Ladies and gentlemen, bienvenue. We are the Artfag.

And, seeing as the summer season has been upon us in full force, we too have been lamenting the drought of gallery shows lo, these past two months. Not a great deal has been happening in these post-July days, except for the conspicuously touristy offerings of our Grand Institutions of Public Condescension we have come to know and love as our Art Museums. Much as they have tried plying our parched throats with their artistic equivalent to rosé, nothing makes Toronto look quite so barren as gallery shows disappearing like mirages in the desert haze. So we offer you our own artistic equivalent to San Pellegrino with a hint of lime: the special summer issue, in which, lacking any other targets, we take aim, David-like, at the Art Goliaths running rampant throughout our deserted burgh.

What we like: well, if it wasn’t obvious before, San Pellegrino with a hint of lime.

How we are: well, darlings, given the weather this past while, if we aren’t wilting, we’re drowning. Aside from that, we are possessed of the slightest trace of bonheur, which never hurt anyone.

What we don’t like: if it wasn’t obvious before, rosé, and white pants.

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Ladies and gentlemen, we feel a deep ambivalence about going to museum shows (much less reviewing them) for the simple reason that they have come to resemble bags of chips. Flashy packaging and tantalizingly inflated exteriors tend to reveal a pitiful lack of substance. And, more often than not, the curatorship of these affairs couldn’t pass muster in an undergraduate art history course. And, economically necessary as it might be, we are always slightly disgusted by the inevitable gift shop that awaits us in last room of the exhibit (why wait to get to the ground floor to buy your Monet umbrella? Buy it now!). All this is readily in evidence at the AGO’s latest attempt at a blockbuster: the Turner, Whistler and Monet show Impressionist Visions.

On the surface, this show has much to offer, as all three subjects are superlative painters who mark important pit-stops along the rocky road to Modernism (that dread word), and on to Painting As We Know It Today. The three are not often showcased together like this, each as a bridge to the others. Besides which, the three could each benefit from being rescued from History.

Turner needs the least rescuing, in large part because much of his output is the least ‘safe’ (read: figurative). A great number of his landscapes are barely comprehensible as such, and therein lies his staggering achievement and modernity (there’s that word again). His almost preternatural skills as a painter (his gesture and touch alone are worth his reputation), combined with his almost religious desire for innovation has produced a body of work that is nothing short of (to borrow a hideously overused phrase) timeless; those shimmering skies that travel imperceptibly from creamy yellows to infinite ceruleans, his transparent glazes of colour worked up to a luscious varnish, can prefigure pretty much any subsequent artistic benchmark if one looks hard enough. We realized, in our travels among the Turners, that the only things that separate his work from, say, Rothko are the name and the date on the tag. As if this weren’t enough to recommend him, we were struck by a simplicity in his painting - a barely traced swath of red for a horizon line here, a plain patch of umber for a outcropping of land there; nothing is laboriously figured, and yet his paintings are possessed of a palpable solidity, which invites an electric tension with the frenzied ambiance of his sky- and seascapes.

This is not to say, of course, that Turner can do no wrong. On the contrary, just as he excels at brilliant paintings, he also excels at ruining them. As soon as Turner gets figurative, his paintings lose all their swift innovation; a stunning sky and waterfall in the back- and middle-ground are stunted by silly mock-French Neoclassicist nymphs in the foreground. A vivid sky lit by a nearby conflagration is torpedoed by the sketchy figure of a soldier gazing at his reflection in a lake. When Turner kowtows to the conventions of his day, he turns maudlin with alarming speed. Nevertheless, we are willing to endure the occasional creamy rump of faux-Rococo nymphs if it means we can revel in his frantic, swirling vistas.

