Tag Archives: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

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The Structure of Spirit

Angine de Poitrine with René Lussier and Robbie Kuster, and S.R.U.F, Club Soda, 18 April 2026

Silhouette of hands forming a heart shape in front of a spotlight during a live performance.
Angine de Poitrine perform at Club Soda 18 April 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The meaning and potential achievement of a group composed of two people cannot simply be transferred to a group entity consisting of an undetermined multitude of people.”
— Siegfried Kracauer, “The Group as Bearer of Ideas”

In every age, certain ideas ebb and flow, rising and falling in patterns which we might describe as “spirit.”

Individuals originate ideas that other individuals take up and share. Together, these individuals form groups that realize ideas to a lesser or greater extent in the material and virtual world. Individual ideas alternate in impact based upon group behaviour.

The Germans, of course, have a more specific word for this phenomenon — “zeitgeist” — combining the words for time and temperament, refining the precise meaning as the spirit of the moment.

We tend to believe that any given idea’s popularity is a marker of its value. That is why we are concerned with bestsellers lists for books, and musical top ten charts, and box office figures for films. The greater number of individuals that adopt and echo an idea, the more we revere that idea and find it fascinating and might want to participate in it. This is how ideas gain momentum and become the spirit of an age, the zeitgeist of a culture.

Nonetheless, whether an idea is good or not is independent of its popularity. Some terrible ideas historically garnered immense traction, and other great ideas missed their original moment entirely. Vincent van Gogh was overlooked during his lifetime, only to be subsequently reconsidered a genius. Yet, enough Germans supported Adolph Hitler to make his ideas among the 20th century’s defining zeitgeists.

Popularity, then, is not the metric upon which history should or does evaluate ideas.

The Torlonia Collection: Masterpieces of Roman Sculpture, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Until 19 July 2026

A marble statue of a youthful male figure holding a lyre, standing on a pedestal, with a historical landscape backdrop featuring classical architecture and additional figures.
Statue of Apollo, 2nd c., Collezione Torlonia, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Politically, we are still stuck in the systems of thought of the Greek and Roman slave states, no matter how much we rant about ‘democracy.’”
—Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

There are two extremes that form the polarities of an idea’s popularity: everyone is doing it, and only one individual is doing it. Somewhere along this continuum is where most ideas are located.

The notion, however, that individuals are free to take up certain ideas or not is illusory. There comes a moment in the lifespan of any extremely popular idea in which ignoring it is no longer an option. Disregarding a big idea can have consequences that adversely affect individuals and ostracize them. There is a stigma against not going with the crowd. And nobody wants to be the only one to have missed out on a good idea.

Social status is often linked to an individual’s enactment of popular or unpopular ideas. But there is just as often an inverse correlation between status and popularity. Coca-Cola, which everyone consumes, commands a lower rank than niche, artisanal beverage brands. Until the artisanal brand gains popularity, it is associated with a sense of discernment and taste.

The margins of society are always the testing grounds for mass culture. It is popular to hold unpopular opinions. Which unpopular opinions become integral to the zeitgeist, and how, is an alternative definition of democracy.

Paola Pivi: Come check it out Lies lies lies, Centre PHI, Until 13 September 2026

A collage of various images displayed on a grid surface, featuring people, nature scenes, animals, and urban environments.
Gallery view of Paola Pivi: Come check it out Lies lies lies at Centre PHI. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Success is fatal.”
—David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd

Establishing an idea in absence of an alternative is the realist’s strategy to reinforce an idea’s popularity. Capitalism is the obvious example, the mode of economic organization proper to a monolithic spiritual culture.

However, capitalism exhibits another curious paradox: it functions on the everyone-is-doing-it extreme of the popularity spectrum, but it trades in the only-one-individual-can-do-it cachet that characterizes the egoist zeitgeist at the other end.

Capitalism masks its social construction beneath a veneer of atomized self-actualization. The second-order paradox that acts as capitalism’s failsafe is that the alternative to individual success must necessarily be collective failure.

