Curator & Collector

Supposed Ming Dynasty stolen artwork image taken from the CBC

I occasionally call myself a philistine when I mention that most modern art really doesn’t do much for me. I think a lot of five year olds can pull off what some contemporary artists do, and to me it doesn’t matter that the artists could potentially do much more. Nevertheless, I’m a little surprised at the number of modern day philistines who surround us. Most of the top-recommended comments on this CBC story, about a $150,000 artwork that was robbed at gunpoint from a Richmond, BC, gallery are all written by and recommended by people who haven’t a clue about art, economics, collecting, or even insurance. Some think that an artwork from the 14th century should be worth much more than $150,000, as though the artist, the number of artworks made and the number that have survived, the condition, and market demand had no bearing at all. Others can’t fathom how an artwork worth “200k” could be on display in a gallery in a mall. These folks have evidently never been to the better art galleries of any major city, including their own.*

Meanwhile, I saw today in one particularly fascinating art gallery holding northwest coast First Nations art the comment “it was as boring as hell.” Unfortunately, I believe it was one of my former students who may have written it. (The program these students were in finished shortly before this post was written.) Speaking of students, two juvenile would-be commenters, one from a school in Calgary, and another from a school in Kelowna, left a lot of foul language in badly misspelled and badly-punctuated comments on this blog’s entries on some of Bill Reid’s more notable sculptures. I did not publish the comments by these young Vandals.

Perhaps one of the worst examples, though was from a middle-aged person who, upon seeing Reid’s The Raven and the First Men, confided, without a trace of irony, “well isn’t that silly? In my village in North Africa, we were taught that God created Adam and Eve.” Good art’s not for everyone, and not all genres are for everyone, but some people simply need to open their minds and hearts. There’s much they’re missing out on.
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*It could turn out, of course, that the claim was staged–but the price-tag alone shouldn’t make anyone think so.