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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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The OAAG just sent around some startling numbers about money spent on art and culture in Ontario:
Ontarians spent $8.6 billion on cultural goods and services in 2001, four times more than the $2.2 billion spent on culture in Ontario by all levels of government in 1999-2000, the most recent year available. Ontario residents spent $830 million dollars on art works and events and $170 million dollars on admissions to museums and and heritage-related activities. In terms of municipal regions, the cultural spending of Ottawa residents ranks first among 13 municipal regions in Canada ($1027 per person). In Ottawa, $80 million was spent on art works and events and $55 million on art supplies and musical instruments (as compared with $41 million on movie theatre admissions). Toronto ranks ninth in per capita consumer cultural spending among the 13 municipal regions ($731 per person). In Toronto, total cultural spending by consumers was $3.4 billion in 2001, including $350 million on art works and events and $130 million on art supplies and musical instruments.The research was done by Hill Strategies Research Inc. and pdf files of the full report are available at their website here.
This eveing I attended a packed out panel discussion that attempted to address the following questions: "Is art criticism still able to galvanize debate or has its effectiveness been diminished? Or are there no issues? Is the art system now too complex for debate, or has the art community advanced beyond this need, having found other ways and forms of engaging discussion?"
Highlights include the following quotes:
panelist Mark Cheetham: Debate needs a context of contestation, and that needs to be staged.
panelist Sarah Milroy: The citadel has fallen to the art-hungry hordes.
panelist Catherine Osborne: Assumed knowledge is a failing.
The panel was lopsided in favour of journalism and accessibility (two things that I like), and therefore art criticism per se (another thing that I like) did not get a fair kick at the can. Philip Monk apparently felt that his role as moderator prevented him from truly advocating for the 'lost' discourse. Some riled-up audience members such as Andy Patton, Xandra Eden, Jessica Wyman and John Bentley Mays, spoke up for critique, but in the end Monk, somewhat fatalistically*, declared a consensus that art criticism is irrelevant, and the statement was met with an overall sense of quiet, defeated resignation. Ouch!
I told someone the other day, dismayed at my lack of a master's degree, that I got my learnin' at the school of hard knocks. HAh. Not true. I'm basically uneducated. But I do occasionally read (and also sometimes publish) art theory and criticism. My budding series of Canadian art quotes ( 1 / 2 / 3 / and JR ) is a tiny testament to the peaks of the discourse that have inspired me along the way. Reading art criticism (and here I will melt art theory into the same puddle, tho I know there's a distinction) may be the provenance of freaks and social deviants ...but I know you are out there!
Join me and post your favourite art criticism and theory quotes (with bibliographic citations, please) in the comment section below.
*or mabye he's right, and I'm a Pollyanna. Okay okay ... I am a Pollyanna. But that doesn't mean he's right!
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Excerpt from the Toward a Science of Consciousness III (MIT Press), introduction to section VIII: The Timing of Conscious Experience, by Stuart R. Hameroff
[...] Libet concluded that somehow the brain appreciated sensory input after a significant delay but corrected the timing by referring the conscious signal backward in time! Libet's data and conclusions have been widely debated, with quite different interpretations. Some physicists take the backward time referral seriously, as supportive evidence for a quantum mechanism in consciousness. Others believe classical, nonquantum explanations suffice. The debate continues in the first two chapters in this section.This set of articles has been bugging me since I read the book last fall. Had no idea they were online!
I watched the adult anime (hentai) Nightmare Campus the other day. The end is pretty hilarious, with a gigantoid penis that rises up out of the planet, with a little tiny tiny girl wiggling around on top of it. But what I keep thinking about is the images of nuclear explosions - a giant white flash, a dome of light/force that explodes into cataclysm. Is the whole cosmic rebirth phenomenon in anime related to the fact that Japan was victim of nuclear bombs? Am I stupid to be only really thinking about this now...? or is there something weird and blinkered about the fact that we in North America fetishize all things Japanese, and carry our own embedded nuclear nostalgia paranoia, but do not talk about a Japanese internalization of nuclear holocaust?
