NalanKennyElvan EdaIşık-TaşJianHuangEnglish for specific purposes instruction and research: Current practices, challenges and innovationsXVIII2020Palgrave MacmillanCham319 pp., EURO 109.99, Hardcover, ISBN: 978-3-030-32913-6

Abstract

The artist's statement is a unique genre that provides a written description of an artist's creative work. Usually produced by the artists themselves, the artist's statement accompanies exhibitions, funding applications, or more recently the work presented on an artist's website. In the educational context, it provides important support for the assessment of student work. In order to find out more about the artist's statement, this study provides a corpus-based analysis of the genre, focusing, in particular, on its characteristic rhetorical functions and associated lexical features. The study reveals five rhetorical functions; i) expressing identity, ii) conceptualising function, iii) specifying motivation, iv) identifying effect on the viewer, and v) identifying creative processes and materials, each of which is realised by a set of frequently occurring lexical items. However, rather than simply providing conduits for conveying information that describes the artist's work, these rhetorical and lexical features are identified as performing a constitutive role that brings the artist's work into being. The study concludes by examining the contents of 25 ‘how to write an artist's statement’ websites, and argues that their inability to accurately reflect what occurs in practice is a consequence of neglecting the genre's complex functionality and constitutive nature.