The special exhibition Words to Watch: An Exhibition by Adib Fricke, The Word Company, Berlin will be on display at the Busch- Reisinger Museum through May 2. The exhibition will present a selection of invented words by Adib Fricke (b. 1962), a Berlin-based artist who calls these neologisms "protonyms."

Since 1994, the artist has functioned as The Word Company, with its signature logo TWC never very far from the protonyms -- those to be displayed at the Busch-Reisinger will be under a licensing agreement and in a typeface determined by their inventor.

Although Fricke has exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout Europe, this will be his first exhibition in the United States.

An eight-page, three-color brochure, designed by the artist and with an essay by Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch- Reisinger Museum, will be published by the Art Museums to accompany the exhibition. Words to Watch is organized by Peter Nisbet and is supported by the Charles L. Kuhn Fund.

Fricke's words are well made and independent.

Although protonyms such as "smorp," "yemmels" and "ontom" may sound like other words we have heard before, they refuse the comfort of a referent. Part of the fascination with the protonyms lies in the implied parallel to a wholly new, non-referential visual image.

As we are used to radically original and non-representational paintings appearing in our museums, why shouldn't newly invented abstract words with no established meaning be equally challenging, beautiful, persuasive?

Fricke's protonyms seem to be designed to both annoy and please, combining wry humor and a naive fondness for the potential beauty of the new word -- drawing on the avant-garde dream of a creation that transcends the limits of conventional society, language, meaning.

Presenting a selection of them in a museum setting should reinforce our sensitivity to the submerged utopianism in the artist's project. The museum context can also, by contrast, heighten our awareness of the quasi-commercial model which Fricke has adopted for his creativity.

The Word Company can be thought of as an organization which owns the rights to these proprietary neologisms and licenses them temporarily to museums for "showing."

Although this paradigm cannot be fully followed (partly because German copyright law apparently would not consider the protonyms to be worthy of copyright), it raises irritating questions about our current obsessions with originality and intellectual property: just what can one own (genes? words? phrases?), and under what conditions? Can a corporation invent? How does the art museum relate to this mode of creativity?

Fricke neatly and unspectacularly uses language as a medium of social and institutional critique. The latter carries a special piquancy for the Busch-Reisinger Museum, a museum whose mission is in part language based ("the art of German-speaking Europe") but which will be presenting presumably a-national words (from a Berlin-based artist).

Fricke's collection of protonyms is surprisingly small; partly because he wants to ensure that they really do not already exist in other languages or contexts, and partly because a selection process akin to the aesthetic is at work. Invented words are retained in the repertoire because of the artist's preference.

Used repeatedly over the past five years, they retain a puzzling integrity, successfully resisting both specific meaning and decorative vacuity.