Lost in Translation
The language of a different art world
A slightly different newsletter this week. It begins with a bang, spirals into discomfort, and somehow lands on me realising why I keep on writing week after week. I hope it resonates.
I sit down next to a young guy, casually sipping a beer.
“That buildup just kept on going, right, my god…,” he says sarcastically.
We had just listened to a live electronic experimental music performance for half an hour. Across from us, two girls are sitting on a bench.
“Yeah… We turned the speakers down a bit to be honest,” one of the girls responds. “It was just really loud.”
“Did you hear that massive bang, like out of nowhere?” I ask. “I honestly wasn’t sure if it was part of the performance or not, hahaha.”
The guy turns to me, amused: “Oh yeah? Guess I missed that one.”
“Yeah… It was kind of weird,” I smile. “I don’t think I got it, to be honest.”
“You’re not supposed to get it,” he shoots back. “There’s so much in life you’re not meant to understand. You just feel it. And clearly — you just don’t feel it.”
His sharpness catches me off guard. What started as a light and slightly awkward social chat suddenly flips. His tone cuts. I feel tension climb into my body. All at once, I’m hyper-aware of being surrounded by people I don’t know.
“I mean… I guess I don’t know that much about music, so maybe I just find it hard to place things,” I suggest.
“You don’t have to know shit about music to feel something. What kind of fucking logic is that,” he snaps.
I freeze. My chest tightens. The girls across the table go completely silent.
Trying to ease the tension, I ask him: “Ok so… what do you do?”
“Again, that question,” he retorts bluntly.
He rolls his eyes deliberately in my face and exhales with theatrical exhaustion. Complete silence follows right after.
I flinch. Shift awkwardly in my seat. I rephrase: “I meant, do you do anything with music yourself?”
His body language softens and he starts talking about his music passion project of which the specifics aren’t important for this story. I pick up on bits and pieces and try to make connections to the art world I do know. But nothing clicks between us.
A few minutes later, he gets up and says he’s going to say hi real quick. When I turn around, he’s standing with a group of smokers.
My dad would call this “een nutteloze luchtverplaatsing”. A useless movement of air. A conversation with a lot of words, without anything being said.
Dissecting the afterthought
The conversation stayed with me for days. A ‘casual’ encounter yet it fastened itself into the fibres of my thinking. At night, I would lay the memory on the operating table, dissecting it layer by layer, without anaesthetic. I found myself not just replaying the moment, but actively seeking answers: reading, researching, trying to understand what exactly had unfolded that evening.
Today, I want to take you through what that encounter opened up in me. What I have learned from it and what I might approach differently next time. If there’s one thing I take from this, it’s that we learn so much from interpersonal exchanges, however brief or awkward. And that none of the explanations below hold an absolute truth. They emerge from a messy tangle of context, emotion, and perception. To me, the absolute value lies in continuing to challenge both ourselves and the other.
Lost in translation
I get what he meant. I know that some things have to be felt instead of being understood. Because I recognise the same instinct from the visual arts. We all long to be moved, shaken, undone by a work that grabs us by the throat and pins us to the wall. But let’s be honest: how often does that really happen?
Maybe, in that moment, I was just the nono in the music industry: the outsider, the beginner, the one who (maybe like you) wants to be moved, but sometimes feels pushed aside by abstraction, jargon, or intimidating spaces. Maybe my comment wasn’t stupid, but simply an attempt to make contact with something I didn’t yet have words for.
Still, what struck me the most in this conversation was his tone and body language. It seemed elitist. Hautain. Something my friends outside the art world often run into when they tentatively step in the scene. And now, I also felt it and I could read his thoughts: “Ugh, here we go again. Someone who still thinks you have to understand art”.
And again, I get him.
It’s exhausting to keep talking about a form of art when you’re not met at a shared emotional frequency. It drains your energy. Maybe this was his fifth shallow chat of the evening. Maybe my comments and question were the drops that tipped the glass…
So, I ask myself: why did I ask a placeholder question?
Maybe I filled the space out of discomfort because I struggle with silence among strangers. Maybe I also felt socially responsible for softening the mood. Maybe next time I should just accept the discomfort and part ways.
But at some point, I noticed we speak from different places. I process cognitively (consciously, reflectively, slowly). He says he processes affectively (immediatedly, bodily, intuitively).
I feel through framing. He feels through direct experience. And I think that’s where we got lost in translation.
