Art in Montreal

Kent Monkman: History Is Painted by the Victors is the latest large single-artist exhibition to open at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. A mid-career retrospective, it was organized in collaboration with the Denver Art Museum . John Lukavic, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts at the Denver Art Museum, co‑curated it with Léuli Eshrāghi, Curator of Indigenous Practices at the MMFA. As usual with such exhibitions, the press previews, notably from official broadcasters such as the English and French CBC, were effusive. Eshrāghi told Westmount Magazine that, “The stories Monkman tells offer crucial insights into contemporary realities for Indigenous peoples, while questioning dominant culture and society as a whole.”  A social media post from the institution markets it this way: ““My name is Miss Chief Eagle Testickle and I come from the stars.” [p] Meet Miss Chief Eagle Testickle (a play on the words mischief and egotistical), the fierce, time-traveling character cr...

If you take a survey course in the history of twentieth century art at most universities in this country, there is typically minimal, if any, substantial recognition of the art of totalitarian states. One exception I recall from my own art education was a survey course in the art of Asia in the past century, where it was unavoidable. But the generic line for most surveys of Modern to Contemporary Art follows different sorts of formalism into more thematic or identity-based art practices. Most textbooks on twentieth century art tend to be organized around these lines. Along the way, the two Futurisms (Fascist and Marxist) will pop up, Surrealism’s extremely dubious political implications may arise, the anarchistic aspects of Realism, Expressionism, or Dada may be mentioned, and so on. By the time you get to the 1960s, this more “activist” side then gets exploited as part of the genealogy that leads to the more seemingly overt political art that follows from the 1960s. The art of the Na...

  Thankfully, summer is ending, and the undeserved holiday season that galleries take is coming to a close. I review two current exhibitions below, but they come with a preamble. Prefacing that, I should say that I have little doubt that the tendencies discussed below would have emerged without AI; so, the suggestion is not that they share deep cultural continuity, but that they share incidental formal traits. I am on the fence about the likely implications of AI for art (it seems much clearer for other fields), but it annoys enough people that it is at least potentially interesting. Despite the “newness” that people associate with it, AI’s artistic potential seems to be entirely in step with the ambitions of significant aspects of the avant-garde from a hundred years ago. However, the dreams of an automatic, depersonalized art made by machines that would eliminate elitism — and which were central to many Modernist ambitions — seem entirely out of step with the reac...

* Since festival season is here and that means few art shows over the course of the summer, I will be posting a set of more thematic essays. Appeals to “empathy” are central to the ideology of “care” that is basic to the governance of Canada. Care is mostly rooted in the broader history of British sentimentalism, even if it has been re-branded with various multicultural highlights from the ashes of the empire. Such appeals are increasingly frequent in the enframing discourses employed in the local art system. Rather than chart how this has been playing out in the city over recent years and the cottage industry of pop pseudo-therapeutic texts on the triad of empathy-care-art, I thought it would be more worthwhile to evaluate the more rigorous theoretical attempts to promote the idea that art has much to do with empathy (primarily Vittorio Gallese and David Freedberg). To do so, and for brevity and focus, I have limited the discussion to a handful of summative texts by leading exponent...