GALERIE RENE BLOUIN (Montreal)

Mona Hatoum

Nov 6 to Dec 23, 2004

Interview with R.M. Vaughan

National Post

Saturday, April 16th, 2005

p. TO11

Here, darlings, is the interview we did with the fabulous miss R.M. Vaughan for the National Post, unabridged and unedited; originally published on Saturday, April 16th, 2005 in the National Post's Toronto pull-out section. Posted with Miss Vaughan's kind permission.

RMV: Why do you do this? It can't be for profit.

AF: No darling, it certainly isn’t for profit; we are, in fact, what is commonly referred to as a money-losing venture (although, quite frankly, 50-odd dollars at Kinko’s every few months is hardly an oppressive cost to bear). We are doing this because the Canadian art-critical persona, much like the rest of the Canadian cultural persona, is infected with an appalling politesse. It’s present everywhere, from our Great-and-Powerful National Papers to local, alternative presses. There is a crippling lack of real criticism in this country, and without the public dialogue that real criticism engenders, the art scene suffers. Everyone talks about how one must go elsewhere to start one’s career as an artist, and complains about Canada being an artistic backwater; well, that’s what polite, apologetic, Canadian criticism gets you. When was the last time any paper, national or other, took a great, big, incontrovertible dump on someone’s undeserved reputation? Lord knows there’s plenty of opportunity. If no one is going to rake you over the coals for producing pap, then there’s nothing at stake in being an artist. In addition to being courteously middling, most art criticism is simply badly written; honestly darling, if we read the phrase “beautifully poetic” one more time, we’re going to take an AK-47 to the top of Mies Van der Rohe’s TD Centre and start shooting. So we are attempting to remedy that, in our own homespun way. That, and we have delusions of grandeur.

Are you also an artist?

Yes darling, although these days, who isn’t? Artists are, quite unfortunately, a virulent contagion, rather than an endangered species.

Anonymity gives you great freedom, but many would argue it also makes you unaccountable - please respond.

Oh, please: in this sphere of endeavour, screams for accountability are the mating calls of the easily offended. And quite frankly, the easily offended have no business being artists. Now, we are mindful of the comfortable cover that anonymity provides, but nevertheless, we mistrust this issue of accountability (We apologize, in advance, for how Lit. Crit.-ese this might sound). Opinions are very easily dismissible when there’s a face and a name attached to them. We’re quite sure you’ve encountered this yourself, darling; someone doesn’t like what you say, and all of a sudden, your opinion is dismissed as “well, you know what RM Vaughan is like” or the more vulgar “well, what does RM Vaughan know?” etcetera, etcetera. Quite honestly, we are given to thinking that one of the reasons people keep reading us is precisely because we’re anonymous. To wit: when one removes the face and the name, all one is left with is the irreducible opinion. Now, if the opinion is dull and uninformed, well, who cares? But when the opinion is well-written and well argued, there’s no dismissing it; writing negative reviews might be endless fun, but we do not take them lightly – we take everything, even the aesthetically impoverished, on its own terms. And so this irreducible un-dismissibility is what rankles, and what gives rise to these screams for accountability; after all, would anyone even care about ARTFAG if it were badly written?

Many people think I am The Artfag. Some folks think The Artfag is Daryl Vocat. I personally think it's Philip Monk. If you weren't The Artfag yourself, who would you vote for?

First of all, Philip Monk isn’t even a fag (oh, if Miss Connie Black only knew what conversations are being had at her old stomping grounds). One look at those hideous Neoprene suits and what currently passes for his haircut should be enough to tell you that. Daryl Vocat is not a bad guess, given our flair for the DIY approach, although she’s too soft-spoken for this kind of business. You certainly were the most popular guess for a while there, and we must admit, there is a certain neatness to it: button-down art critic for a conservative rag by day, ruthless Masked Avenger by night, like some kind of art critical Dr. Jekyll and Miz Hyde.
Who would we vote for? Oh gosh my geesh, darling, let us think: we’re surprised nobody’s thought of Gerald Hannon, or one of those other stately homos from the Body Politic. But if we must, we’d cast our vote for Keith Cole, assuming that she’s actually got a computer with something other than porn on it, and, of course, assuming she’s ever sober enough to type (as opposed to say, drunkenly mashing her fingers against a keyboard).

Where can folks get The Artfag? Is there a subscription?

