Are art galleries and museums the new churches? What is the relationship between art and faith? Does art that can inspire us to that degree even still exist?

The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Image: artblat.com

Emily Carr, Wind in the Tree Tops, c. 1936-1939. Image: heffel.com

I was marveling with a friend the other day at how in the early 20th century – only 100 years or so ago – people were profoundly shaken by bright colours and loose brushstrokes in painting. I was speaking specifically about the reaction of Torontonians to the early work of A.Y. Jackson and other painters who had been influenced by the likes of Edvard Munch and the Impressionists in Europe.

A.Y. Jackson, The Red Maple, 1914. Image: yorku.ca

And then today on CBC Radio’s Q, today the Reverend Jennie Hogan spoke about the relationship between faith and art, and how the Mark Rothko room at the Tate Modern can have such a profound spiritual effect on people.  Is art, she asks, replacing religion?

James Turrell’s Roden Crater Project. Image: 1.pb.blogspot.com

At a time when religion indeed seems to be on the wane, is art able to replace it? Or is art that powerful (I’m thinking Rothko, Barnett Newmann, James Turrell, even Emily Carr, even still being produced?)  Much of today’s art, as Hogan put it, unfortunately seems to be no more than a knee-jerk reaction to things.

Maybe it’s architecture, though, not art. If museums are the new cathedrals, as Hogan argues in THIS Guardian article, then maybe it’s not the art but the architectural space that now provides the sublime experience.  This is something that was brought up after Gehry built Bilbao and architecture fans flocked there like catholic pilgrims to Lourdes.

If at first glance it seems unlikely that art has replaced religion, I can think of two artists who have the power to create a faith experience, one in the positive (inspiring belief), and the other in the negative. Canadian David Rokeby’s award-winning interactive sound installation Very Nervous System (1986 – 1990) is an  invisible computer interface that sets body movements to music. Imagine walking down the street and suddenly your body movements begin to create sound! Though I haven’t seen it in the flesh, on THIS video, it seems sublime. Click that link also to find out how it works.

Secondly, and on the other side of things, is Gregor Schnieder, possibly the greatest German artist of his generation. His numbingly claustrophobic, absolutely terrifying basement installation, Weisse Folter at the K21 in Dusseldorf in 2007 shook me so profoundly that it still haunts me now, years later.

Gregor Schneider’s Weisse Folter. Image: 3.bp.blogspot.com.

So great art hasn’t lost any of it’s power. It may seem like more of a challenge for art to generate an almost spiritual reaction, but it’s still there. Perhaps it’s just harder to see, with so many mediocre artists clouding our view of it.

“Maximillian?…No, Maximultimillion” is the response attributed to Lord Beaverbrook, a.k.a Max Aitken, when he was once asked his name.  It gives you a sense of the grandeur with which the Canadian media baron must have swirled about London social circles in the early 20th century.

Lord Beaverbrook. Image: photobucket.com

I noticed, the other day in the Art Newspaper, THIS article about how the UK-based Beaverbrook foundation is having to sell Cherkley Court, the former home of Lord Beaverbrook, for whom the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in New Brunswick, is named.

Cherkley Court, in England. Image: exclusiveheritageavenues.com

As you probably know, the Foundation and the gallery have long been locked in a bitter dispute over which paintings belong to whom, and the Foundation needs the money from the sale of Cherkley Court to pay its legal bills. Read more about the ongoing battle, HERE.

For What? One of Frederick Varley’s excellent war paintings, made in 1918 while with the CWMF. Image: warmuseum.ca

While reading an advance copy of Ross King upcoming book Defiant Spirits, about the Group of Seven, I discovered that in 1916, Lord Beaverbrook founded the Canadian War Records Office and the War Memorials Fund, through which many of the Group – A.Y. Jackson, Frederick Varley, and Arthur Lismer – were commissioned to record the war.

The brilliant novelist Evelyn Waugh. Image: blogs.guardian.co.uk

Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Image: finebooksmagazine.com

I also discovered that as owner of the British papers the Daily Express, the Sunday Express and the Evening Standard, Beaverbrook employed the novelist Evelyn Waugh (one of my favorites) and then lampooned him in one of my favorite films, Scoop, as Lord Copper and as Lord Monomark in both Put Out More Flags and Vile Bodies.

