Art in Montreal

This is the last part of my coverage of MOMENTA. In the previous two articles, I addressed the disparate implications of two of the key shows and how the one undid the other, and I examined how the logic of images , regardless of the framing imposed by artists and curators, tended to complicate or invert the officially sanctioned interpretations of their purported communicative content. In the first article , I looked at how the entire event was framed. This meant both its broader framing in the press through a rhetoric of crisis that exploited various medical metaphors, and the way that MOMENTA was more specifically conceptualized this year by its curator Ji-Yoon Han. In her concluding essay in the MOMENTA catalogue, the curator substantially extends the kind of panic discourse that was already employed as a plea for funding and publicity. She uses this to frame the event with an extraordinary amount of hyperbole. We are told that we live in a “frantic age” in which artists have lo