Bizet’s Carmen, Opéra de Montréal, Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, 2-12 May 2026

A woman in a black shirt embraces a seated man in a suit, both engaged in an emotional moment during a rehearsal. The background features wooden crates and a simple stage setting.
Rihab Chaieb and Dante Mullin Santone perform at a dress rehearsal for Carmen at Place des arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Without delirium and confidence, capital could not function.”
—Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

Ideas can produce addiction as powerful as any drug. And like drugs, ideas can be synthesized and purified down to their most potent forms.

In fact, simplicity is the hallmark of many of the world’s most addictive ideas. High-concept narratives and three-chord pop songs tend to resonate most deeply in the subconscious, as infectious as nursery rhymes, encouraging repetition and positioning themselves perfectly for mass approval. As the center reinforces itself and self-organizes, the margins are cleaved away like corn husks, exposing the chaotic uniformity of the kernels.

Art Souterrain, Place Ville Marie, Until 10 May 2026

A man stands in a room filled with yellow decor, gesturing towards a table while another man in a virtual reality headset interacts with the environment.
Gilles Tarabiscuité demonstrates Réalité dés/augmentée 2.0 (2025) at Art Souterrain. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I could leave you, say goodbye
Or I could love you, if I tried
And I could
And left to my own devices, I probably would.”
—Pet Shop Boys, “Left to My Own Devices”

Virality in our era is synonymous with zeitgeist. Memes today, more than any other medium, capture the spirit of the moment.

In January 2026, a clip from Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World went improbably viral. The scene depicts what Herzog describes as a “deranged penguin” running away from the colony and apparently towards certain death. The clip became a meme and was shared on social media by the Trump administration in the context of the U.S. president’s threats to annex Greenland.

The impetus to defy acceptable behaviour exemplified by this meme is portrayed as simultaneously admirable and suicidal. And yet, the nature of mimesis is a kind of mob mentality, the fuel of smouldering populist movements that are perennially in danger of igniting into fascism.

What would happen if everyone went in their own direction, like so many deranged penguins, heading toward an uncertain future, but certain that the popularly prescribed future is untenable? Some adherence to the crowd ensures our collective survival. Too much can doom us en masse. But not enough could doom us individually.

Perhaps a clue emerges in the maturity of ideas. In addition to their popularity, we are inclined to give more symbolic weight to progressive ideas over traditional ones. Novelty and contemporaneity are prized as innocent and original and uncorrupted by time.

A “progressive” polity, writes Richard Sennet in The Culture of the New Capitalism, “is one in which all citizens believe they are bound together in a common project.” Sennet elaborates: “The new institutional order eschews responsibility, labelling its own indifference as freedom for individuals or groups on the periphery.”

The truth is, there are no peripheral groups or individuals. There are only black polka dots or white stripes.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Angine de Poitrine perform at Club Soda 18 April 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Desire

Lèche-vitrine, Art Dressé, Espace Transmission, 8-18 April 2026

Catherine Machado performs The Maintenance Worker at Espace Transmission, 8 April 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL

The fear of the wicked, it shall come upon him, but the desire of the righteous shall be granted.
—Proverbs 10:24

The British slang “window-licker” is a derogatory term for a person with diminished mental capacities. It is akin in meaning to the “R” word and considerably more offensive. It indicates the propensity of mentally handicapped people to do foolish things, like, for instance, lick windows.

Since the release of the 1999 Aphex Twin single “Windowlicker,” however, the expression has taken on another connotation: unconsummated desire. The song’s video, which has not aged well, especially presents overt themes of longing which suggest a covert toxicity that accompanies objects of desire. There is an implication as well that desire itself is mindless, that wanting is a form of weakness, ripe for control.

“Window licking” in the 21st century has come to signify still another type of desire — the desire for the representation of an object. “Windows,” after the Microsoft operating system, are what we commonly refer to in the act of looking-through onscreen. Window shopping and window dressing are no longer practices reserved for meatspace. And what appears within the digital window can be infinitely adjusted, altered, augmented, or may in reality not even exist.

