NATIONAL POST ARTS

How a road trip to Canada in the ’80s inspired Richard Ford’s latest novel
“I loved that landscape,” Richard Ford says. “What struck me was how different it was from just where I was living at the time, across the border in [Missoula] Montana. It didn’t shock me, it pleased me, in a way. There was something about the landscape up in Saskatchewan … that I had such an affinity for. I think it just settled on me in a profound way.

“When an American — this American, anyway — is in Canada, you’re very aware that you’re in a completely different place,” he adds. (Illustration by Steve Murray)

Justin Bieber announces North American tour

With seven Canadian dates! Click here for more details.

About a decade before Lady Gaga donned a meat dress at the 2010 Video Music Awards, a similar fleshy ensemble was attracting controversy at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Jana Sterbak’s Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic featured 50 pounds of raw flank steaks stitched together. A city councillor called it a “decadent and perverse waste of taxpayers’ money.”

Despite three entries at Sundance, Canadian documentaries are in dire shape
With three documentaries in competition, a feature film in the spotlight and a buzz-ready debut in premieres, this year’s Canadian contingent at the Sundance Film Festival may be the best in recent memory. But while official agencies have been quick to put out logo-laden news releases and party invitations celebrating our success, filmmakers say it’s no time to wave the Maple Leaf.

The Canadian funding system that gave birth to hometown heroes in the past, and the very core of the documentary tradition spawned by John Grierson, has been eroding in recent years, as a result of continuing budget cuts and shrinking broadcast windows.

Documentary production in Canada declined to its lowest level in six years, resulting in rising unemployment in the documentary field as a whole, according to Getting Real, a March 2011 report prepared by the Documentary Organization of Canada.

“Essentially, we are finding less and less support,” says Peter Wintonick, a veteran documentary director and producer who attended Sundance in years past with projects such as Manufacturing Consent, a film about linguistic guru Noam Chomsky. (Illustration by Andrew Barr)

Royals with cheese at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery
A lot of Canadians didn’t like it when Charles Pachter first showed them an image of their Queen atop a moose.

“I’ve been exploring the whole post-colonial British thing in Canada ever since I can remember; 1973 was the first image I did of the Queen on a moose, which caused a scandal at the time,” says the Toronto artist, who has two cheeky takes on the House of Windsor currently showing at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton. Highnesses-in-Training Greet Monarch of the North, painted this year, depicts “Kate and Wills” meeting a moose. Laughing Monarchs is a 2008 example of Pachter’s Queen-and-moose theme. (Regarding the titles, he explains that as a schoolboy he learned that the moose was “monarch of the North.”)

Terry Graff, curator and deputy director of the New Brunswick public gallery, says a pair of events set the stage for its show of Royal likenesses: the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and the restoration of a centuries-old Tudor scene rescued from an Irish castle.

Make Museums Free: What we can learn from Britain and Washington
After two or three centuries in business, public museums have developed into one of the splendours of democracy, the only places where private taste meets elite scholarship and we all pursue our own passions at our own pace. It’s an arena of opinion that permits individualism and innovation to come magnificently alive.

Just one thing is wrong: Going to a museum in Canada costs money. Unlike parks, libraries and cathedrals, museums have box offices. If two adults take three teenagers to the National Gallery in Ottawa, they pay $18. That’s to enter a building that their taxes built, to see art that they, being citizens, own. The Vancouver Art Gallery, which charges $17.50 for an individual ticket, offers a family rate (maximum two adults and four children) for $50, plus tax. Paddy Johnson, a Canadian curator who runs an art blog from Brooklyn, recently wrote: “I’ve never thought the public should be charged to see their own belongings.”

That’s also the British view. In Britain most of the national museums are entirely free, most of the time. In Washington the array of museums run by the Smithsonian Institution on the Mall proudly advertises “admission always free.”

Unfortunately, while charging money at the door supports the running of a museum, it also strengthens the wretched idea that the arts and sciences are the business of a few specialists and the well-to-do. Although many museums have free days or free hours, the existence of a regular ticket price sets the tone. It especially discourages those who find museums a shade intimidating.

Live Chat: Margaret Atwood discusses In Other Worlds
Join us at noon on Monday, November 28 for a one-hour live chat with Margaret Atwood. The celebrated Canadian author will discuss her latest collection of essays, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (Signal Books) and answer reader questions.

Writing in the National Post, Zsuzsi Gartner called the book “a kind of encyclopedia: a quirky and admittedly personal primer on ‘imaginative writing.’” Read Gartner’s review of the book here.

Click here to read more about the book.

And click here for details on how to win the complete Signal Books library and a chance to see Atwood live in Toronto. (Illustration by Steve Murray)