Art in Montreal

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

This is probably the last of my looks at the basic political economy of Contemporary Art in the province. It is a review of Guy Sioui Durand’s L’art comme alternative: Réseaux et Pratiques d’art parallèle au Québec 1976-1996 . A member of the Huron-Wendat nation, Durand is a sociologist by training and the book is an adaptation of his dissertation. He has a long history working within the milieu he describes as well as museums, as an author for various provincial arts magazines, and as an academic instructor. We have already seen how a leading technocrat for the cultural sector has justified its existence as a form of enchantment, how the sector was critiqued for being essentially corrupt and fostering incompetence by two of its insiders, and how even its apologists recognized that what resulted from the various strategies of artists, artists’ groups, federal, provincial, and municipal governments was primarily the establishment of a system of pastoral care for its ideological bure...

In the previous installment of this sketchy exploration of the political economy of Canada’s artworld, I dealt mostly with the specifics of Québec, notably with the corruption that some polemically suggested was central to how its art system functions. Here, I take a boarder view. In the background, more implied than argued here, is that Contemporary Art is a genre, at least if this term is understood in the way it has been employed by film theorists like Rick Altman and Steve Neale, to designate a heterogeneous matrix with consistent furniture, strategies of hybridization, and a clear pattern of industrial production that has to a substantial degree determined its formal qualities. As Altman has claimed, genres are best understood as “contraptions capable of performing multiple tasks” that allow for the general summing up of formula, structure, and expectation, providing a “conduit” for the flow of desires. [Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 14-15] T...