The digital world, among other dubious consequences, has exponentially multiplied and convoluted “window licking,” not only in meaning. Nonetheless, the variation of sense in the circuits and wires and distributed networks of interconnected machines always has real-world consequences.

Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disrupter, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, Mount Royal Center, 10 April 2026

Panel discussion titled 'Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disrupter' at Centre Mont-Royal, featuring four speakers seated on stage with a large screen displaying event details.
From left: Cory Doctorow, Astra Taylor, Yoshua Bengio, and Nahlah Ayed. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I don’t need anything. I want.”
—Mr. C., Twin Peaks: The Return

At a recent conference on A.I., Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada Daniel Béland identified two categories of power: power over and power to.

Power over, Béland loosely defined in the negative as the power of one person or group or nation to subjugate and control another. Power to, he described in the positive as the power to assist or overcome or empower another subject.

Judging by the standing-room only crowd, the potentials and perils of A.I. are of immediate interest and acute concern to a broad swath of luminaries across the disciplinary spectrum. I was seated between a retired McGill Engineering professor and the head of a public relations team from a Montreal-based startup, and each of these individuals listened with discernable alarm, as if there were some secret code to be cracked in the participants’ responses.

Artificial Intelligence, like any technology, has the potential to demonstrate, and the capacity to exert, both types of power. In the hands of some users, A.I. could be a force for capital ‘C’ Control in the Burroughsian or Deleuzian sense — protocological, algorithmic, inhuman domination that subjugates us through a series of automated if-then propositions. In other hands, A.I. possesses the power to ease the burden of impossibly tedious or time-consuming labour, to liberate us from work that has always posed an obstacle to progress and growth.

The problem is that human beings designed and implemented A.I. in our own image, so to speak, and as such it aims to satiate our wants more than our needs. A.I. has its own essential desire. It desires to satisfy our desires — if you like this, then you’ll love that — and inoculate us in doing so against the virus of dissatisfaction.

The Intense Leningrad Symphony by Shostakovich, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 15 April 2026

A full orchestra performing on stage, featuring musicians playing violins, cellos, and other instruments, with sheet music on stands and a conductor directing the performance.
Rafael Payare conducts the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal at Maison Symphonique, 15 April 2026. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

Over the counter, with a shotgun,
Pretty soon, everybody’s got one.
—U2, “Desire”

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government made headlines this week by being the first in Canadian history to secure a majority outside of a general election. Through a series of floor-crossings and byelections, the Liberals now occupy 174 out of a possible 343 seats and can operate until October 2029 without facing the threat of a no confidence vote.

Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre described the Liberal mandate as undemocratic, accusing the party of coordinating “dirty backroom deals.” According to Poilievre, Carney orchestrated his majority by force, using vaguely anti-revolutionary coded rhetoric: “Mark Carney is saying to Canadians: ‘Your vote does not count,’” Poilievre declared on 9 April in Richmond, B.C.

The Liberals’ byelection sweep recalls the famous anecdote about the conversation between Lenin and Trotsky on the eve of the October Revolution in November 1917. According to legend, Lenin, in a fit of uncertainty, asked Trotsky, “What will happen to us if we fail?” To which Trotsky was said to reply, “What will happen to us if we succeed?”

“An act proper is not just a strategic intervention into a situation, bound by its conditions,” writes Slavoj Žižek in Living in the End Times, “it retroactively creates its conditions.” Carney is in the process of performing a similar soft socialist revolution in Canada and, given the populist surges underway in Alberta and Quebec, I for one reluctantly have to admit that I don’t hate it.

Quatuor Molinari : Musique à voir, Fondation Molinari, 29 March 2026

A string quartet performs in front of an audience in an art gallery, with red abstract paintings in the background.
Quatuor Molinari performs at Fondation Molinari, 29 March 2026. Tomas Dessureault for NicheMTL.