Our Artfag-Hag (her choice of nomenclature, not ours) and her lovely Beau are kind enough to do our dirty work for us, distributing ARTFAG to gallery windowsills along the Queen West strip, from about the Angell Gallery westward. Mind you, because of the unfortunate meeting of our credit limit and our careless disregard for a profit margin, our print run tends to limit itself to about 50 copies, give or take, so they tend to disappear fast. There is a subscription of a sort: we do e-mail PDF versions of our little cahier of witticism and criticism to members of our mailing list, so that one may enjoy it in the comfort of one’s in-box. This is, natch, a free service, and to avail one’s self, one need merely send a missive to leartfag@yahoo.ca. We take care of the rest.

Have you thought about expanding your media empire - internet, radio, pirate television?

Oh darling, have we thought about it? Please: when we started on this little endeavour of ours, it was with the dreams of being able to scream, a la Citizen Kane, “WE CONTROL THE MEDIA!!!” Like Howard Hughes, but without the hypochondria, and with a better manicure. But yes, in answer to your question, we have indeed thought about it, and, if we may indulge in some therapy-speak, have taken some concrete steps: do feel free to peruse our lovely new website: http://www.artfag.ca. We control the virtual, to paraphrase that hideous TV show. As for further expansions, well, if some dashing young lad with a fat wallet wants to pony up the capital, we’d be in like Flynn. Let it never be said that we can’t be bought.

And, finally, what makes you so deliciously cranky?

Oh, darling, what doesn’t? We begin every issue of our little cahier with a running list of What We Don’t Like. A brief best-of: people who misuse the word ‘whence,’ people who insist on declaring to anyone who’ll listen that they “just don’t get it” (or, conversely, that their “three-year-old could do that”), humidity (as in “it’s not the heat, it’s the...”), white pants, the constant blaring of revolting Christmas ditties sung by lugubriously voiced pop singers (come the season, of course), and those great, lumbering germ incubators on wheels more commonly known as public transit. But, in all seriousness, most often, it’s mediocrity. At least with atrocious art, there’s something there to sink our teeth into, something to engage with (if only by ripping it mercilessly apart). Being heinously bad is a level of achievement; being half-heartedly bad is unforgivable.

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Scandale à Montreal:

Roadsworth and the estate of Zahra Kazemi

We are not, generally speaking, a political creature, ladies and gentlemen. That type of commentary seems to demand the particular kind of heavy breathing and glib rhetoric that we don’t generally trade in. Granted, we breathe heavily on occasion (too seldom, of late) and are known to clip off a glib phrase or two; as a matter of fact, in defense of that previous sentence, let’s be glib now: politics lack panache. More to the point, we are an art critic; we generally like to leave the political filibustering to those more qualified. However, there is quite the little brouhaha brewing in Montreal that has managed to raise a few hackles and arch a few eyebrows, ours included.

The sordidness begins with the curious case of the artist known pseudonymously as Roadsworth. Roadsworth’s oeuvre consists of rather clever street graffiti. Trading in a particular brand of impish visual puns - our particular favourites involve his addenda to crosswalks, circumscribing them with spray-painted barbed wire or a row of bullets - that come across as sly, needling and discontented, he is currently under fire from Montreal’s Finest. From what we have come to understand, Roadsworth has been arrested on 85 counts of public mischief. He faces significant fines and possible jail time.

