Canadian Postmodern is a Cognitive Dissonance: Like salt in your coffee, the #metoo of art.
It’s obvious that anyone criticizing the National Gallery of Canada or their current crop of curators and artists would look unreasonable. Objections seem absurd when an entire profession agreed on peer-reviewed norms, and we’d rightly be skeptical of claims the art world’s gone down the drain. …who said that? But only nine years ago the banking industry lost it over sub-prime loans; that global catastrophe reminds us that even conservative bankers can make bad choices… and artists do love to wear the emperor’s new clothes.
What I do ask… is my reader’s patience as I trash the status quo… in order to question well-known artists and curators praised nationwide, but this note is credible, logical, and deserves a hearing. A glance from the panopticon suggests some curators and artists in influential positions are insider-trading and wrecking havoc. Have they risen high because they’re the best or the most aggressive? Derek Guthrie, publisher of London/Chicago’s New Art Examiner, writes that art writers must keep a vigilant eye, otherwise insider trading will determine success in this troubled art world.
To make sense of this, consider that science tells us art is very specific, it’s genetic, it’s biology. Art is not anything you can get away with, and aesthetics is tracked by a science that says art’s complex differentiations are crucial for mental health. In the 1970s Abraham Moles and Frieder Nake analyzed links between beauty, information processing and information theory. Physicist Paul Dirac is quoted saying “if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress”. Denis Dutton was a philosophy professor and editor of Arts & Letters Daily. In The Art Instinct he suggested that humans are hard-wired to seek beauty. “There is evidence that perceptions of beauty are evolutionarily determined, that things, aspects of people and landscapes that are considered beautiful are typically found in situations likely to give enhanced survival of the perceiving human’s genes.”
Postmodern in a Potemkin village
In Canada, unfortunately, beauty is scorned by the academic-curatorial complex and that’s why we can’t have nice things. Our curators instead promote artists cutting out paper dolls. This being the art world, their assistants cut out the paper dolls for them; the optics are terrible. Surely not everyone’s assistants are allowed to sit on marble benches in the National Gallery of Canada lobby, cutting pictures from art books purchased minutes ago at the National Gallery bookstore. They’re probably dripping glue on the marble floors that visitor’s footprints will later track to exhibition rooms.
Nor can any artist then take the elevator upstairs to sells those very same cut-out dolls back to the National Gallery for the price of prime real estate in downtown Toronto. In Geoffrey Farmer’s Blades Of Grass we see exceptional people-skills; this artist gets along fabulously with curators, he’s in their comfort zone. Except that’s not art, its just pictures from art books glued to sticks. There is really nothing philosophical, nor creative, nor of any depth. The work at first is impressive; it is long and there are many pictures glued to sticks. But after a moment of looking at this picture on a stick or at another, soon we lose interest because unless you’re carrying an illustrated art dictionary and look up each image to correlate the meaning with another, then it’s just a bunch of pictures glued to sticks. Now it is true that making art that cannot be understood is a post modern strategy; combined with the fact that we don’t really spend much time looking at this installation before we get bored, this is a perfect example of superficial art. Why are Canadians and the National Gallery and the artist run centers praising the fake instead of rejecting it?
The National Gallery of Canada’s press release of Farmer’s Trailer proudly says that it is a fake. If they spend all that money on a fake trailer, that’s how you know it’s real art. For who would pay that much money for a fake trailer if it was fake art?
“Faking depends on a measure of complicity between the perpetrator and the victim, who together conspire to believe what they don’t believe and to feel what they are incapable of feeling…” so Roger Scrutton writes in aeon: “Anyone can lie. Faking, by contrast, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. The liar can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed, but the fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he had created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself was a member. Understanding this phenomenon is, it seems to me, integral to understanding how a high culture works, and how it can become corrupted.
Potemkin was a Russian general who built façades of villages, fake fronts, cut out pictures of wealthy peasant houses to fool Catherine the Great as she toured the country to see the nation’s wealth… while he pocketed great sums. Some Canadians are now waltzing the Potemkin, their cut out snipped by assistants paid minimum wage while the brand names pocket handfuls of tax dollars; their façades then ‘enrich’ Canada’s status, or so it seems to the simple-minded, while earning us scorn from the global illuminati. The cloth woven on the Emperor’s loom unravels a confidence game. Is deception art? Or is it Dr. Oz fakery that we assent to self-serving marketing for lack of courage and a failure of responsible scholarship?
A potlatch can raise a curator’s brand at institutional expense but it doesn’t do much for Canada even though, as Dario Gamboni wrote in The Death of Art, “the trash had been declared art by experts”.(5) It’s a comfortable thing for any curator to declare trash to be art, for who dares question them? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase found in the work of the Roman poet Juvenal from his Satires (Satire VI, lines 347, 8). It is literally translated as “Who will guard the guards themselves?”
It certainly will not be those Canadian art magazine editors who rejected this article as unsuitable and of no interest to their readers… many only print what drops from the psittacine cage. H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World described the papacy of Innocent III (1160-1216), as if it were Canadian art mags today. “And it was just because many of them doubted secretly of the entire soundness of their vast and elaborate doctrinal fabric that they would brook no discussion of it. They were intolerant of questions or dissent, not because they were sure of their faith, but because they were not.”
In Michel’s Foucault’s view, all discourse gains acceptance by expressing, fortifying and concealing the power of those who maintain it; and those who, from time to time, perceive this fact are invariably dismissed as fools or locked away as mad — a fate Foucault himself unaccountably avoided. Danielle S. McLaughlin of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association says that when we can no longer explore and express ideas that are troubling and even transgressive, we are limited to approved doses of information in community-sanctioned packets.