“The Buddhist will tell you: ‘All life is pain.’ Pain comes from always wanting things.”
—‘Sally’ Moltisanti, The Many Saints of Newark

We are under the impression, mistaken in my opinion, that if we were only to consume the correct media, desire the proper commodities, collect the right art, listen to the authority-approved music, watch the acceptable films, belong to the prestigious clubs, trust the most reliable experts, keep the most important company, and engage in the most sophisticated sexual escapades, our wanting would be absolved and our suffering effaced. Because if we only want the righteous things, we shall receive them.

Still, it’s not the things that we desire that make us righteous or not; it’s the wanting.

Plural : Foire d’art contemporain à Montréal, Grand Quai du Port de Montréal, 10-12 April 2026

A woman stands beside a large mural depicting a blue depanneur storefront covered in graffiti, with rain falling down.
Gallery view, Jasmin Bilodeau, Dépanneur 2025, photograph printed on polypropylene. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Happy are those who have what they need and no more.”
—Saul Ha-Levi Morteira

The old “wheelbarrow” joke, which I have told many times, hits different in the age of ICE and bears repeating.

A man crosses the border every day carrying a wheelbarrow full of sand. And every day, the crossing guard at his checkpoint dutifully sifts through every grain of that sand and finds nothing.

Day after day, month after month, year after year, the same man transports his wheelbarrow full of sand over the border, in the face of the same increasingly confounded crossing guard, sifting to no avail, evermore certain that he is being deceived by some ingenious smuggling scheme.

Finally, the crossing guard reaches his last day on the job and implores the man with the wheelbarrow: “Please, I’m retiring tomorrow. You must tell me what it is that you have been smuggling through my checkpoint!”

To which the man replies, “I thought it was obvious. I’ve been smuggling wheelbarrows.”◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Fatine-Violette Sabiri, Portrait d’une chambre orientale, 2022, Édition 2/3 + 1AP, inkjet printing on archival paper, 24 x 36,” Galerie Eli Kerr, acquired by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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The Problem of Pain

Viktor, dir. Olivier Sarbil, Cinémathèque Québécoise, 17 March 2026

The Wall Street Journal on 7 March reported that Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence had threatened social media users with harsh penalties under the country’s anti-espionage laws for making and sharing images or video documenting U.S. and Israeli strikes and their aftermath in the Republic. The Ministry characterized such prospective posters as a “fifth column,” or the enemy within. War photography, once universally understood as a reliable method of unshrouding the true faces and victims of conflict, has become suspect in its ubiquity, its susceptibility to disinformation, and its vulnerability to A.I. and deep-fake manipulation.

Images have the power to produce consensus and encourage something resembling collective memory. Especially single images that proliferate widely shape our impressions and recollection of events, particularly when we did not witness them ourselves. Think of the depiction of Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing a napalm attack in South Vietnam, or more recently, Thomas E. Franklin’s photograph “Firemen Raising the Flag at Ground Zero.” Like a tuning fork, seeing the second plane strike the World Trade Center’s South Tower on live television resonated with everyone in unison. These images immediately implant a sense of recognition in viewers.

“There is no such thing as collective memory,” writes Susan Sontag in her 2003 book, Regarding the Pain of Others. “But there is collective instruction.”

Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore with Myriam Gendron, Le Gesù, 18 March 2026

There are generally two types of pain: physical and emotional. It is impossible to feel another person’s pain, and so we are condemned to describe our pains using the best communication tools in our toolkits. We might tell the dentist that our toothache is a throbbing or a stabbing pain. Or we could draw lightning bolts shooting into aching shoulders on a diagram of the human body in advance of a massage.

Images might be the proper medium for conveying physical pain. Everyone visually recognizes an injury, a wound, or a scar, and empathizes using their own familiarities to conjure the memories of past distress. Sound, though, and music, specifically, is arguably the vehicle best suited to communicate emotional pain — the pain of mourning, of love lost, of failure, of separation from self and from God.