His situation rather puts us in mind of something Steve Kurtz of the Critical Art Ensemble said (for the uninitiated, Mr. Kurtz is currently facing rather rabid prosecution in his native Land of the Free, Home of the Brave for what essentially amounts to thumbing his nose at the Monsanto Corporation - further details to be found at http://www.critical-art.net). Raising funds for his legal defense, he passed through Toronto and gave one of the best talks we’ve ever had the pleasure to sit in on, canvassing such subjects as activism and what the consequences are of being a publicly engaged artist in These Modern Times. What Mr. Kurtz said, in so many words, was something to the effect of the following: if one isn’t participating in the free flow of Capital, then one is a Problem, regardless of whether or not one is actually breaking a law. And, of course, heaven help you if you’re caught breaking the law while obstructing the free flow of capital.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, we are far from Marxist, but certain conclusions are inescapable; ostensibly created to curb the nocturnal activities of wayward youth, the rise in anti-graffiti legislation in large cities has tended to coincide sharply with the rise in the urban condominium market. New York’s legislation was passed in 1995, in full-swing of then-Mayor Giuliani’s ruthless promotion of Times Square as the northeastern DisneyLand. The U.K.’s legislation, called the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (ah, but the British have a knack for titles, don’t they?) has only just come into being. Montreal’s laws came to pass in the late nineties; if anyone’s paying attention, that was around the time that the then-bible-of-the-voguish Wallpaper Magazine devoted a strenuous amount of column inches to Montreal’s burgeoning hipness. Here in Toronto, the Canadian capital of condo-mania, the City, in addition to already having its knickers in a twist over graffiti, is currently in the process of trying to ban postering. The only reason that there is any kind of legal ramification to graffiti is because it lowers property values; if it didn’t interfere with the asking price of the latest patch of condo property, who would care? Now, graffiti artists have staked their reputations on violating about as much of the above as possible - the propriety of city walls, and thus the free flow of capital, and thus the law - and Roadworth as apparently got himself caught in the lurch.

The other bit of bizarre intrigue to pass under our nose is the curious case of the formerly Cote St. Luc Public Library (now the Eleanor London Public Library) versus the embattled estate of Zahra Kazemi. To politely refresh the memory, Ms Kazemi was a journalistic photographer arrested in Saudi Arabia and eventually tortured and killed while under police custody. In an attempt to draw attention to the ongoing diplomatic impotency that is Canadian International Relations, the community library’s gallery invited Ms Kazemi’s son to mount his mother’s photographs there. Someone complained about the photographs, and more complaints followed, the gallery got weak in the knees, and a controversy was born.

There are a few complicating twists: Cote St. Luc is a community of mostly upper middle-class Jewish families and retirees. Not the most active of Montreal’s neighbourhoods, nor the hippest (let’s just say that Wallpaper Magazine neglected to make it down there with their barometers of style). And some of Ms Kazemi’s photographs were of Palestinian refugee camps. As one might guess, trouble ensued.

Now, we cannot pass any kind of firm critical opinion on Ms Kazemi’s oeuvre. We have seen very little of it, although what we have seen corresponds to the standard fare of documentary journalism, Dorothea Lange division. Not the most innovative work around, but competent enough. But, as is generally the case, the quality of the art seems to have little to do with what actually happened: someone saw the photographs of the Palestinians and the camps and thought they detected a whiff of sympathy, and promptly Spoke to the Manager. Under the ensuing complaints, the gallery lost their nerve and took down the five offending photographs. Stephan Hachemi (Ms Kazemi’s son) declared that it was all or nothing, and the gallery sided with nothing; the show promptly came down, and, in yet another display of spinelessness, called in the borough’s mayor to face the press for them.

There are several things that we find utterly perplexing; the show was mounted at the gallery’s insistence, for ostensibly humanitarian reasons. Where was this moral rectitude when the time came to actually stand behind the photographs, and the legacy they represented? The borough officials made much ado about a public institution’s right to set its own policy; but surely it’s the role of a public institution (a library, no less! a gallery, no less!) to encourage public discourse rather than shut it down at the first opportunity. And beyond all that, what we find ourselves asking is: what was this complainer’s beef? That a Palestinian refugee camp was portrayed as a less-than-ideal place to be? What do they think, that a refugee camp is all marshmallows and campfire sing-alongs? Surely the quality of life in a refugee camp is the one matter where an editorial opinion on the Middle East is not involved. And did no one, during these very public proceedings, recognize the almost sublimely tragic irony that the work of a victim of human rights atrocities was being censored by a brand of acutely Canadian political preciousness?

But alas, public hysteria is not a thing renowned for its calm, ruminative faculties, nor its appreciation of irony. Neither, for that matter is cowardice. But, ladies and gentlemen, if ever one is tempted to clutch one’s forehead in despair at these judicial unfoldings, one can take a very limited solace in the fact that both Mr. Roadsworth and Ms Kazemi have taken their place among those who remind us that, in this, the day and age of the seen-it-all-done-it-all approach to cultural observation, art can still be a thorn in the side of the powers-that-be.