Maggie MacDonald's the Rat King Mini Rock Opera
The time will come to pass / when wealth and social class / will be as meaingless / as rat's feet over broken glass
I went to see the Tin Tin Tin performance (curated by Carl Wilson at Toronto's new Drake Hotel ) on a whim, and came away stunned and moved. The music was good. I liked Three-Ring Circuits quite a bit although Jonny Dovercourt's stagey attempt to shush the talkative audience was unfortunate. It's your job to win our attention, Mr.Guy-On-Stage. I liked Act 3 (Polmo Polpo, Great Bob Scott, & Chris Gartner) okay: live jazz to a projection of super 8 film (baboons with a warthog and a leopard) that was being aesthetically slowed, paused and melted on the spot, to nerve-wracking effect. Kinda like a snuff-film, only its the film itself that's getting snuffed (plus, maybe some baboons, when the leopard shows up).
But all this is preamble to the main event: the Rat King Mini Rock Opera, by Maggie MacDonald (sorry for the lame link - I know there must be better out there), which was grEAt! This performance was supposedly a 'workshop' or 'rough' run-through, but it captivated and transported us (we audience), bad wigs, funny rat-hats, gawky on-stage props, reading-from-scripts and all. The music was great and Magali Meagher took performative control with such poignant panache, that we all surrendered our disbelief en mass. Jes Singer was calm and confident as the lanky, scary dad with daughter issues, and John Caffrey made a lovely rat king, complete with jiggling third-hand, protruding from the torso. This was very fine, small-venue, scary/funny, cathartic theatre the way those ancient Greek dudes made it up to be.
Canadian Art Quote #3
Kevin Dowler
Dowler is writing here about the controversies that arose when the National Gallery of Canada purchased Barnett Newman's "Voice of Fire" in 1990, and then again when they exhibited Jana Sterbak's "Vanitas" (aka. meat dress) in 1991.
From the "In Defense of the Realm: Public Controversy and the Apologetics of Art" published in the anthologoy Theory Rules published by YYZ Books and University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1996. pg.82
The collapse of the distinction between, on the one hand, the sphere of aesthetic production and reception and, on the other, the spheres of everyday social and political interaction, even if only brief, can produce some interesting and unanticipated consequences. Until recently, the uselessness of art, its pure negativity, ensured its freedom to function as critique, since it rested beyond (and therefore was incapable of infecting) the horizon of everday life. However, with the erosion of the autonomy of aesthetic practice and the broadening of the scope of reception (once encouraged by the avant-garde), art can no longer hold the priviledged position that was the sign of both its freedom from constraint and its lack of utility.
Ironically, the occasions which do seem to produce some social effects and which would indicate a certain success as regards the claim for the centrality of aesthetic experience have led instead to a shrill rhetoric in defense of artistic (and, concomitantly, institutional) freedom. This appears to run into a contradiction that emerges in relation to both aesthetic practices and discourses: the persistent desire, first expressed by the avant-garde, to reunite aesthetic experience with quotidian experience, and the insistence that art remain immune to the social and political criticism of its contents.
I started the day ready to post something cynical about valentine's and red dye #2. but then I read today's beautiful post over at Mr. Wilson's Arboretum. Thanks for this Alex: "Sex is Nature, while Love is Culture, but a connective tissue of metaphor (which is to say, meaning) grows between, and knits our bodies to our souls. "
beta decay
Michael Frayn's very good play, Copenhagen, revolves around a strange socio-political event in quantum physics. In 1941, patriotic german physicist Werner Heisenberg went to Nazi-occupied Denmark to visit his past mentor and collaborator, Neils Bohr. For Bohr, Danish and half-Jewish, to welcome a German into his home at this point in time was a deep compromise. For Heisenberg to present himself in the role of dinner guest was a terrible imposition.
The top-notch Jewish phsyicists were out of Germany. No scientists in occupied Europe were able to communicate with the US or Britain, yet physicists all over the world were working on nuclear fission. Nobody had the bomb quite yet. So why did Heisenberg come to Copenhagen? This is the central question of the play, which has only three characters, Heisenberg, Bohr, and Bohr's wife, Margarethe.