A singing voice invokes the universal truth of emotional pain and exorcises it.

Jean Cocteau, dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Cinéma du Musée, 15 March 2026

“Hunger and force can never be conditions of productive activity. On the contrary, freedom, economic security, and an organization of society in which work can be the meaningful expression of man’s faculties are the factors conducive to the expression of man’s natural tendency to make productive use of his powers.”
—Erich Fromm, Man for Himself

Pain is a productive energy.

Physical pain prompts the body to identify its source and repair it. Emotional pain spurs action, too, to ameliorate the conditions which initiated the anguish. Analgesics can effectively blunt physical pain, but numbness is antithetical to the productivity that emotional pain potentially stimulates. Rather, it is necessary to feel emotional pain in its entirety — not to induce it, but neither to detach oneself from it — in order to make it useful.

The greatest artists didn’t thrive under conditions in which their basic needs went unmet. The notion of the “starving artist” is unproductive and anti-romantic. Art is unavoidably work and workers work best when they are fed and clothed, sheltered and rested. But a claim can be made for microdosing emotional pain in pursuit of creative productivity. Enduring emotional pain produces faith, and humanity cannot survive without faith.

Not an irrational faith in ideology, or technology, or capital, but a radical faith in the prevalence of goodness, beauty, and truth.

Champs de fracture, Bradley Ertaskiran, 19 March 2026

An industrial wall with a textured surface features four rectangular panels that resemble light-colored stone, arranged horizontally. Above them is a large blank area framed by the wall.
Gallery view, Dawit L. Petros, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Is the absence of a meaningful Self traumatic only when we expect its presence?”
—Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times

“…there is a destructive force that is in love or attaches itself to love—one that moves human creatures toward destruction and self-destruction, including the destruction of that which they most love.”
—Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence

Among life’s inexplicable paradoxes is that love is a source of pain. That emotion which should provide the utmost pleasure, that virtue which Jesus commanded of his disciples, contains within it the seed for immense suffering.

This is why love is a commandment and not just a suggestion — because none of us would do it willingly. And this is why true love is selfless — because the persistence of love’s subjective experience discourages it.

The Designer is Dead, dir. Gonzalo Hergueta, Cinémathèque Québécoise, 19 March 2026

“Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God’s, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it.”
—C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

One of the defining characteristics that sets us apart from beasts is the human search for meaning. We comfort ourselves with sayings like “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” and “everything happens for a reason.” And yet, reason in terms of rational thought cannot possibly justify or defend violence. Reasons are not inherently morally sound. The reasons for international wars, or for interpersonal conflict, are most frequently amoral and unethical — ego, greed, avarice, hatred, ignorance, shame.

Some things are fundamentally meaningless, and it is a fool’s errand to search for meaning in them. Moral deformity cannot be explained spiritually or scientifically. There is no lesson in birth, life, and death. These things exist independent of our inclinations to interpret them. Man’s search for meaning is entirely contextual and relative and contingent.

We have all experienced a child’s game of repeatedly asking “why?” Eventually, every adult on the receiving end of this perpetual question arrives at the ultimate answer: “just because.”

The painful truth is that there is no meaning; there is only understanding. Most of life passes us by misunderstood. Understanding this is the first step towards a state of grace.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore perform at Le Gesù 18 March 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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About Face

Orchestre Classique de Montréal with Marie-Josée Lord and conductor Kalena Bovell, Salle Pierre-Mercure, 5 February 2026

Marie-Josée Lord and Kalena Bovell with the OCM at Salle Pierre-Mercure. Photographed for NicheMTL.

What began anecdotally as suspicion about facial bias on social media was confirmed in 2021 when Bogdan Kulynych, a Ukrainian graduate student studying at EFPL University in Switzerland, proved a preference for lighter skinned faces in (the company formerly known as) Twitter’s cropping algorithm. Twitter’s photo-sharing system also seemed to like younger, slimmer faces more than older and wider ones, with those faces left out more regularly from image-based tweets. Women’s faces, too, enjoyed preferential treatment, appearing more frequently in Twitter’s new recommendation-based feeds.

