Picture Related
Noah Charney's new book The 12-Hour Art Expert, subtitled "everything you need to know about art in a dozen masterpieces," may have created a subject niche similar to the "For Dummies" series. I hope so, because it's engaging reading which does not assume extensive knowledge of art by the reader.
The Expert takes the "down the rabbit hole" approach to art. Let blue noses look down their noses, but conspiracy theory is the literary genre of our time. It is thoroughly democratic. Anybody can join. All that is required is a suspicious mind. Noah Charney's approach makes art a curious subject.
I find Charney's exploration of Carlo Crivelli's iconography provocative. Crivelli (c. 1430-1495) exhibited the idiosyncrasy of including an expertly painted pickle in his religious paintings. It was his trademark. This was before artists signed their work. One would expect to discover a connection with his name. As Charney observes, Crivelli literally means "sieve" -but also (enigmatically) "riddle."
In English idiomatic use, “in a pickle,” implies a complex situation. Pickles have subconscious connotations, or, maybe one should say subliminal connotations. Salamoia comes to mind ad lib, an alternate Italian word for pickle. Another alternate is sottaceto. Sottaceto sounds like, and is probably cognate with, sotto, meaning “under.” Pickles are made by soaking under vinegar.
Further down the speculative rabbit hole, Sottaceto rhymes with setaccio, which is an alternate Italian word for sieve, and which brings us full circle to the meaning of Carlo Crivelli's name. To perceive the implicit meaning, the words must be spoken, must be listened-to, not merely read verbatim as printed text.
We can be certain of one thing: Crivelli's associates teased him about his name. Who knows if Carlo Crivelli could even write his name? We take literacy for granted. If Crivelli were unable to write his own name, it would explain the pickle in his paintings, and thus, the arcane iconography.
But that is not the solution to our riddle. At the end of the rabbit hole is always a joke. The riddle is the lure of the perceived “rabbit hole” in things, of subliminal meaning behind everything. What did Lewis Carroll start?
Free-form linguistics is fun -but must not be abused by the serious art history major. Free association can reveal more about the investigator than about discovery. There's been a tendency for heated arguments to erupt in social media over wild speculation of this kind. Ground zero of the confrontation is the “meme,” the special Internet term for pictorial banality supercharged with gratuitous, biting commentary.
The sheer outpouring of satirical captioning has resulted in picrel, a portmanteau for “picture-related.” In use, it refers to the picture at the top of a long scroll of sarcastic, back-and-forth scuttlebutt, to which it refers, and which remains at top until superseded by a more expressive picture, or "topic," at which point the debate devolves into a fracas.
One may feel left out of such conversations without explanation beforehand of shorthand abbreviations. Explanations demanded in the midst of real-time discussion are typically met with hostility. Definitions are available by search, and do not leave the reader conspicuous or, in Internet slang, a "glowie."
The shorthand terminology for novices is both short-tempered and lengthy. It is a style of dialectic that has arrived, and (it appears to this reader), to be here to stay. Someday it will be counted a historical genre in itself. Satire has a rich history and assimilates accommodatingly. Scholars will probe the layers of meaning left by waves of anonymous contributors to the Internet meme. It has begun to define the future of art writing.