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Date: 07 Dec 2000
Time: 09:20:05
Remote Name: user-2iniifg. dialup. mindspring. com
Going through the exhibition of recent work by the Canadian artist Betty Goodwin, I found myself ticking off the references from one work to the next; - here a little Beuys, there a little Rauschenberg, with a generous helping of Graham Coughtry, and nondescript poetry informally laid in by precursors too numerous to mention. A very thick book from Matthew Teitelbaum and Jessica Bradley, director and curator respectively at the Art Gallery of Ontario, conveys the need for certification, if not quite "greatification". Perhaps such nervousness finds its correlative in the nervous signature style of Betty Goodwin, a defensive reflex in the presence of such pastiche.
I found myself thinking about Richard Gorman. Gorman is the best painter in Toronto, and probably Canada. Paul Fournier continues to paint marvelous images, Louis de Niverville has probably never been better, and I hear good things are still being done in Edmonton, but in Gorman's painting there is a complex of features that in the past fifteen years have effectively distinguished him from everyone else.
By contrast, Betty Goodwin is symptomatic of the taste that has no taste. This is the unctuous fear of being left behind. It crudely mimics international fashion, and has a destructive effect on the indigenous culture. Not that anyone cares. The corrupt speculators' mentality now controlling the art world is strictly, show-me-the-money, and the situation say in San Francisco or Miami remains much the same. (New York and Los Angeles are two sides of the same coin. ). The new museum in San Francisco, a study in obscenity, has reportedly directed sums approaching $15,000,000.00 to a few Manhattan Galleries who dutifully follow the galaxy according to Leo Castelli, the undead. Things are pretty much the same in Miami and Toronto where the vitally important work of Cindy Sherman was recently valorized one more time, just for good measure. For Canada's last entry to the Venice Biennale, Teitelbaum and Bradley chose growling fiberglass dogs and bronze dildoes (although the dogs might have been bronze and the dildoes were fiberglass, and I think there was also the inevitable video). The ostensibly public institutions in these cites in fact function as private enclaves where the officials and the speculators can comfortably mingle, clearly feeling quite unencumbered by any real responsibility to the quality of art with which they engage and later bequeath to their social and financial inferiors, the general public.
And so here we are, with corporate culture destroying the museums, and the taste that has no taste only too eager to please. On each visit to Toronto the galleries devoted to the most expensive Politically Correct Crap are usually empty. Standing there alone, just me and the security guard, I always wonder how much longer this will last.
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