Did Heisenberg go to Copenhagen to warn Bohr that the Nazis were near to having the bomb? To find out if Bohr knew whether the Allies had the bomb? To get Bohr to stop the Allies from building the bomb? To get Bohr to stop him, Heisenberg, from building the bomb? To get absolution from Bohr for building the bomb? To test himself in the presence of Bohr, to force the issue of whether he, Heisenberg, was going to build the bomb or not? Did he trick himself into thinking that the chain reaction would take too much U235? Did he truly neglect to do the calculations? Was he lying? Did he really have that much power? Heisenberg spent the rest of the war trying to build a reactor. Hitler never got the bomb. Bohr went on (among others) to help USA build the bomb*. The US dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The main strength of the play is that it spins a web of possible interpretations, like an electron cloud, around the central event of the visit. It is surprisingly emotional, threading physics in and through huge cut-to-the-bone politics and the charged, potent, initimacy between competitive old friends and colleagues.
The weakness of the play is its romantic individualism. Heisenberg is saddled with the power to advocate to the Nazis for or against researching the bomb. He feels the fate of the worlds in his hands. Perhaps it was to some degree, but the fiction-like narrative structure makes too much of it.
Heisenberg is given some lines to the effect that his uncertainty principle is the advent of a 'new humanism' because it puts humans back at the centre of things. (As soon as you measure something, you introduce a new element that dictates the state of your measurement, so that, in effect, you create the world as you measure it.) I didn't buy it in semiotics, and I don't buy it here either. But, as in semiotics, the idea that our perception of meaning is meaning can be an extremely generative thought experiment. Too arrogant, however, when translated into big theatre about big important men.
*An interesting follow-up to Frayn's play is that Neils Bohr's estate released into the public domain a letter that he wrote to Heisenberg about their visit. Of course it is in hindsight and only tells Bohr's side of the story. But it's worth reading if you see the play!
Related links:
Atom Bomb Chronology by Tokyo Physicians for Elimination of Nuclear Weapons
Doomsday Clock by Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
guess I'm still a newbie. I had the admin wrong on this page so anyone could post, thinking that was required for comments to be enabled. Just got an anonymous post that probably should have been a comment (below), though I'm not sure to what thread. I've fixed it now, sorry everyone.
Ursula Franklin from The Real World of Technology Massey Lectures, Toronto: CBC Enterprises, 1990
Looking at technology as practice, indeed as formalized practice, has some quite interesting consequences. One is that it links technology directly to culture, because culture, after all, is a set of socially accepted practices and values. Well laid down and agreed upon practices also define the practitioners as a group of people who have something in common because of the way they are doing things.
. . . I sat in the back of a large meeting room, listening to a long and boring discussion. I began to knit. A young woman came over, sat down next to me, and whispered, "I'd like to talk to you. You knit just like my mother." Of course, her mother was also German, and there is a German way of knitting.
I think it is important to realize that technology defined as practice shows us the deep cultural link of technology, and it saves us from thinking that technology is the icing on the cake. Technology is part of the cake itself.
Like democracy, technology is a multifaceted entity. It includes activities as well as a body of knowledge, structures as well as the act of structuring. Our language itself is poorly suited to describe the complexity of technological interactions. The interconnectedness of many of those processes, the fact that they are so complexly interrelated, defies our normal push-me-pull-you, cause-and-consequence metaphors. How does one talk about something that is both fish and water, means as well as end?
clockwise from top: "Flutter Nutter" (detail), 2003, "Crushed" (detail), 2004, "Neapolitan Sunset" (detail) 2003
As part of the now disbanded collective, Bucky and Fluff's Craft Factory, Allyson Mitchell has been using this over-the-top artsy-crafty style for awhile, with a blowyourmind, sequins and macramé, girl-positive, glitter-glue and plastic toys, quantity over quality approach that's always been fun but pretty light fare. Now, in The Fluff Stands Alone, Mitchell has focussed that frenetic energy into a really solid body of work. This big, ambitious series of wall hangings and bedspreads reinvents the women of Playboy cartoons as fuzzy, happy, flocked and fun-furred beasts. Mitchell's sense of kittenish play is still here in spades, but the work has taken on a satisfying weight and presence. I resisted the tempation to rub my face on the art, but I'm sure others did not.
Message to email subscribers: thank you for signing up! (I hope your inbox is holding out). I have a request; if you want to respond to an update, please log on to the site and use the comments button. Or you can email your post to me at smblog@sympatico.ca. If you simply reply to your email update it creates more work for the webmaster, and he is a sweet guy who already does too much to make this whole thing run smoooothly. Thanks in advance! - SM
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Hey what gives? Here's the current outgoing message at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation:
We have suspended the foundation's exhibition program and are currently generating books. There is nothing on exhibit at the foundation.If you know the skinny, please leave a message in the comments below!
Got a goodreads email recently with a nice quote from Steven Pinker. It reminded me about this list (below) of traits shared by the Universal People , researched by Donald E. Brown, and transcribed here from Pinker's, The Language Instinct, pgs. 429-430.
Value placed on articulateness. Gossip. Lying. Misleading. Verbal humour. Humourous insults. Poetic and rhetorical speech forms. Narrative and storytelling. Metaphor. Poetry with repetition of linguistic elements and three-second lines separated by pauses. Word for days, months, seasons, years, past, present, future, body parts, inner states (emotions, sensations, thoughts), behavioural propensities, flora, fauna, weather, tools, space, motion, speed, location, spatial dimensions, physical properties, giving, lending, affecting things and people, numbers (at the very least "one," "two," and "more than two), proper names, possession. Distinctions between mother and father. Kinship categories, defined in terms of mother, father, son, daughter, and age sequence. Binary distinctions, including male and female, black and white, natural and cultural, good and bad. Measures. Logical relations including "not," "and," "same," "equivalent, " "opposite," general versus particular, part versus whole. Conjectural reasoning (inferring the presence of absent invisible entities from their perceptible traces).
Nonlinguistic vocal communication such as cries and squeals. Interpreting intention from behaviour. Recognized facial expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and contempt. Use of smiles as a friendly greeting. Crying. Coy flirtation with the eyes. Masking, modifying, and mimicking facial expresssions. Displays of affection.
Sense of self versus other, responsibility, voluntary versus involuntary behaviour, intention, private inner life, normal versus abnormal mental states. Empathy. Sexual attraction. Powerful sexual jealousy. Childhood fears, especially of loud noises, and, at the end of the first year, strangers. Fear of snakes. "Oedipal" feelings (possessiveness of mother, coolness toward her consort). Face recognition. Adornment of bodies and arrangement of hair. Sexual attractiveness, based in part on signs of health and, in women, youth. Hygiene. Dance. Music. Play, including play fighting.
Manufacture of, and dependence upon, many kinds of tools, many of them permanent, made according to culturally transmitted motifs, including cutters, pounders, containers, string, levers, spears. Use of fire to cook food and for other purposes. Drugs, both medicinal and recreational. Shelter. Decoration of artifacts.
A standard pattern and time for weaning. Living in groups, which claim a territory and have a sense of being a distinct people. Families built around a mother and children, usually the biological mother, and one or more men. Institutionalized marriage, in the sense of publicly recognized right of sexual access to a woman eligible for childbearing. Socialization of children (including toilet training) by senior kin. Children copying their elders. Distinguishing of close kin from distant kin, and favouring of close kin. Avoidance of incest between mothers and sons. Great interest in the topic of sex.
Status and prestige, both assigned (by kinship, age, sex) and achieved. Some degree of economic inequality. Division of labour by sex and age. More child care by women. More aggression and violence by men. Acknowledgement of differences between male and female natures. Domination by men in the public political sphere. Exchange of labor, goods, and services. Reciprocity, including retaliation. Gifts. Social reasoning. Coalitions. Government, in the sense of binding collective decisions about public affairs. Leaders, almost always nondictatorial, perhaps ephemeral. Laws, rights, and obligations, including laws against violence, rape and murder. Punishment. Conflict, which is deplored. Rape. Seeking of redress for wrongs. Mediation. In-group/Out-group conflicts. Property. Inheritance of property. Sense of right and wrong. Envy.
Etiquette. Hospitality. Feasting. Diurnality. Standards of sexual modesty. Sex generally in private. Fondness for sweets. Food taboos. Discreetness in elimination of body wastes. Supernatural beliefs. Magic to sustain and increase life, and to attract the opposite sex. Theories of fortune and misfortune. Explanations of disease and death. Medicine. Rituals, including rites of passage. Mourning the dead. Dreaming, interpreting dreams.
moon