Art in Montreal

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 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

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