Chrome Extension — Free
IAE Detector reads any arts writing on the web and scores it for density of the theoretical dialect that has come to define contemporary art institutions — press releases, exhibition texts, criticism, catalogues.
Live Demo — paste any text below
Origin
In 2012, sociologist Alix Rule and artist David Levine published International Art English in Triple Canopy — a rigorous, quietly devastating analysis of the language used in e-flux announcements. Applying corpus linguistics to over 13,000 press releases, they identified a global dialect that had emerged from the translation of French critical theory into English via the international art world.
IAE, they found, was not simply jargon. It was a grammatical system—one that favored abstraction over clarity, nominalized verbs into nouns, and deployed certain words (practice, space, tension, engage) with frequencies that diverged wildly from standard English. It was the language of cultural legitimation.
IAE Detector extends Rule and Levine's project into the browser. Rather than corpus analysis, it offers real-time feedback: a word-by-word scan, a weighted score, a visual register of intensity. It is a tool for reading as much as for critique; i.e., a way of decoding and making the dialect legible.
How It Works
On any webpage, click Scan Page. The extension reads all visible text—body copy, captions, headers. A single press release, an exhibit review, or a full critical essay: it handles all.
Each detected term is weighted by how specific it is to IAE. Common contextual words score low; sacred theoretical nouns score high; named theorists score highest of all. The total is normalized per 1,000 words, so short and long texts are comparable.
Toggle highlighting to mark every IAE term directly in the text—four colors for four tiers of intensity. Hover over any highlighted word to see its classification. Toggle off to restore the original.
The popup shows the highest-scoring terms from the page sorted by their combined weight and frequency. A useful shortcut to the words doing the most theoretical labor in any given text.
Highlight Key
Score Levels
| Level | Score (IAE / 1k words) | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Clean | 0 – 5 | Refreshingly legible prose. |
| Slight Drift | 5 – 15 | Some curatorial vocabulary present. |
| Curator Voice | 15 – 30 | Recognizable IAE patterns emerging. |
| Wall Text | 30 – 55 | This text would fit in a press release. |
| Deep IAE | 55 – 85 | Dense theoretical register throughout. |
| Pure Theory | 85+ | Unintelligible without a PhD in critical theory. |
Installation
IAE Detector is a free Chrome extension available on the Chrome Web Store. Install in one click — no account, no sign-up required.
Add to Chrome — FreePrivacy Policy
IAE Detector is entirely local. It reads the text of pages you visit, processes everything on your device, and sends nothing anywhere. There are no servers, no analytics, no accounts, and no tracking of any kind.
The visible text content of the active browser tab when you click Scan Page. It does not read other tabs, your browsing history, passwords, form fields, or any other browser data.
Nothing is stored persistently. The extension holds no memory of which pages you have scanned, what scores were returned, or any text it has processed. Closing the popup clears everything.
The extension makes zero network requests. The word list, scoring logic, and all interface code are bundled locally. No data is sent to external servers at any point.
The extension requests activeTab (to read the current page when you click Scan) and scripting (to inject highlighting). It does not request access to all sites, your history, or background activity.
There are no third-party services, SDKs, analytics platforms, or advertising networks involved in this extension. It is a standalone tool with no external dependencies at runtime.
The extension code is available to inspect. If you have concerns about what it does, you can read every line before installing. There is nothing to hide because nothing is collected.