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It turns out, ladies and gentlemen, that there is quite the little brouhaha (emphasis on the “ha ha”) brewing like so many tempests in so many teacups around this year’s installment of the Untitled Art Awards. A gay squib like this is too marvelously trivial to keep to ourselves: recently, a few e-mails landed gracefully in our in-box, all concerning the hosting of said event, the tenor of which suggested dish that, while not exactly gut-bustingly spicy, was enjoyable enough for us to indulge in; hence, this gossipy tidbit.

Let’s get everyone up to speed: as we’re sure you all know, the delightful misses RM Vaughan and Andrew Harwood were asked to host this year’s installment of the Untitled Art Awards. Yadda yadda yadda, cut to: us receiving two letters: reactions from Miz Vaughan and Harwood to an e-mail from the UAA ensemble (which was embedded in the respondee’s letters). We shan’t reprint the UAA letter, for two reasons: they didn’t send it to us directly, and we didn’t ask their permission to post it. In the interest of full disclosure, we didn’t ask because we have the sneaking suspicion that they would have declined. We shall, however, reprint the ripostes, with permission, and you can peruse them at your leisure. They are available via link, below.

But first, to summarize and editorialize:

This particular teacup tempest resulted (apparently) from some sensitive souls taking umbrage at the hosts’ bon-mots (well, probably not bon-mots...mal-mots?) about certain Award recipients. Apparently, corporate sponsor ears were offended, and support (read: cash) was withdrawn in a huff. The UAA letter, then, consists of a very diplomatically phrased finger wag, during which, very politely and in consummate bureaucrat-ese, the UAA praise misses V and H for their local colour and fabulousness, and then (buried underneath the snow of passive-voiced deferrals) they lay the blame for the flight of corporate capital squarely on their apparently too-colourful, too-fabulous shoulders. They then have the delightful temerity to sign off by asking the hosts for their feedback. Now, ladies and gentlemen, we did not attend the Awards, so we can’t proffer comment on the hosts’ comments. But we know enough of the misses Vaughan and Harwood to be able to extrapolate the circumstances with a fair amount of accuracy.

A few brief words, then, on the wisdom of finger-wagging:

1 - Caveat empor. It’s not as if the misses V and H were plucked from obscurity; the organizers wanted a lively show, and they knew who they were getting. Or, to put it slightly less delicately, if you’re going to open your home to the incontinent, you have to expect some shit on the rug.

2 - There is a delicious irony here, which we’re sure must be lost on those oh-so-sensitive corporate creatures: they are, in effect, telling a critic – a critic to whom they’ve given an (entirely well-deserved) award for his criticism – that he shouldn’t have been so critical.

3 - Never tell a faggot to tone it down.

The curious can read R.M. Vaughan’s and Andrew Harwood’s letters here.

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Scandale à Montreal, part deux:

The Curious Affair of Zeke.

Darlings, let us state the obvious: this little world in which we live is a sad, sad one indeed. Let us not beat around any prettily digressive bushes: this clichéd observation was pounded home when we stopped to peruse our email, where we found a distressed missive by one Mr. Chris "Zeke" Hand, proprietor of Zeke's gallery in Montreal, and one of our very first (and most vociferous) supporters. He is, apparently, strangely, absurdly, being sued for libel to the tune of some 25,000$.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, in order for us to properly appraise you of all the dizzy dealings, we would ourselves be approaching that paper-thin ridge of the libel volcano, and Everybody but Heaven knows, the financially-dependent aspects of our homespun little affair would crumble like a deck of cards should the litigious powers-that-be decide to huff and puff (this is, after all, the very same financially precarious situation in which our dear Mr. Zeke finds himself). So, bearing this in mind, we produce the following summary:

Apparently, our comrade commented, in the virtual pages of his blog, on a news report commenting on the goings-on of a Certain Unnamed Someone. Our comrade then comments on his ties with a Certain Unnamed Someone Else, and goes on to intimate (with the help of a major Quebec newspaper) that this latter's own dealings seem to be (how shall we put it so that we don't topple into the volcano?) impolitic. Now, this Certain Unnamed Someone Else caught wind of this, and apparently felt like exercising his lawyers, who are currently attempting to have a group jog on the head of our dear comrade.

(Well, quite frankly, darlings, we had a hard time making sense of it ourselves, and we know all the names of the people involved. The curious knot-untanglers can be fully informed here.)

