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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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Curator and international art collector Ydessa Hendeles is blowing me away these days. The quotes below are from a CBC broadcast of her presentation at Making History, a recent symposium in Toronto about Canadian art and its role on the international stage. I put up an mp3 of the broacast here. (Thanks for the recording, J!)
It is not only possible, but critical for Canadians to build relationships with artists and curators outside our national borders. It is the nature of expression to have urgency, and seek out as large an audience as possible. [...] I don't mean that artists should look for their audience in a careerist, strategic way. [...] Relationships work best when works are authentic expressions that are not made for strategic purposes of capitalising on already existing subjects of discourse.
[...] Museums in each country should not all have the same art in them.
[...] Some collecting museums, to resolve the issue of timeliness, have resorted to showing prominent private collections. But this has recently backfired. Indeed, the collecting museum's authority can easily be corrupted by the marketplace. For example, the display of the Saatchi collection of the show Sensation resulted in a scandal at the Brooklyn museum. [...] The persistent controversial issue is the commerical gain later won by the collector, as his works were subsequently put up for sale and made huge profits. The trustees of the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Gallery, both major collecting museums, responded by taking the position that they will not show a private collector's art collection. [...] Like the separation of church and state, there is, and should be, a boundary between commerce and art. Neither a collector, nor a corporation should be able to capitalize financially from the sale of a collection that comes directly from being promoted by a public museum.
 Image by Michael Breslin of the UofT Varsity, taken from here |
The death of activist Tooker Gomberg is a huge loss. His inspirational drive, imagination, and natural leadership accomplished a great deal for environmental activism and social justice. The shallow coverage in today's Globe and Mail is indicative of the fact that Gomberg knew how to get under the mainstream media's skin. Tooker was all justice all the time, and his media "stunts" raised awarness about poverty, smog, cycling, and political representation, as well as massively important global environmental issues. He will be badly missed. |