Whistler is a little more in need of historical rescuing, since his mother has overshadowed the rest of his work. He detested sentimentalism and narrative in painting, opting instead for a rigorous formalism, the evidence of which can be seen in the fact that he never gave his paintings evocative titles. Whoever named that albatross of a painting “Whistler’s Mother” did so without Whistler’s approval; he titled that painting like he titled everything: “Arrangement in Grey and Black.” Similarly, all of the paintings at the AGO are “arrangements”or “nocturnes”: “Black and Gold,” “Blue and Gold,” “Grey and White.” This rigid formalism reflects his love of Japanese art, and much of the joy of his work comes from his processing of that influence. His unquestioned centerpiece at the AGO, “Nocturne in Blue and Gold (Old Battersea Bridge)” is a marvel of compositional construction borrowed from Hiroshige: the great solid indigo ‘T’ of the bridge, jutting asymmetrically from the pale waters, is delicately balanced by the shower of precise cadmium yellow dots of the fireworks in the night sky.

Monet has been out-and-out hijacked by the March of Time. All the restless innovation, the ferocious struggling against academic painting values (if one really wants a taste of what Monet et. al. were up against, look at Bouguereau, their exact – and popular, well-respected – contemporary) which would eventually make way for Fauvism and Cubism has been drowned out by a bizarrely nostalgic fondness for his subject matter. In what is possibly one of the greatest crimes of canonical art history, Monet has been taken over by the postcard and calendar industry. Doomed by his sailboats and lily-pads, Monet has come to stand for ‘safe art,’ art free from the straitjacket of intellect, art that you don’t have to “get,” which is, of course, a vulgar misjudgement.

Monet’s genius, like Turner’s, lies in the lightning spontaneity of his brush stroke, his mastery of subtle colour shifts, and his obsession with optics. The best of his paintings, of the British parliament (to name some that are actually present at the AGO) for example, are masterworks of colour placement that display a spectacular painterly intellect. His handling of (not so) simple optical effects, light on water, the blue-to-red gradient of a sunset, the filtering of light through trees is, when he is on his game, nimble and faultless. In this, it would hardly be an overstatement to say that he prefigures, albeit in a painterly way, James Turrell.

When Monet is off his game however, he’s way off, and there isn’t much there by which to reel him back. He is best when tightly controlled, and severely limited; he shines when his palette and his brush stroke are narrowest. When he opts for a wider colour range, he goes terribly over the top, as he does in one painting of the British parliament under a garish rainbow sky. Quite frankly, that particular painting looks like it belongs in the bathroom of a gay bar. Likewise, when his brush strokes are wide and more gestural, he comes off as sloppy, and the dense atmospherics that make his other works so marvelous vanish into fat, drippy air.

Alas and alack, the AGO makes no attempt at rescuing these three from the barren land of the pretty postcard. Instead of a rigorous and thoughtful conjoining of the painters in question, we get a context so superficial, we wondered why they bothered at all. The packaging on the proverbial chip bag is (drum roll, please)...atmosphere. Turner and Whistler and Monet are art historical confrères because of the way they depicted the physical atmospheres of their respective milieux. Atmosphere? With all these painters have to offer, from their embattled artistic innovation, from everything they were slandered for in their day, from everything they contributed to painting, the AGO has decided to make a big deal about the weather. Why should a museum bother to aim something at the heads of its public when they can just dump it at their feet? Then again, no one buys an umbrella because the person who made the fabric print prefigures Turrell. Sadly, it seems that when it comes to landscape painting, bad or good, the packaging, rather than the substance, always prevails.

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It is with perhaps a soupçon of hyperbole that we declare Ydessa Hendeles to be the best thing to happen to contemporary art in Canada. She has a ravenous appetite for international contemporary art collection, and the money to support the habit, to say nothing of her gorgeous little Art Foundation on King Street west. In the past two years, she executed quite the curatorial tour de force with her teddy bear show, and managed to secure the illustrious Mr. Michael Fried for a public lecture (everybody but heaven knows what an unmitigated disaster that was, but Ydessa can hardly be blamed for that). The only thing stopping us from calling her the Canadian Charles Saatchi is the fact that she has yet to espouse the habit of shopping for her art at local graduating shows, thus far depriving us of a Hendeles-manufactured Canadian Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili or Jenny Saville equivalent. But we feel fairly secure in saying that should Ydessa decide to embark on such shopping sprees, she could do for the Toronto art scene what Mr. Saatchi is doing for London’s art scene. So it was with great relish indeed that we peeked at the latest offering at the Foundation: two group shows, consisting of bits and pieces from her collecting jaunts, entitled “Dedicated” and “Generated.”

