Art in Montreal

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.” -Franz Kafka You could fill a small library with books on every side of the “culture war” over the past fifty years, most of which are pretty depressing. I have never been sold on the term, but it generally has something to do with “values,” how these are expressed in works of art, and how these things are legislated and bureaucratically managed. That “culture” may be one of the most perniciously idiotic pseudo-concepts in intellectual history does not help any of this. To her credit, Isabelle Barbéris ' 2018 book L’Art du politiquement correct: Sur le nouvel académisme anticulturel does at least introduce some potentially productive directions in thinking through this. It is a book of two parts. The first sixty percent is a rather broad overview of the theme. The last chunk of it shifts around through a few more specific aesthetic issues. While the first aspect is pretty clear, the second is mo...

Following up on the previous two examinations ( I and II ) of the political economy of the local art world, this is a review of Simon Brault’s No Culture, No Future (2010). Originally published in French under the less apocalyptic title Le facteur C: l’avenir passe par la culture , I have used the English version here to respect the official translation. Brault is a bureaucrat and educator from the performing arts part of the cultural spectrum. His positions and much of the anecdotal information in his book are understandably focused there. Since that is usually much less relevant to our concerns, I have focused on the elements that are more generalizable or specific to the visual arts. As one of the country’s (and the province’s) leading cultural and educational bureaucrats, his book is worth reading for how much it says (or does not say) about what “culture” is or does. The book also provides one of the more thorough, if hardly rigorous, attempts to justify the existence of the ...

In past articles, I have revisited some of the polemics for and against Contemporary Art in the city. This was done both by describing two of its key early events - Québec ‘75 and Aurora Borealis - as well as by looking at one of the first attacks on its development and one of the primary defenses of it. All of this could be contextualized within the generally uncertain historical aftermath of Refus global and the “revolutions” of the 1960s, as a state-supported art system and artificial economy were erected. In line with those sketches, this article looks at a polemical text from the turn of the millennium that provides a kind of halfway checkpoint between this earlier era and where we are now: artist Marcel Deschênes , L'art de qui?: analyse et description chiffrées de ce qui nous tient lieu de marché de l'art (2003). But first, I will start with an anecdote. There was a mild furor created (deliberately) in La Presse during November of 1991 when Jean-Claude Lebl...

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of Refus global , that signature event that has been consistently taken as the harbinger of the province’s modernity, the icon of the passage from the mythical Grande noirceur to the equally mythical Révolution tranquille, that sign of the origin of multidisciplinary and the first moment of a proto-feminist art, etc. To reflect on this, here is a review of Sophie Dubois’ Refus global: Histoire d'une réception partielle (2017), based on her award-winning dissertation, and one of the most admirably anti-lyrical depictions of the function of Automatism in the province’s intellectual (or spiritual) life that has been published. Dubois’ basic concern is what allowed the original collection, possessed and read by so few initially (or subsequently), to reach the point that it could become a generic referent in pulp fiction by the end of the millennium. She asserts that “The survival of the work does not depend on internal factors...