review of the new Art Gallery of Ontario

from the Globe and Mail (11/14):


Unmasking art's dazzling pleasures – and its dirty secrets, too
SARAH MILROY
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
November 14, 2008 at 4:18 PM EST

"Writing in 1940, against the deepening shadow of Nazism, the great German Jewish theoretician Walter Benjamin had a few things to say about museumgoing. The thoughtful visitor, he wrote, may well be moved to tears by the beauty that he finds therein, but he will understand as well that “the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries.” Benjamin continues: “There is no document of civilization that is not, at the same time, a document of barbarism.” Power, made manifest through the splendid material of art, was, for him, the subliminal theme of the museum." ...

"Can there be such a thing as a non-violent museum?

These are the questions that animate the new galleries of the Art Gallery of Ontario, which opens to the public for the first time this weekend, an institution which has gracefully managed the transition from art gallery to museum, now housing important collections of Inuit, African and North American aboriginal art, as well as art made by men and women working the white European tradition." ...

for the complete review of the Art Gallery of Ontario