As descriptors of what the shows consist of, the titles are terse and accurate. And, as one might expect from shows that can be summed up in one word, the collection of works are very loosely related to one another. “Dedicated” consists of four or so collections of things that embody dedication to something or someone - discarded turn-of-the-century photographs of New Orleans prostitutes by E. J. Bellocq, carefully repaired and re-developed by Lee Friedlander, contemporary photographs of Italian tomb statuary, also by Friedlander, a religious themed installation based around St. Francis of Assisi by Vincent Tangredi, and a bizarrely riveting video by Fischli and Weiss. “Generated” consists of installations wherein inert industrial materials approximate generative organic creatures and processes.

Neither show is particularly excellent. We tend to disagree with Ms. Hendeles’ taste in art. The Francis of Assisi installation, done in the early 1980's, embodies everything that went wrong with conceptual installation of the time: it is clumsy, narcissistic and needlessly obscure. No doubt every element of the installation, from the mock-up of Francis himself, to the vague bits of text on the wall whose poetry smacks of a freshman year religious studies class, is endowed with Meaning and Purpose. Quite frankly, ladies and gentlemen, not to be anti-intellectual, but if an installation is so conceptually unavailable to an interested public as to require a set of tutorials, then we fail to see why we should care. The photographs of the prostitutes are delightful, and their discarded, sepia-toned quality endows them with a certain pathos. The tomb statuary are lovely, but the photographs of them aren’t; they look like quirky tourist postcards in expensive frames. The video is worth a gander, being a comically baroque lesson in inertia; it is a live-action version of those elaborate Looney-Toons Roadrunner traps (the bowling ball hits the board which launches the match which lights the candle which...). It goes on for a good 30 minutes, and is certainly novel, if totally devoid of substance.

The “Generated” installations are much the same. Each installation has its own room – two rows of egg-shaped marble spheres, each encased in thick steel cable, entitled “Ova,” by Luciano Fabro; a ghost regarding a pool of blood (which is, in fact, a sheet of dyed glass) by Katarina Fritsch; a tin fish used to cast chocolate by Anton Reiche; an array of dog-shaped vases by Jeff Koons. They’re all quite pretty, and most are embarrassingly shallow (though we must admit, we’re quite fond of the ghost and the pool of blood). And yet, making our way through these shows, we feel undoubtedly as though we are in the Presence of Art.

The reason for this is twofold: first, Ms. Hendeles’ reputation sits on these shows like a mother hawk sits on her eggs, and second, her knack for presentation overpowers her pieces, endowing them with, to borrow an overused phrase from Walter Benjamin, an unquestionable Aura. Simply put, she has the resources to knock the viewer out with sheer presentational flair. This makes a certain amount of sense, if we think back to her much lauded teddy bear show. In and of themselves, antique photos of people with their teddys are worthy of interest only to a collector (or a fetishist). What made that show so spectacular was how she curated it; the photos were presented and organized in a manner so precise and deliberate that the curatorship was in-and-of-itself a work of art. Such is the case here, most evident in the room with the ghost and the pool of blood. Those are the only two things in the huge room, itself immaculately white; soft light cascades from the exposed roof, bathing the room in a serene glow. The silence and blankness of the room demands that you consider the installation, that you meditate on it, whether you like the thing or not. Such is the power of her presentation. Perhaps in addition to being the Charles Saatchi of the Toronto art world, Ydessa Hendeles is also its Martha Stewart; we can hardly recall a better example of Martha’s lesson that presentation is everything than in the hallowed halls of the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation.