There’s so much happening in the Canadian art world, it can be difficult to keep up with it all. Here’s a reminder of some places you can hear excellent talks, watch videos and read thoughtful commentary.

On OCAD’s website, check out videos from their excellent speaker series, including talks by the critic Hal Foster, Jamelie Hassan and Vandana Shiva.

Jamelie Hassan, Wall with Door, 1977. Image: canadianart.ca

Also, Filip, the Vancouver-based art publication, has some excellent podcasts, including THIS one from last year by the writer Diedrich Diederichsen on Judgment, Objecthood, Temporality.

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Click HERE for a questionnaire with Vancouver artist Jeff Wall in this month’s issue of Frieze magazine.

“I get so much from looking at great works, but some days – or even some months – I get more from not looking at them. You experience the art also by being away from it and not seeing it.” – Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall, The Destroyed Room, 1978. Image: tate.org.uk

Also, HERE in Art + Auction, Souren Melikian writes on the shifting perceptions in the Old Masters market, where mediocre works are achieving great prices, thanks to scarcity of the real gems.

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We hear that national critic Sarah Milroy and Toronto ‘Gallery Going’ writer Gary Michael Dault are going freelance at Canada’s largest-circulation national newspaper the Globe and Mail, leaving a big dark hole where the visual arts writing used to be.

Image: dspace.mit.edu

However, R.M Vaughn, the writer/artist/poet/critic who currently writes a film/celebrity interview column for the paper, will take over the Toronto coverage with a weekly column titled The Exhibitionist, (starting May 8th) but we can’t imagine that he’ll be there for too long. He seems to be a busy guy, showing his short videos around the world, among other things.

Rumour has it that certain not-for-profit arts organizations are unhappy about this lessening of coverage, enough to be discussing what to do about it and how to take matters into their own hands.

Stay tuned for more on this one…

Get ready, Toronto! This year, the city’s much-loved “All Night Contemporary Art Thing”, Nuit Blanche, takes place on October 2, 2010 from 7 pm to 7 am.

Agnès Winter, Monument to Smile, 2007. Image: hustlerofculture.com

It should be good, with a great lineup of curators, each of whom will curate a section of downtown. We have high hopes for McMaster’s choice of The Open Ended Group, Anthony Kiendl’s choice of Dan Graham (!!) and Christof Migone’s choice of French artist Davide Balula, in particular.  And we’re sure Toronto boy Darren O’Donnell (of Haircuts for Children fame) will not disappoint.

And the curators are:

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Last week we posted HERE part one of our conversation with Douglas Coupland. In this post, Coupland talks about his collecting habits, coming from a “guns-and-ammo” family, his interest in nuclear culture and his new TV mini-series, among other things.

Douglas Coupland’s tiny cubes of 100 stamps. Image: VoCA

Coupland brings out a bowl filled with small cubes of 100 stamps, held together with a band of paper.

VoCA: Wow, did you make all these?

DC: Oh God, no. I collect stamps, I collect Japanese stamps.

VoCA: See, you do collect! You collect tons of things!

DC: Ok, the thing is, there’s a show on A&E called ‘Hoarders’, have you seen it?

VoCA: I’ve heard of it. It’s about people who obsessively collect things.

DC: No, no. I collect. These people don’t get rid of shit. (laughs) These are people who use a paper towel and don’t throw it out thinking it might be useful in the future. People who hoard have almost always had a huge, catastrophic loss in their life, a family member usually and it’s almost impossible to get rid of once you’ve got it. It becomes for them, ‘something you can’t take away from me,’ kind of thing.

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Last night, we went to a panel discussion, hosted by the Canadian Journalism Foundation, titled Arts Journalism: Staying Critical in the Digital Age.

The panel: Taylor, O’Regan, Al-Solaylee and moderator Bronwyn Drainie. Image: courtesy Roger Cullman

Moderated by Bronwyn Drainie, Editor of the Literary Review of Canada, the panel featured Kamal Al-Solaylee, Assistant Professor at Ryerson and former theatre critic at the Globe and Mail, Seamus O’Regan, co-host of CTV’s Canada AM and host of Arts & Minds and The O’Regan Files on Bravo!, and the sharp, witty and spot-on Globe and Mail columnist and feature writer Kate Taylor.

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Last week at his beautiful, art-filled Ron Thom designed home in Vancouver, VoCA sat down with artist-slash-writer Douglas Coupland to get his views on everything from Warhol to techological obsolescence to City of Toronto love.

“All young artists secretly think they’re the next Warhol,” says the Generation X author.

Douglas Coupland. Image:anthonygeorge.com

Here are some highlights:

VoCA: Douglas Coupland, are you more artist than writer or vice versa?

DC: I don’t differentiate. I don’t see a real difference. Is cooking different from roasting?

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We returned from Vancouver to the news that Brian Jungen has won the $25,000 2010 Gershon Iskowitz award at the AGO, and that the $50,000 Sobey Art Prize longlist has been announced.

Vanessa Paschakarnis, Shield for a Human, 2009. Bronze. Image: erhard-metz.de

Most regions have a pretty clear shortlister for the Sobey (I’m thinking either Isabelle Pauwels or Jeremy Shaw from the West; Daniel Barrow from the Prairies; Diane Borsato or Jon Sasaki from Ontario and Duke and Battersby from the East) but Quebec has a tough choice between Pascal Grandmaison, Patrick Bernatchez, BGL, Adad Hannah and Karen Tam.

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This is a lovely sculpture outside Vancouver’s convention centre overlooking Burrard Inlet. Titled The Drop, it “pays homage to the element of water and the untamable forces of nature which are omnipresent in Vancouver.”

It’s by the German public art group Inges Idee, four artists – Hans Hemmert, Axel Lieber, Thomas Schmidt and George Zey, and it’s their first installation in North America.

Inges Idee, The Drop, 2009. Image: VoCA

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Stay tuned for an interview with Douglas Coupland, author, artist, fan-of-Warhol and recent author of a book on McLuhan.

Some of Coupland’s recent artworks.