Art in Montreal

It would not occur to us to demand a prescription for nostalgia. Yet in the seventeenth century, nostalgia was considered to be a curable disease, akin to the common cold. Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches and a journey to the Swiss Alps would take care of nostalgic symptoms. By the twenty-first century, the passing ailment turned into the incurable modern condition. The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia. Optimistic belief in the future was discarded like an outmoded spaceship sometime in the 1960s. Nostalgia itself has a utopian dimension, only it is no longer directed toward the future. Sometimes nostalgia is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways. -- Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (2001) I will preface this with an obvious statement. When reviewing a biennial, one is not reviewing the works as they exist autonomously, but how they exist as part of a collective curation. Even with the demarcation by author...

  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...