Kulynych noted that these facial biases were not accidental but rather designed to maximize engagement and thus profit for the company. Twitter paid Kulynych a $3,500 reward for discovering the bias and apologized in a statement, claiming, “…we’ve got more analysis to do.” On 25 April 2022, before they could undertake that analysis, Twitter’s Board unanimously accepted Elon Musk’s hostile takeover bid for $44 billion.

Less than four years later, Musk has changed the name of the company to X — no relation whatsoever to the rating — and developed a subscription-based A.I. service that when prompted to do so creates sexualized deepfake images of real people without their consent.

Bibi Club with Fionavair, Pub Pit Caribou, 13 February 2026

Bibi Club perform at Pub Pit Caribou for Taverne Tour, 13 February 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Faces are the most instantly recognizable physical features humans have. A number of studies demonstrate that infants show a visual preference for their mother’s faces within hours after birth, effectively making babies the first and most reliable facial recognition software.

The subtlest facial movements can indicate avalanches of emotion, and we intuitively recognize, interpret, and act upon these behavioural cues. More than any other nonverbal signs, we build bonds and trust people based upon their faces and what they communicate to us.

During the coronavirus pandemic, witnesses were asked to testify in court trials wearing face masks, and criminologists questioned whether these masks would affect the credibility of their testimony. A group of American and Canadian researchers, including Vincent Denault from the Université de Montréal and host of the podcast Beyond Lie Cues, published an experiment designed to isolate masks as a specific variable affecting the believability of a witness’s testimony. To their surprise, they found that the difference was negligible.

As important as faces are for identification, it is not imperative to see a face to believe a story. Masks appear to conceal neither lies nor the truth.

No Hay Banda with Karen Ng and Ida Toninato & Jennifer Thiessen, La Sala Rossa, 9 February 2026

Jennifer Thiessen and Ida Toninato perform for No Hay Banda at La Sala Rossa, 9 February 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Guitar face” is the phenomenon of involuntary and often hilarious facial expressions that guitarists pull when performing on their instruments. But it can also be applied to other musicians, too, and even extended to non-musical pursuits. We’ve all seen someone sticking out their tongue or biting their lower lip when they’re involved in a complex task.

“Laptop face” is the increasingly common occurrence of a laptop musician expressing facial acrobatics whilst manipulating a trackpad or keyboard. Of course, there is also “saxophone face,” the extreme inflation of the cheeks which saxophonists cannot avoid. Among the rarer instrument faces is “viola d’amore” face, another level of spontaneous expression akin to a plate spinner adding heroic complexity to an already demanding feat.

Nights in Fairyland by Will Straw, Milieux Resource Room, 13 February 2026

Will Straw holds a copy of his book, Nights in Fairyland, 13 February 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

When we become attracted to another person, we are usually attracted first and foremost to their face. There can be other physical attributes that one considers striking, many of which are well-known and need not be relisted here. But the face is the interface beneath which the operating system functions, so to speak, giving an indication to its innerworkings and alternately concealing and revealing our true character.

“Gaydar” is the term generally applied to a person’s visual ability to accurately discern sexual orientation in women and men. Nicholas O. Rule and Ravin Alaei in the Department of Psychology at University of Toronto published a study in 2016 that suggests that the general population is able to predict sexual orientation at a rate better than chance, indicating that there are certain facial features more frequently attributed to gay people.

Urban Dictionary entries are instructive and reflect how real people variously define and use language. At the time of writing, there are several more or less sensational definitions of the term “gayface.”

One definition indicates that gayface is an almost obligatory “look that gay men have that enables other gay men to quickly identify them as ‘family.’” This definition suggests that gay people have better gaydar than straight folks. Another less anticipated entry defines gayface as a variant of blackface, in which a person problematically dons a particular genre of facial expression for derogatory effect. Still, another entry simply states: “Anyone that goes by the name of Joseph.”