A note: I also found out, in Ross King’s book, that former Prime Minister Mackenzie King loathed the work of the Group of Seven – he thought they were far too outlandish, despite their desire to create a Canadian style of painting.  Plus ca change…

There seems to have been a lot of talk about the democratization of art lately.  Recently in the Globe and Mail, columnists Russell Smith and Lynn Crosbie have both offered their thoughts on recent developments in the cultural sphere.

Jan Vermeer, The Milkmaid, c. 1658-60. Image: navigo.com

In THIS article, Smith focuses on an online movement known as “folksonomy …or social tagging. It has created software that permits anybody to look at various museums’ online collections and label each image with as many descriptive keywords as they like.”

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The Canadian Art Foundation––where I work––recently hosted Peter Eleey, curator at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, for a lecture when he was in Toronto.

David Lamelas, Limit of a projection I, 1967. Theatre spotlight in darkened room. Image: spruethmagers.net

In THIS excellent video, Eleey, formerly curator at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, gives a fascinating account of his curatorial influences when preparing The Talent Show, a recent exhibition for the Walker, that “examines a range of complicated relationships that have emerged between artists, audiences, and participants in light of the competing desires for notoriety and privacy that mark our present cultural moment.”

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Here’s a quote from Nancy Bauer’s opinion piece in the New York Times yesterday, which asks Are Lady Gaga and the women who identify with her confusing sexual power with self-objectification?:

Lady Gaga. Image: ftweekly.com

“There is nobody like Lady Gaga in part because she keeps us guessing about who she, as a woman, really is. She has been praised for using her music and videos to raise this question and to confound the usual exploitative answers provided by “the media.” (Journalist Ann) Powers compares Gaga to the artist Cindy Sherman: both draw our attention to the extent to which being a woman is a matter of artifice, of artful self-presentation. Gaga’s gonzo wigs, her outrageous costumes, and her fondness for dousing herself in what looks like blood, are supposed to complicate what are otherwise conventionally sexualized performances.”

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Michelle Kuran has written an excellent article on the state of Canadian art criticism, in the Ryerson Review of Journalism. Read the article HERE.

Young, and determined critic Naja Sayej. Image: torontoist.com

Though Ms. Kuran did contact VoCA for our perspective, we were out of town and didn’t manage to make the interview happen.

Quoting everyone from R.M Vaughn to Artstars’ Nadja Sayej to Canadian Art editor Richard Rhodes and Eye magazine’s David Balzer, the article is an interesting insight into the ‘criticism-by-omission’ that dominates today, and not only in Canada, of course.

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Here’s a fascinating article by Ben Lewis from Prospect magazine. It’s definitely worth reading.

In it, he presents the case for “compelling parallels between much of the contemporary art of the last two decades…and French rococo, a movement that extolled frivolity, luxury and dilettantism, patronised by a corrupt and decadent ancien régime.”

Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Image: rawartint.com

“Boucher’s art represented the degradation of the baroque school’s classical and Christian values into a heavenly zone of soft porn, shorn of danger, conflict and moral purpose. Similarly, (Damien) Hirst’s work represents the degeneration of the modernist project from its mission to sweep away art’s “bourgeois relics” into a set of eye-pleasing and sentimental visual tropes.”

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The 2010 Power Ball, the annual fundraiser for Toronto’s Power Plant Gallery, took place June 3, and took as its theme ‘The Ball that Started it All‘, which, it turned out, worked well!

All photos VoCA/Scott Barker.

Billed as “a carnivalesque line-up of amazing art, extraordinary entertainment, and spectacular prizes“, it aimed to “remix the best of the best from Power Ball’s glorious (and often notorious) past.”

Click below to see lots more photos…

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This past weekend, an exhibition titled Art School: Dismissed, curated by Heather Nicol, brought together works made by artists who are also art teachers. It took place in a decommissioned elementary school in Toronto. Here are some highlights:

The exhibition’s poster. All photos by VoCA.

Jay Wilson‘s sculpture made from toothpicks and white glue.  It reached nicely between floor and ceiling, and was a reminder of school art projects, where the joy was in making something really cool. We liked its shape and structure.

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“L’harmonie, c’est la conciliation des contraires et pas l’ecrasement des differences” – Jean Cocteau

We just came across this quote.  Harmony is the reconciliation of opposites and not the squashing of differences.

It’s a good thing to remember.

Jean Cocteau. Image: meanjin.com.au

There’s more on the poet, writer, filmmaker, ballet and opera designer and painter. HERE.