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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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An quick update on Excellence at the National Gallery of Canada:
We complained a lot in a recent thread about the apalling performance of Marc Mayer when questioned on CBC TV about a lack of diversity at the National Gallery of Canada. Now there is "a growing collective of cultural producers from Canada and abroad concerned with the outrageous and blatantly anachronistic policy of exclusion recently asserted by the Director of the National Gallery of Canada, Marc Mayer, during an interview aired as part of a segment on Diaspora Art on CBC’s 'The National' on February 2, 2010." Read the open letter, it's satisfyingly snarky. I signed on. Here's my favourite bit.
Well, we know “excellence” when we see it, and today we prefer to call it hegemony.
As the Director of a major art museum you might like to read up on this concept. You could start with Linda Nochlin’s seminal work "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" (1971), and then move on to more contemporary, fulsome texts, such as Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993) and bell hooks’ Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992). At the very least you could try reading Fuse Magazine.