Richard Avedon: Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951-2004, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 10 February – 9 August 2026

Jacob Israel Avedon (detail), Richard Avedon at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The notion that time is art fascinates me. Age changes all things, and the ways in which age manifests materially could be considered instinctive creativity, nature as artist. This is why antiques are more valuable with their patina preserved.

Art restoration is its own artform and needs to be practiced sparingly and only when necessary to not lose the work of art to history in its entirety. A subset of art restoration is film preservation, for which students can study to earn a degree, most notably at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, or Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada.

Film, though, is a different medium than digital image reproduction and indicates an age even if it is entirely contemporaneous. 35-millimeter photographs taken today somehow convey a deeper sense of history than iPhone photos do.

Perhaps that is because they fix moments specifically in time, whereas digital images are infinitely manipulable. One can endlessly Photoshop a jpeg. But prints begin to show their age the second they’re struck, forever decaying.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: William S. Burroughs by Richard Avedon at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL

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Objet petit a

Joyce Wieland, Heart On, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 6 February 2025 — 4 May 2025

Joyce Wieland, O Canada, 1970, Lithograph in red on wove paper, 57.4 x 76.4 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…there is no language in existence for which there is any question of its inability to cover the whole field of the signified…”
—Jacques Lacan, The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.

In the wake of the Super Bowl halftime spectacle that the rapper Kendrick Lamar performed on 9 February, which was, of this renowned un-Canadian sporting institution reportedly the most-watched edition, likely due to multitudes tuning in to see whether or not there would be a third and ultimately successful assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the catastrophic U.S. President and billionaire blowhard, a flurry of frothy media commentary emerged, the kind of chatter that passes in our intellectually insolvent neoliberal era as “cultural discourse,” regarding the intention and interpretation of the political statement the artist was apparently making in the act.

Lamar clearly designed the elaborate show to entice spicy takes.

Almost all of these observed Lamar’s lowercase ‘a’ on a diamond-encrusted chain and proposed what it meant: the Amazon logo, perhaps, or a nod to his production company, or another sly swipe at Drake’s supposed penchant for minors.

Still, none entertained the possibility that a deeper meaning should be discerned by delving into any unintended or subconscious reading.

Kendrick Lamar performs at the Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show, Caesars Superdome, New Orleans, 9 February 2025. Gregory Shamus/Getty Images.

Curiously, no hot take that I read invoked the 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, which seems a glaring oversight, since obviously the chain at once signifies and is the signifier of Lacan’s “Objet petit a.” The pendant is literally a small ‘a,’ and as an object of desire, it also represents the anxious lack sought in subjective otherness. This to me screams peak America.

Did Lamar explicitly intend to elicit this analysis? I don’t want to underrate the dude. He did win a Pulitzer Prize. But I harbour my doubts.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t matter whether it was intentional or not. Because as any philosopher of art understands, poetry, and art more broadly, as Wimsatt and Beardsley observed in 1954 in The Verbal Icon, “is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it.”

For Lacan, the “Objet petit a” is “what falls from the subject in anxiety,” and, more simply, “the cause of desire.” For the Buddhist, it may also be the source of all suffering.

HRT, Taverne Tour, La Sotterenea, 7 February 2025

HRT perform at La Sotterenea, 7 February 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The fundamental substance of an epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other reciprocally.”
— Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament.

It is fascinating that Trump is the first sitting American president to attend a Super Bowl game, and highly symbolic to the neofascist form of politics that he represents. The Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 were central to Hitler’s display of power, too. The objectification of bodies in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia is as unambiguous as the marching columns of red, white, and blue, Black performers that formed and reformed around Lamar.

Doubtless Trump viewed this spectacle unfolding for his own personal amusement because Trump, with the exception of McDonalds cheeseburgers, is composed of pure unconscious desire, pure id.

