Smug gloating mitigated by a worthy cause

It’s been a busy week, so I had nearly forgotten that the shortlist for the Sobey Art Prize was due to be announced today until the results popped up on my RSS feed to View on Canadian Art (before they showed up on the Prize’s website, even, so good on Andrea Carson for that one). And in an even more delightful surprise, my dream list of never-gonna-happen picks from the longlist was more accurate than I could have hoped. Four correct picks out of five, my only screw-up being the choice to bypass my knee-jerk love of Marcel Dzama in favour of dark-horsing around with Jon Pylypchuk for Prairies and the North.

So against all odds, there’s going to be a 2009 Sobey Art Prize exhibition of all my favourite quirky, fun-loving Canadian artists. High time to book a trip to Halifax, or it would be if I weren’t skint.

Despite my good luck so far, I still hesitate to go so far as to choose a winner. I don’t see the big prize going to Luanne Martineau or Graeme Patterson, and with them out of the way I think Shary Boyle, David Altmejd and Marcel Dzama are all pretty equally matched. I’d be more than happy to see any of them $70,000 richer, but in the interest of being sporting, I’ll place my bet on Shary Boyle.

Shary Boyle (image from Canadian Art)

Now that the gloating is out of the way, however, there is also the matter of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, which I had been hearing murmurs about on the sidelines but finally came around to bean me in the head via the wonderful Neurartic blog. From Martha Langford’s leading statement on the Save the CMCP wesbite:

The National Gallery of Canada (NGC), under the direction of Marc Mayer, has recently announced that the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (CMCP) will no longer occupy its building at 1 Rideau Canal. In fact, the building will no longer be a public space for the arts. It has been handed over to Parliament, to be gutted and renovated as office and meeting space.

There’s been a long trail leading to this point, a slimy thing not unlike a snail’s wake, too sticky to tackle in passing but I already find my sense of subtlety slipping in the utter revulsion of witnessing this latest governmental shiv in the face of Canadian art. Canceling PromArt and Trade Routes was one thing, but turning over a custom-built museum to Parliament is downright sickening.

This shit has also hit the fan at an opportune moment, given that this year’s Contact Photography Festival kicked off in Toronto today. This is precisely the month in the Canadian art calendar when photography tends to zoom to the forefront of the collective cultural consciousness in a way that I typically find mildly obnoxious, but could now prove invaluable in raising awareness of the CMCP’s downfall. In the meantime, please take a moment to follow the links above, and sign the online petition here.

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