This was originally titled (Untitled), but then the artist decided to call it ¡Je aime une juene ete!. How many mistakes can you detect in the new title?Home > Essays > Check your titles!
This was originally titled (Untitled), but then the artist decided to call it ¡Je aime une juene ete!. How many mistakes can you detect in the new title?The title of a painting, drawing, photo, sculpture, etc., should not be the most important thing about that artwork. But there does need to be some kind of thought process. Having a title with some silly, avoidable mistake is perhaps much worse than being lazy and just using (Untitled).
A problem a lot of young American artists have is when they try to use languages other than English for their titles.
For example, suppose an artist decides to give his new painting a title in French. If it's a title a French artist has already used as a title, then it's a simple matter of copying the existing title, making sure to duplicate the spelling (that includes all accent marks), capitalization, spacing, and, if applicable, punctuation.
But more often than not, the young artist feels a need to take his original words in English, which get the idea across just fine, and cast them in a different language, needlessly obscuring what he is trying to say. Even just one mistake is enough to distract those who come to the gallery.
As an example, consider the title ¡Je aime une juene ete!. In this scenario, the artist actually only had one mistake, but when the gallery staff re-typed it for the work list and the tag, they introduced further mistakes.
Worse, when a patron pointed out one of the mistakes, the staff made matters worse and failed to correct the mistake that was pointed out!
Some of this could have been avoided if the artist had at least bothered to put this through Google Translate or some other machine translation; he might have gotten "J'aime un jeune été!", which looks a little more correct.
It would be even better to run this by a native French speaker, who might be able to suggest some idiomatic expressions the artist couldn't even think of.
Of course one might wonder what a "young summer" has to do with a green texture and three vertical strokes, but that's another issue.
Much less common but still in need of being checked are titles involving mathematics or science.
For example, with chemistry, people will understand what you're getting at with "H2O", but it would be much more correct to write "H2O".
For any other substance, using its chemical formula as the title of the artwork could be an unnecessary barrier to appreciating the artwork.
If you are an art student at a general university, like say, Wayne State University, you have at your disposal the expertise of professors in several subject areas. I know for a fact Wayne State has professors who are bona fide experts in French and chemistry, for example, and if you're paying tuition, it makes sense to take advantage of their expertise.
But if you're not a current tuition-paying student at a general university, there are other ways to find experts to give you feedback on titles. You might be judicious in accepting Facebook friend requests and still have someone in your circle of social media friends who can advise you on topics you're not an expert in.
The bottom line is this: if there's anything in the title that you can't be certain is absolutely correct, you need to have someone else check it. But also consider whether it wouldn't be better to just use a simple title in plain English.