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Shame on them… The Banque Nationale du Canada has one of the better corporate art collections in the City/Province/Country (take your pick). Apparently it comprises more than 7,000 pieces, from 1895 to now and was worthy of a press release when they loaned a piece of art to the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal earlier this year. The curator of the collection appears to know what she is doing.

So why did they reduce the size of the exhibition space in their building? Back in June this was the total extent of what was viewable

Where they used to have approximately 100 linear feet of exhibition space in the lobby of their head office, they now have what appears to be 40 linear feet of exhibition space buried in the branch outlet in the basement (and beside the food court) in their head office. Can you say “being set up to fail?” Like the once mighty Alcan collection or the Les Femmeuses exhibits that Pratt & Whitney used to organize before deciding to stop, it appears that the Banque Nationale du Canada’s art collection is not long for this world.

Pity.

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Why is it that “An illustration of Spider-Man that ran on the cover of one of the wall-crawler’s comic book adventures from 1990” sells for roughly the same price as Jean Paul Lemieux’s Ti Gus?

And then come to think of it shouldn’t Todd McFarlane be considered a Canadian Artist (with a capital C and a capital A)?

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Over at the irrepressible and always entertaining View on Canadian Art Andrea Carson writes a thoughtful and interesting article about Ms. Pootoogook.

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I’m in the midst of trying to write about half-a-dozen large articles, so there isn’t too too much small easy stuff to report on. But I recently got mail from Maskull Lasserre responding to what I had written on his piece Coriolis and Mirana Zuger’s exhibit, Vrtlar at the McClure Gallery. I’ve appended it to to both articles if you care to read it (A and B).

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In our ongoing series of old dead French painters in front of a film camera about a hundred years ago, we get to Claude Monet.

via

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If you’re interested in what goes into a Dic Ann’s burger

and

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I wasn’t aware that details of Janet Cardiff’s and George Bures Miller’s wedding ceremony were important in understanding their art… I’ve ranted about 40 Part Motet before, and if someone pushes the right button I’d be more than happy to do so again.

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i presume that you’re old enough to know what an upskirt photo is. As I spend an inordinate amount of time looking up,k I figured I could take some upbuilding photos. Again, apologies for not taking notes and identifying the buildings.

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For those of you with long memories, the owner of Galerie 2000 and the guy who threatened to sue me in 2007, is getting sued himself. According to this article in yesterday’s Journal de Montreal, one of his clients didn’t particularly appreciate some of M. Tremblay’s selling techniques.

For those of you with short memories, he has previously been in trouble with the law a couple of other times as noted in this article from Radio-Canada and this one in the National Post.