But did I really feel nothing? Or was I just too self-conscious, to show what I felt? The other girls at the table froze too… What happens when you suppress your affect and replace it with cognitive responses?
According to scholar and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant (1957–2021, USA), women are often culturally associated with the affective (emotional, intuitive). Yet in practice, they are trained to suppress it in favour of cognitive control to avoid being disruptive. They are scared to be labeled as ‘emotional’, ‘too much’, or even ‘hysterical’. This means that in social settings, women often soften their tone, explain or reformulate their words.1 Just like I did.
In Cruel Optimism (2011), Berlant writes about the longing for harmony and adjustment as a survival strategy. But this longing, she argues, can become its own form of constraint, because ironically it prevents us from ever being fully heard or touched. Meaning that a true connection is bound to fail.2
And maybe that’s what happened that evening. There was no real encounter between us and I don’t think either of us is to blame. However, we both played a part in keeping the dynamic going. He by reacting sharply instead of slowing down, and I by adjusting instead of naming what felt off.
One way to slow down a conversation and to step away from those quick, (often hurtful) explosive reactions, is by asking a question. What if, instead of going into attack, he had simply asked me, “What do you mean by not understanding? I only feel music.”
Deborah Tannen (b. 1945, USA) has researched exactly this. In her work on gendered communication, she distinguishes between report-talk, often used by men to establish status, and rapport-talk, often used by women to build connection. She notes that in personal conversations, men tend to ask fewer questions, which can lead to a lack of reciprocity.3
bell hooks (1952–2021, USA), writing from a different angle, explores how men are often discouraged from expressing vulnerability or curiosity in relationships. In The Will to Change (2003), she argues that showing interest or care is rarely framed as strength, but rather as weakness. It’s a belief that restricts both women and men in their capacity for intimacy and mutual understanding.4
I believe everyone benefits from becoming more conscious of asking questions. But more importantly, of learning to ask better ones. One of my closest friends facilitates workshops for teams, helping them optimise processes and collaborate more intentionally. One of her key insights is that asking better interpersonal questions between colleagues is essential for fostering genuine connections across departments.
A simple “What do you do?” opens a different door than “Which part of your job do you enjoy most and why?” Same topic, but the latter invites curiosity and vulnerability.
I’m glad I met him. And that at first I collided with him (mostly afterwards, on my dissecting table, as I obsessively over-analysed our encounter). Only to realise that what I was really facing wasn’t him, but myself.
I viscerally felt again (or fine, I cognitively processed haha) just how important my desire is to build bridges between people and contemporary visual art through language.
It reminded me of why I care so much about language, because I truly believe that a lot of art appreciation grows from knowledge. From understanding where things come from: art history, materials, techniques, art movements and their relevance, the market, the collaborations, the thresholds, the frictions. All of it.
This is why I do what I do. Why I use this newsletter to contextualise the art market and everyone involved. Not because I don’t believe in feeling but because I believe framing helps us to feel more. And when the context is clear, maybe the art (and we) can start to speak more freely.
In a perfect world, I would have said exactly this to the stranger after the concert, but apparently, I needed some time to digest my feelings ;)
So if this all made sense to you: stick around and share it with others. I’ll keep doing my best to write about art authentically and to not get lost in translation.
Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, 2008. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2011, Duke University Press
Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation
1990, Ballantine Books
bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, 2004, Atria Books
Emily! What a douche! Not worth your time. You deserve to be treated with common decency. Everyone does. Douchey men like to crush women’s intellects. I can assure you he did not give your exchange one single thought afterwords. He felt threatened by your will to think, to inquire, to suggest that there is whole field you became aware of, and were respectful of enough to say you may not have the tools to get it. You’re also allowed not to like experimental music. I can’t handle free jazz. And one day, because we’re open minded, we’ll love a piece of a thing we’re not drawn to and that’s ok as well.
I think this is a better lesson in how not to talk to people about art. He was the perfect villain, and the purpose of the villain is to turn us around to a better road, challenge us to overcome, or show us the division line between bad and good (because it’s often so grey). So for print art (music is also an art), we learn from this villain that opinions differ, people think they are right about their opinions on what an artwork means, and only the insecure people will negate your experience of an oeuvre. Also, I’d like to note, it’s ok to not know how you feel about a work immediately, and to reflect on it or discuss the piece with others.