ICAs versus Street Art

On our very first day in Montreal, Jen and I walked past the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal—the Contemporary Art Museum. There was a giant banner advertising the current show. I was psyched and expected sculpture, maybe along similar lines as David Altmejd’s The Eye over at the Museum of Fine Art.

What'd I get?

Vids of giant blocks of ice (threaded with course black hair) slowly melting and vaguely steam punk-ish spacemen trudging across the snow covered tundra. At the DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art we got film of a dude bro playing a gameboy in a camping tent.

It likely won't shock you that these did absolutely nada for me. I don’t get the point, the meaning, the reason for their existence. They seem like nothing more than intellectual/artistic wanking.

I'm just SO glad these carrot waxers got major museums and galleries to show their onanistic treasures! OK, what they did accomplish is pissing me off. My screaming thought was Warhol did this shit 52 years ago and it was stupendously dull and impotent then.

Having said that, just because these flicks don't light my fire, just because I don't grok their message or reason for being, just because it steamed me royal to have spent money to see these monkey spankings, doesn't mean that other people fail to genuinely understand and/or appreciate them. Maybe the dude bro and the spaceman and their struggles are immensely totemic to some not insignificant portion of the art appreciating public?

Not me. I do NOT have the most cutting edge, sophisticated, intellectual, avant-garde taste in art. It’s true. I know this. I need to remember so’s I don’t plunk down my precious hard-won dinero to view a bunch of self-reverential crapoli that’s just gonna piss me off into the next century.

I preferred Montreal’s street art and, happily, there was a lot of that.