Art in Montreal

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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...

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...