedom, and the ability to communicate freely for US citizens and foreign nationals alike. The US government has long viewed these "cyber-security" programs as a means of monitoring and controlling the internet and disseminating propaganda. The fact that this is all being done under the auspices of the NSA and the Pentagon means, by definition, that there will be no transparency and no meaningful oversight.
Back in 2003, the Rumsfeld Pentagon prepared a secret report entitled "Information Operations (IO) Roadmap", which laid the foundation for this new cyber-warfare expansion. The Pentagon's self-described objective was "transforming IO into a core military competency on par with air, ground, maritime and special operations". In other words, its key objective was to ensure military control over internet-based communications:

Regarding the report's plan to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum", the BBC noted: "Consider that for a moment. The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet."






What Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex has been feeding itself on fear campaigns since it was born. A never-ending carousel of Menacing Enemies - Communists, Terrorists, Latin American Tyrants, Saddam's chemical weapons, Iranian mullahs - has sustained it, and Cyber-Threats are but the latest.
Like all of these wildly exaggerated cartoon menaces, there is some degree of threat posed by cyber-attacks. But, as Singel described, all of this can be managed with greater security systems for public and private computer networks - just as some modest security measures are sufficient to deal with the terrorist threat.


This new massive expansion has little to do with any actual cyber-threat - just as the invasion of Iraq and global assassination program have little to do with actual terrorist threats. It is instead all about strengthening the US's offensive cyber-war capabilities, consolidating control over the internet, and ensuring further transfers of massive public wealth to private industry continue unabated. In other words, it perfectly follows the template used by the public-private US National Security State over the last six decades to entrench and enrich itself based on pure pretext.



for the full article  :


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/28/pentagon-cyber-security-expansion-stuxnet

the roots of the rich disconnect.

The roots of the wealth the World's Wealthy now own, are buried deep in the colonial past. A past that has never really ended. It's practices continue even today - as the neocolonial wars  that now aim to grab more of other peoples' resources.


                   
             The white well of wealth or the "Black Hole" ?             

                                    CALCUTTA


The way we are governed is inexplicable – until you      understand the upbringing of the elite.



the role of such schools was clear: they broke boys' attachment to their families and re-attached them to the institutions – the colonial service, the government, the armed forces – through which the British ruling class projected its power. Every year they released into the world a cadre of kamikazes, young men fanatically devoted to their caste and culture.





The school chaplain used to recite a prayer that began "let us now praise famous men". Most of those he named were heroes of colonial conquest or territorial wars. Some, such as Douglas Haig and Herbert Kitchener, were by then widely regarded as war criminals. Our dormitories were named after the same people. The history we were taught revolved around topics such as Gordon of Khartoum, Stanley and Livingstone and the Black Hole of Calcutta. In geography, the maps still showed much of the globe coloured red.




Last year the former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote something very similar about the dominant classes of the US: "the rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens … the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it."
Secession from the concerns and norms of the rest of society characterises any well established elite. Our own ruling caste, schooled separately, brought up to believe in justifying fairytales, lives in a world of its own, from which it can project power without understanding or even noticing the consequences. A removal from the life of the rest of the nation is no barrier to the desire to dominate it. In fact, it appears to be associated with a powerful sense of entitlement.

So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its frontbench can rock with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them.

http://www.monbiot.com/2013/01/28/another-country/

Monday 28 January 2013

propaganda and the (free) press


Selective leaks  to a select few make for great propaganda. Purging  "unofficial' leaks and leakers   puts the much vaunted Free Press in the Free World in grave danger. The bigger danger, however, is to the very idea  of Democracy. Democracy that is supposedly promoted around the world even as it is being destroyed by attacks against its very  roots.Attacks on the free flow of information. Information that is not selective  production of Propaganda.



The permanent US national security state has used extreme secrecy to shield its actions from democratic accountability ever since its creation after World War II. But those secrecy powers were dramatically escalated in the name of 9/11 and the War on Terror, such that most of what the US government now does of any significance is completely hidden from public knowledge. Two recent events - the sentencing last week of CIA torture whistleblower John Kirikaou to 30 months in prison and theinvasive investigation to find the New York Times' source for its reporting on the US role in launching cyberwarfare at Iran - demonstrate how devoted the Obama administration is not only to maintaining, but increasing, these secrecy powers.




