Rhetorical invocation: a four-layer computational analysis of discourse vocabulary in institutional art writing

In many fields of human endeavor, success is not measured by a simple score or a clear win. Instead, value is often created through reputation, where the authority of an institution or a person is built on how they speak and write. In the world of contemporary art, this is especially true. Because there is no objective way to measure the quality of a painting or a performance, the art world relies heavily on language to signal who belongs and what matters. This language, often called International Art English, is a specialized way of writing that uses complex words and specific sentence structures to sound sophisticated and authoritative. It is the tool institutions use to prove they are serious thinkers. But a critical question has remained unanswered: does this language actually perform the deep thinking it claims to do, or is it merely wearing the costume of serious thought?

A new study set out to answer this by treating thousands of art texts as data to be measured, rather than just reading them for meaning. The researchers gathered a massive collection of about 62,400 texts from 13 major art institutions, including famous magazines, museum websites, and digital platforms. To see how these texts really worked, they compared them against a control group of 1,673 peer-reviewed academic articles, which are known for their rigorous logic and clear arguments. The team did not rely on human opinions or feelings about the writing. Instead, they built a four-step computer system to check four different things: how the sentences were built, how words were paired together, whether ideas were logically connected, and how deeply the text engaged with its own subject matter.

The first step looked at the skeleton of the sentences. Academic writing is known for using long, complex noun phrases where extra details are packed in after the main word. The study found that art writing does exactly this. When the length of the documents was adjusted to be equal, art texts used these complex sentence structures at nearly the same rate as academic papers. This suggests that art writing has successfully copied the outward appearance of academic rigor. However, the second step looked closer at how words were used within a single document. In academic writing, when an author uses a specific adjective, like "critical," they tend to pair it with the same nouns repeatedly, such as "critical theory" or "critical analysis," to build a consistent concept. The study found that art writing does the opposite. Within a single art text, the same adjectives are paired with a different noun every single time. There is almost no repetition of these word pairs. This means that while the vocabulary is there, the text is not building a stable, recurring concept; it is using the words as one-off decorations rather than as tools for a sustained argument.

The third step examined the glue that holds an argument together: logical connectors. In academic papers, words like "because," "therefore," or "however" are used frequently to show how one idea leads to another. The study found that in 60 percent of the art documents, the key vocabulary words appeared without any of these logical connectors nearby. In contrast, academic texts used these connectors much more often. This indicates that the art texts are listing ideas side by side without explaining the causal relationships between them. The final step used advanced language models to judge the depth of the writing. The models were asked to determine if a text was merely mentioning a topic, describing it in context, or actually analyzing it. The results showed that academic texts were about 3.5 times more likely to reach the level of deep analysis. The art texts, by comparison, mostly stayed at the level of context, describing what something is about without explaining why or how it works.

When these four findings are put together, they reveal a pattern the researchers call rhetorical invocation. This is a situation where the formal markers of serious thinking are present, but the actual work of thinking is missing. The study shows that art institutions have mastered the syntax and the vocabulary of academic rigor, but they do not use them to build logical arguments or repeat concepts to deepen understanding. Instead, they deploy these markers to signal authority. The research explicitly rules out the idea that this is simply a different style of writing suited to art. The study found that even the most analytical sections of art writing, such as long-form essays, still failed to repeat word pairs or use logical connectors at the rates seen in academic work. This suggests the pattern is not a choice of genre but a structural feature of how these institutions communicate.

The study also found that this pattern is consistent across all 13 institutions, regardless of whether they are a museum, a magazine, or a digital platform. This consistency points to a shared system where institutions mimic each other to gain legitimacy, rather than each one designing its own style. The researchers were careful to note that their analysis was limited to the specific words they tracked and the time period from 2010 to 2025, and it did not measure the intentions of the writers. However, the data is clear: the language of the art world performs the role of authority with high precision, but it largely stops short of the analytical operations that generate that authority in academic writing. The result is a system where the appearance of deep thought is circulated widely, while the actual machinery of deep thought remains concentrated in a very small number of texts.