Who's afraid of serotaspeak?

Drawing its inspiration from Roy Harris's The Necessity of Artspeak which investigates the ramifications of the language myth in Western discourse on the arts, this paper examines Sir Nicholas Scrota's 2000 Richard Dimbleby Memorial Lecture entitled 'Who's afraid of modem art?' as an example of artspeak in the service of the institution. My analysis takes account of the socio-cultural context in which the Lecture is embedded and views this context as paramount to a close reading of the text. I argue that Serota's discourse, located in the very public domain of television, illustrates what Harris characterises as the subordination of artspeak to the new supercategory of mediaspeak. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.