To understand the Obama White House's obsession with punishing leaks - as evidenced by its historically unprecedented war on whistleblowers - just consider how virtually every significant revelation of the bad acts of the US government over the last decade came from this process. Unauthorized leaks are how we learned about the Bush administration's use of torture, the NSA's illegal eavesdropping on Americans without the warrants required by the criminal law, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, thesecret network of CIA "black sites" beyond the reach of law or human rights monitoring, the targeting by Obama of a US citizen for assassination without due process, the re-definition of "militant" to mean "any military age male in a strike zone", the video of a US Apache helicopter gunning down journalists and rescuers in Baghdad, the vastly under-counted civilians deaths caused by the war in Iraq, and the Obama administration's campaign to pressure Germany and Spain to cease criminal investigations of the US torture regime.
In light of this, it should not be difficult to understand why the Obama administration is so fixated on intimidating whistleblowers and going far beyond any prior administration - including those of the secrecy-obsessed Richard Nixon and George W Bush - to plug all leaks. It's because those methods are the only ones preventing the US government from doing whatever it wants in complete secrecy and without any accountability of any kind.


Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power. That's why those who wield political power are always driven to destroy methods of transparency. About this fact, Thomas Jefferson wrote in an 1804 letter to John Tyler [emphasis added]:
"Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues of truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is freedom of the press. It is therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions."
About all that, Yale law professor David A Schultz observed: "For Jefferson, a free press was the tool of public criticism. It held public officials accountable, opening them up to the judgment of people who could decide whether the government was doing good or whether it had anything to hide. . . . A democratic and free society is dependent upon the media to inform."



The Obama administration does not dislike leaks of classified information. To the contrary, it is a prolific exploiter of exactly those types of leaks - when they can be used to propagandize the citizenry to glorify the president's image as a tough guy, advance his political goals or produce a multi-million-dollar Hollywood film about his greatest conquest. Leaks are only objectionable when they undercut that propaganda by exposing government deceit, corruption and illegality.
Few events have vividly illustrated this actual goal as much as the lengthy prison sentence this week meted out to former CIA officer John Kiriakou. It's true that Kiriakou is not a pure anti-torture hero given that, in his first public disclosures, he made inaccurate claims about the efficacy of waterboarding. But he did also unequivocally condemn waterboarding and other methods as torture. And, as FAIR put it this week, whatever else is true: "The only person to do time for the CIA's torture policies appears to be a guy who spoke publicly about them, not any of the people who did the actual torturing."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/27/obama-war-on-whistleblowers-purpose


art lingo - mapping power

International Art English or just Insider's Arty English?

This reminds me of  a term used in Indian sociology  - Sanskritisation.  The lower castes rise up the caste ladder by adopting the  norms of the upper classes, including, of course, the languages derived from the sacred language . Sanskrit. The language of Brahamanical  power.


                'ART '- Sanskritisation or Englishisation



With its pompous paradoxes and its plagues of adverbs, its endless sentences and its strained rebellious poses, much of this promotional writing serves mainly, it seems, as ammunition for those who still insist contemporary art is a fraud. Surely no one sensible takes this jargon seriously?
David Levine and Alix Rule do. "Art English is something that everyone in the art world bitches about all the time," says Levine, a 42-year-old American artist based in New York and Berlin. "But we all use it." Three years ago, Levine and his friend Rule, a 29-year-old critic and sociology PhD student at Columbia university in New York, decided to try to anatomise it. "We wanted to map it out," says Levine, "to describe its contours, rather than just complain about it."
They christened it International Art English, or IAE, 





Sometimes this language is just pure front; sometimes it's a way of hedging your bets in the labyrinth of art-world politics. "Institutions try to guess what they're meant to sound like," says Levine, much of whose own art is interested in the rituals and role-playing of the art world.


The flood of new money into art in recent years may have helped swell the IAE bubble. "The more overheated the market gets, the more overheated the language gets," says Levine. IAE often "insists on art's subversive potential". Popular terms include: radically, interrogates, subverts, void, tension. Much contemporary art does have a disquieting quality, but there can be something faintly absurd about artists in Mayfair galleries playing up their iconoclasm for super-rich collectors. The showy vagueness of IAE can also be commercially pragmatic: "The more you can muddy the waters around the meaning of a work," says Levine, "the more you can keep the value high."





Will the hegemony of IAE, to use a very IAE term, ever end? Rule and Levine think it soon might. Now that competence in IAE is almost a given for art professionals, its allure as an exclusive private language is fading. When IAE goes out of fashion, they write, "We probably shouldn't expect that the globalised art world's language will become ... inclusive. More likely, the elite of that world will opt for something like conventional highbrow English."


http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide-international-art-english