In no particular order, ok?
Radio-Canada: Claude Couillard writes 342 words on the UQAM Design students' show. Very cool pictures, short sweet and to the point. Nothing ground breaking, but giving students column inches is a good thing. I can also mention in passing that the VAV gallery at Concordia and the Lina and Beonard are also doing something similar, over at the blokeschool.
Voir: Nicolas Mavrikakis writes 501 words on Albrecht Dürer and Toucher l'art, on at the Musee des Beaux Arts. Now, I am very surprised that Mr. Mavrikakis is writing about somebody who has been dead for almost 500 years, but you learn something new every day. He still manages to write that he is smarter than his reader with this sentence: "Vous connaissez certainement plusieurs d'entre elles: Le Rhinocéros, La Représentation de la Mélancolie, Adam et Ève, Saint Jérôme, Le Chevalier, la Mort et le Diable... " (or for the blokes in the house: You most certainly know all of the prints, such as The Rhinoceros, Representation of Melancholy, Adam and Eve, etc." Heck, if I'm been reading Mr. Mavrikakis for Contemporary Québecois Visual Art, why in the name of anything should I have a familiarity with Durer's painting?
He continues his ridiculous habit of name dropping, somehow suggesting that because Rene Donais makes prints, and Mr. Mavrikakis wrote about Mr. Donais recently, there has to be a similarity. Yeah, right. In case you're interested in a taste comparison, try these:
Anatomie du boshi, animal mythologique chinois, by Rene Donais, 1995. I don't know any other details.
Les quatre cavaliers by Albrecht Dürer, 1498, gravure sur bois sur papier vergé, 39 x 28,1 cm
He then sums up the review with some sort of history or printmaking. Ummm, not to belabor the obvious, but if he assumes that his readers are familiar with Durer's production sufficiently that by merely writing the name of a piece they can visualize it, why is he writing something along the lines that printing started during the renaissance and that at the time there were no museums or photography? Shouldn't this be obvious to his clearly intelligent readership?
He then goes on to talk about the touching art on the aforementioned Sherbrooke street institution. Where he hides behind an unnamed source (an important gallery guy) about how important it is to be able to touch art. Umm, if you've been covering art for I dunno how many years, shouldn't that idea come to you naturally? Why the need for an outside source? And most strangely, why unnamed? And heck, what about smelling art? What about tasting art? Voir then continues their new habit of amassing content for free, and as of the time that I am writing this, there are about another 1,300 words written for free as comments - most of then going off on how good Durer's work is.
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