There are some peculiar absurdities that plague this whole sordid affair: how on earth did the Certain Unnamed Someone Else come across Zeke's little blog entry to begin with? And why is it that the lawyers were unleashed on our dear comrade, rather than the infinitely more influential and widely-read newspapers who reported this story in the first place? Occam and his razor can probably answer the latter: in any legal battle, the winner is almost always the one with more money. Perhaps our Certain Unnamed Someone Else wanted a battle he could win. Certainly, this feels like a case of attempting to swat a mosquito with bazooka.  

Still, the intrusion of litigiousness into the world of blogging and criticism leaves us feeling more than a little queasy. The precedents that this little legal action raises are troubling indeed. Canadian art criticism is passive enough; when it is hamstrung by a legal system at the behest of the litigious, whatever will become of it (as predictive evidence, might we direct you to our case-summarizing paragraph, an exercise in nothing so much as ass-covering evasiveness)? And Zeke was, as far as we can make out, merely referring to other sources; are the limits of critical speech so narrow? Is citing to become a libelous act? Is umbrage-taking to be the guiding principle of law in these matters?

It seems to us that the free speech ethics of this case are cut-and-dried. But, still we worry. The cynic in us knows that nothing parts the law and ethics like the extensive resources of a fat wallet.

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An Open Letter from the Artfag.

February 2009.

Darlings,
As most of you might be aware, we are due for an installment of our little cahier right about now. Alas, none is forthcoming. We have not even begun to work on one, which has prompted this little missive. Truth be told, we are unsure as to whether or not another cahier shall ever be forthcoming.

Five years is perhaps not such an epochal sweep of time in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly is a long time to be doing something on a volunteer basis. We had very few actual tasks in mind as we set out on our little endeavour, in the winter of aught-four; we hoped, perhaps, that we might garner a small audience; ours was not a revolutionary project, but we did sally forth with the notion that this city was a small pond indeed, and there were far too many relatively and undeservedly big fish using up all the swimming space. So that's what we have done: assessed this city's art scene and arts production truthfully, directly with much panache and gusto. And there is only so long one can sit at the edge of a small pond and shriek at the comings and goings of the faunae. We have been shrieking for five years, and we have grown tired of it. Have people gotten the point? Probably not. If we were to be entirely honest with ourselves, we suppose we had vague hopes of affecting the critical landscape in some way here. This was, of course, a fantasy, and remains so.

Among the flattering prose showered on us by our fans, certain themes emerge, one of them being that we really should be writing for one of The Papers, or The Magazines or what have you. This is a charming bit of flattery (and everybody but heaven knows we encourage flattery), but a tad naive in the assumption that our critical voice and style could survive the translation into a mainstream of a media. In point of fact, when our endeavour worked, it did so for the sole reason that it was not beholden to the policies of arts journalism. And while we're pointing out facts, we must say that our writing would break any editor's pencil. We had no responsibility to be direct and to the point, we had no word limit, and we had no assumed audience in mind. The latter is not entirely true. We imagined an audience that would delight in a little bit of savagery and gossip, but mostly, we imagined an audience that would enjoy reading about art. And so our essays were borne of that. Thus, they are winding, tangential, chock full parenthetical statements and purple prose, revelling in fanciful (and sometimes cheap) verbiage. Arts journalism imagines art writing to be like a cord. The best kind is one that lays like an unperturbed line (every so often, column length and advertising permitting, an arc is allowed). By contrast, we imagine our writing to be a cord that works itself gracefully into an ever-increasing pile of baroque knots, and then easily and gracefully works its way back to a single strand. None of this would pass muster in any form of arts journalism.

Among our detractors, the commonest critique was the issue of our identity. We assumed this pseudonym, and its attendant anonymity, initially as a marketing ploy. The Artfag is a delightful moniker, redolent of a bit of self-ironizing humour, a weensy bit of insult. Thus, people might be prone to examine it (back in the day when we dutifully pumped out a paper version) because the name of the author was mysterious and perhaps a bit shocking. And perhaps this reasoning is disingenuous, but we believed then, and still believe now, that the absence of an identifiable name forces the reader to focus on the actual written material. If they don't agree with what's written, they do not have the luxury of dismissing it as the ramblings of an individual; they must wrestle with the material itself, and find the reasons for their disgruntlement therein. And we also enjoyed the idea that our little cahier really did emanate from the Artfag, the collective spirit of all those artfags that populate our city's arts scene, who judge far more viciously than we, but whose sense of social structure prevents the free flow of discourse. Still, our adoption of this anonymity has proven controversial in some small sense, and has given rise to critiques, most of them valid, that we ourselves cannot answer to anyone's satisfaction. We would also like to point out that this anonymity has been as much of a hindrance as an advantage; certainly, if someone had a name that they could write on a cheque, this little endeavour would have turned into gainful employment by now.

