Art in Montreal

* 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...

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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...