David Altmejd, Elle, Bradley Ertaskiran, Until 4 July 2026

“An object of art is an honest way of making a living, and this is much a different idea from the fancier notion that art is a scam and a ripoff. The bourgeoisie have, after all, made it a scam. But you could never explain to someone who uses God’s gift to enslave that you have used God’s gift to be free.”
—Rene Ricard, “The Radiant Child”

The dance between artist and observer is as transient as any dance craze that has come and gone before. It used to be fashionable for the critic to try and gain access to the artist and understand their motivations; at one time, critics fancied themselves psychoanalysts who interpreted the inner workings of artists through their art as if they were forensic crime scene investigators or handwriting experts. Artists, too, have perennially shaped their art for their critical audiences, attempting to anticipate their tastes and desires, to comment upon some underlying condition or natural disposition intrinsic in the contemporary public.

Today, when all art is accessible with a click or a tap or a swipe of the screen, and everyone can observe anything and become an instant expert upon it, what is the objective of the critic that the casual viewer cannot achieve?

It is no longer enough to comment upon structure and form and tradition and perceived inspiration, or to speculate on the artist’s inner impetus for making art. The transactional circumstances of this brand-new dance, too, are laid bare. Artists are no less workers than those who toil on assembly lines or suffer through service industry jobs. And critics have infiltrated the ranks of artists, compelled to draw upon some creative zeitgeist and produce novelty.

Artists and critics are each doing The Watusi on opposing sides of a two-way mirror in 1982, displaced in space and dislocated in time, alienated in virtual communities and disconnected by digital technologies that function to enrich their shareholders by exploiting and enslaving us both. Art, as any other productive pursuit in the hyper-capitalist age, pays in attention rather than capital, where wealth is measured in engagement and ignorance is bankruptcy.

All art and its observation, regardless of medium or language or form, teaches these dance moves today. The critic’s business is to reveal the artist’s obscure secrets while enshrouding the obvious ones in labyrinthine layers of mystery.

Wagner and Debussy: From Love to the Sea, Lawrence Power, viola and Elim Chan, conductor, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 14 May 2026

“Nothing is more compromising than a thought! But the state of mind which precedes thought, the labour of the thought still unborn, the promise of future thought, the world as it was before God created it — a recrudescence of chaos.… Chaos makes people wonder.…”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner”

To watch the mass behaviour of a crowd — at a Habs game or an F1 event or the vernissage for an art star’s latest exhibition — is one of the few activities left in which we are presented with the whole rather than its fragments, or wherein the fragments reveal the whole. It is like reading a book in one sitting or devouring a meal in a single mouthful. It is like looking at an ocean from space and recognizing that all the individual ripples and waves conceal one leviathan. Chaos is merely order uncharted.

LODE, La naissance de l’art, Galerie Eli Kerr, Until 27 June

“Fate is expressionless, it is as cold and alien as the stars into whose galactic configurations men project the entanglements which they subconsciously create themselves.”
—Theodor Adorno, “Fantasia Sopra Carmen”

Adorno, writing on Georges Bizet’s Carmen, suggests that freedom is the antithesis of virtue. We can extrapolate from this suggestion that artistic freedom is the antithesis of artistic virtue, and that freedom for artists to paint what they will betrays a profound decline in character, a lack of faith in the trajectory of art history, or a breach in the hull of the vessel that has buoyed art since the first cave paintings appeared at Lascaux.

It is the artist’s job to be truthful in disclosing this decline. It is necessary for the artist to surrender their free will and their agency, itself such a trendy buzzword, and submit to the vibrancy of things. An honest artist will organize matter in some virtuous manner and factor out freedom from the equation. Casting images back into the world is a reiteration of the chaotic impulse that obliges the reactivation of imagination.

Moin with Sediment Club, Espace SAT, 21 May 2026

“I see the girls walk by
dressed in their summer clothes,
I have to turn my head
until my darkness goes.”
—The Rolling Stones, “Paint it Black”

The record label Blackest Ever Black, which released Moin’s first recordings, as well as those produced under their alter ego, Raime, was the sort of label that inspired obsession. Blackest Ever Black’s output varied widely in genre — from the sludgy punk of Raspberry Bulbs to the oddball lo-fi indie of Officer! to four-to-the-floor stompers by Regis and Tropic of Cancer’s angular new wave. And yet there was a unified aesthetic to everything they released into the world: dark, cool, metropolitan, modern.

Blackest Ever Black label boss Kiran Sande was concurrently a commissioning editor at Fact Magazine, one of the first publications to offer me an audience. Sande was my favourite editor to write for and an enigmatic and ephemeral presence thereafter. Music criticism at that time consisted of snarky love-hate relationships with of-the-moment artists rising and falling on the Boomkat splash page and generating passive-aggressive reviews on corporate websites. Sande was the last of a certain type of visionary, a genuine charlatan, aiming with 100% accuracy.

Insoon Ha, Artist-in-Residence lecture, Fonderie Darling, 21 May 2026

“You know Marx and Lenin were pretty lazy dudes when it came to working for somebody. They looked at toil, working for your necessities, as something of a curse.”
—Huey Newton, Speech Delivered at Boston College, 18 November 1970

The criteria for cultural importance are not popularity, marketability, or influence. Import is weighed in granular increments, accumulative intuition. Mass movement is science. Stirring a single soul is magic.

Art is not the Polio vaccine. It is a compulsion, the need to see, and to be seen, and to see what others see, and to grasp the invisible. Writing about art is even less consequential. Criticism doesn’t save lives. In many instances, it wastes them.

The invention of the wheel was art. Understanding the nature of wheels is essential. The dance steps may have changed, but dance is eternal.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Installation view of David Altmejd, Elle, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.}