But we are not unmasking ourselves. It is part of our game, and that, at least, we are not giving up. We have quoted him before and we shall quote him again: Saccheverel Sitwell sayeth, "It is the mystery that lingers, and not the explanation."

So darlings, there was beginning to be a rather awkward and overly long silence since our last issue. This is perhaps not what you might have wished us to fill it with, but there you are. We are not working on another issue. And while nothing is yet set in stone, we have to decide whether we want to work on one ever again. Let the awkward silence resume.

Toodle-oo,
The A-F.

A Brief Tirade From the Cave of the Recluse

October/November 2009.

This interview came about as a result of research a Ryerson journalism student -- Michelle Kuran -- is doing for an article on Canadian art criticism. The article will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism. The transcript of our interview is posted here with her permission.

1. A critic recently told me: "The Canadian review tends to be the I-want-to-explain-this review rather than the Iwant- to-go-after-this review, although that place of departure is probably a little more exciting. The time for caressing is over, maybe it is time for tough love--the best will survive it." Thoughts?

This critic is correct in their assessment of Canadian reviews. He is incorrect in his last sentence. There should be no conditional clause there, nor should there be any intimation that at one point, an I-Want-to-Explain-This review was ever appropriate. Critics are not publicists. Critics are not explainers. Critics are not public ambassadors for art. This is simply not the role of the critic, and any critic who still indulges in this (to our mind, almost every critic in this country) should be summarily fired, and never given the opportunity to be an art critic ever again.

2. "There is a crippling lack of real criticism in this country, and without the public dialogue that real criticism engenders, the art scene suffers." What does REAL criticism look like? Who (in Canada) is a REAL critic? Examples.

Thank you for quoting us. We always enjoy hearing our own words. But please: do not indulge in trendy malapropisms. Real criticism, much like every bit of writing, looks like words on a page. You are asking how real criticism is meant to read. And real criticism reads as opinionated and argumentative. Are we a nation of illiterates? Have our national journalists not gone to school? The difference between criticism and exposition is something that one is taught in high school, and then (because everyone in the North America must pass high school regardless of their literacy level) is taught yet again in university (and even there, with not much success).

Criticism has an argument, a thesis. There is an introduction, which states the thesis; body paragraphs which expand upon, explain and argue this thesis; and then a conclusion, which closes the argument. There should be no question as to what "REAL criticism look[s] like." In fact, your question rankles us, as its subtextual sentiment is that a definition of criticism is somehow controversial, hard to come by or evasive. This is an unfortunate by-product of postmodern theory taught badly. To be sure, there are instances where received truths and their resultant definitions are problematic, but this is not the case here: surely, the difference between an argument and a description is one of the most basic distinctions of spoken and written language.

Who is a "REAL critic?" When we were actively producing ARTFAG, we were. RM Vaughan is. David Balzer is. Of course these are local examples, off the top of our head. But really, anyone who expresses an argued opinion is a REAL critic. Your question should not be, who are the real critics, but rather who are the good critics? That is more difficult to measure; quality is the evasive and controversial thing to define. Would you ask an interior designer what a real chair looks like? The far more elusive question is what a good chair consists in. Similarly, to ask who is a real critic is simply a matter of pointing. Attempting to determine a good critic gets much closer to the actual problem.

3. Another critic says art criticism today excludes negative appreciation (Negative appreciation: not dissecting cruelly, but dissecting critically. Each work has success and failure. It’s a sign of respect. It means you’re not only taking the work of art seriously, but that you’re also taking art seriously. Give the honor of your dissent.) Do you think the art scene wants negative appreciation, or is it SATISFIED with the high frequency of apologetic/affirmative reviews? If it’s not boosterism is it its saboteur?

It's not a question of what an art scene wants or doesn't want. This is a pernicious Canadian-ism, this idea that one must only offer what people ask for, what people want. What the art scene wants or doesn't want is so completely and utterly immaterial, it's a non sequitur. One does not give criticism because someone wants it. One gives criticism because, first and foremost, it is in our animal natures. There is not one creature on this earth that does not distinguish between good and bad. The animal that has no sense of discernment dies off, because it cannot tell for itself the food that is poisonous. So: we criticize because we are creatures of discernment.

