The jeremiads of unrecognized geniuses, the antics and grimaces of coterie, the boutique esotericism, the imitation of the extremist fashions of the great American neighbour, the intellectual mediocrity and inculture, the easy temptations of craftsmanship and "balanced" beauty, all these features of the Montréal 'art scene'... [105] Published in 1975, Laurent-Michel Vacher’s Pamphlet sur la situation des arts au Québec is a time capsule for a specific sort of marxisant discourse on art, one worth digging up for what it suggests about the early period of Contemporary Art in the province. Some of its polemical points are, if anything, more convincingly applied to artists working today than those he attacked half a century ago. But his pamphlet is also worth reading for how much it fails to actually construct a viable critique, or even simple description, of the situation of art in the province or predict where it was headed. Between the late 1960s and 1974, the shi
A critical revue of contemporary art in the city.