Second of all, we give criticism because someone needs it. If one is never told that one is doing something wrong, one will never correct that wrong behaviour. This is not the act of the saboteur. That is the attitude of someone who doesn't understand what criticism is for. Post-WWII North American social culture, especially since the 1960s, has been propelled by a therapeutic ideal of the promotion of self-esteem and mental and emotional health and well-being. This pervasive idea has wrought much good, and also much bad; in the context of our discussion, it has birthed this idea (and you can see it everywhere, from art criticism to American Idol) that criticism is an assault upon selfesteem and self-actualization. People who value discourse and the free exchange of ideas realize that criticism is always an act of caring, for it is borne of the desire to see things done successfully. Those who believe that criticism is an act of sabotage simply do not value the free exchange of ideas. We're afraid it's as simple as that.

4. Do you think there is there a crisis in Canadian art criticism?

Yes, of course there is.

5. There are few art magazines in Canada. And in those few the spaces for writing reviews are few too. (This is something I've heard again and again: few negative reviews because one doesn't want to burn the few bridges there actually are. There are professional and social implications.) Is this a weak/valid excuse?

Yes, this is a weak excuse, which points to the provincialism that the Canadian art scene suffers from: this terror that our arts scene is so delicate, so fledgling, that it cannot withstand any naysayers. The Canadian art scene is like a house whose windows have never been opened. The air is stagnant and recycled, and those who have managed to live there with any success live these half lives, terrified of incursions into the fragile ecosystem that they mistake for an actual life.

Consider that Canadian Art Magazine's editorial policy, when it comes to their review section, is 'no criticism, only description.' Other magazines do encourage critical writing (C Magazine, for instance), but Canadian Art pays the best, and because people want to be duly rewarded for their work, there is hesitancy to write for a magazine that will pay poorly, if at all (this is part of the reason we stopped producing ARTFAG; we were very tired of doing what we were doing for free). And so, to follow our little metaphor, Canadian Art is a very specific instance of a body that could easily open the windows, and breathe fresh air into the house of the Canadian art scene. But they purposefully don't; and so they are just as culpable, just as responsible as anyone else for the poor poor state of art criticism in this country.

To return to the question at hand: why do we find ourselves repeating the same thing over and over again? Criticism is not burning. That a criticism burns a bridge is something that exists in the minds of egomaniacs and totalitarians. A healthy ego wants criticism. A healthy ego realizes full well that criticism only strengthens bridges. Who are those who say that criticism burns bridges? Who are those on the other sides of these bridges who are willing to take a torch to them at the mere mention of a critical word? Identify those people, and know, of a certainty, that they are egomaniacs and totalitarians, not fit to hold their jobs, and not fit to be participating in a field of endeavour that is meant to be founded on the free exchange of discourse.

But really, let's call a spade a spade. The art scene in Canada, like the international art scene, has not operated via the free exchange of discourse for a long, long time now. It operates via the unregulated exchange of wealth. People are afraid of criticism in this country because its art market is frail and weak. Very few buy Canadian art, and of those few, most buy not at fair market value; they get it for a steal at auctions (O those pernicious benefit auctions!).

Canadian art collectors simply believe that a collection of prestige is not built on Canadian artists, so they buy (mostly) American art and some European art. The Canadian art market, unlike the US or Europe (pre-economic collapse, that is) was never interested in young, contemporary art; there was never a feeding frenzy on young Canadian artists; buyers of Canadian art are timid, only wanting to invest money in something safe, a guaranteed, pre-approved success. This is why all of our artists of note have left for the US or Europe; they know that what they will produce here will be seen by few and bought by none.

And so people fear criticism because they fear its effect on an already comatose market; in a roundabout way, this fear is a kind of capitalist patriotism (a deeply ironic patriotism, given their predilection for cross-border shopping). To criticize a Canadian artist -- to point out not only that the Vancouver school produces formulaic, academically indulgent, anaesthetic work, but to point out that international curators privately share this belief -- is to jeopardize their sales; to naysay the only marketapproved artists we've got; to (again, following our house metaphor) pull at a cornerstone of a dwelling whose foundational structures are few and far between.