L’enfant et les sortilèges, Opéra de Montréal, Théâtre Maisonneuve, 8 February 2025

The cast of L’enfant et les sortilèges onstage at Théâtre Maisonneuve, 8 February 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know.”
—Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

America functions on the libidinal drive. It is so repressed that it represses its own repression, which is only revealed to itself in fantasy and horror and violence. It is ironic that digital language is called hypertext, because the nation’s native language, rather, is subtextual. This is why artists like Lamar layer their true messages in code, and why critics fall all over themselves to attempt to decode them as if performing some elaborate reciprocal gymnastics routine. Of course, this process only produces more anxiety in the form of surplus unfulfilled desire.

It took Trump all of a few days to reveal his overt desires upon assuming the presidency for a second time. In addition to Muntzing (or should we now call it ‘Musking’?) the government apparatus as if he were pulling out circuit boards from a HAL 9000, Trump finally verbalized his imperialist impulses to territorially expand America as he had enviously seen Vladimir V. Putin doing for three years. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Trump called the move “genius,” and doubtless, he could scarcely wait to demonstrate his own, however unstable his cognitive processes had become.

Ravel and Prokofiev with Weilerstein and Payare, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 12 February 2025

Alisa Weilerstein performs with the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 12 February 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

“Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand rips away from need…”
—Jacques Lacan, Subversion of the Subject.

The Panama Canal, Greenland, and Canada are all in Trump’s crosshairs, and we would be wise to take the threat seriously, because Trump disguises his expansionist desires not as wants but as needs. America needs to absorb these sovereign territories for the sake of national security, or of economic security, or of restorative balance and retribution. These are the same excuses Putin used to invade Ukraine, and that Hitler used to invade Poland. But what they repress is the Objet petit a, that which Trump — and America — lacks, and which will never be satisfied.

Benjamin Appl & Eric Lu, Schubert’s Swan Song, Salle Bourgie, 13 February 2025

Benjamin Appl & Eric Lu onstage at Bourgie Hall, 13 February 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Of Children in Swaddling Clothes
“O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will have no understanding of our speech; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not have understanding of your speech nor will you understand them.”
—Leonardo da Vinci

The intentional fallacy extends past poetics and penetrates into politics. There were far graver motivations, for instance, for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan than to prevent terrorism and root out weapons of mass destruction. There were generational fixations that served as factors.

And there are much more sinister explanations behind, say, Musk’s double Nazi salute following Trump’s inauguration. Unlike Kendrick Lamar’s deliberate obscuring of overt political symbolism, Musk’s was laid bare for all to see — and immediately excused by him and his apologists as unintentional. For Lamar, what audiences had to decipher was its real message. For Musk, what they unequivocally witnessed was not.

If the time to be alarmed was not before 5 November 2024, it is certainly now, as Trump and Musk alternate at behaving on a national scale like sexually frustrated frat boys with GHB prescriptions. There is no critical or analytical skill necessary to crack their code, and no thinly veiled good intentions behind which to hide. The word ‘alarm’ comes from the French, à l’arms.

If Canada has any saving grace, it is that America, in its perpetual repression, already has a 51st state — the permanent state of anxiety.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Installation view of Joyce Wieland’s Flag Arrangement, 1970–71, knitted wool.

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How To Make A Small Fortune In Art

Black Givre with Jean-Sébastien Truchy, Fumerolles & Élément Kuuda, Ateliers Belleville, 1 June 2024

Jean-Sébastien Truchy performs at Ateliers Belleville, 1 June 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

There’s an old joke that takes aim at the drive for financial success, a joke that can be adapted to practically any pursuit, especially to art.

Q: How do you make a small fortune? A: Start with a large one.

The mythical U.K. punk band Crass famously emblazoned their albums with labels imploring listeners to “pay no more than £2.00” for this record.

Today, a pristine condition first pressing of the band’s 1979 EP, The Feeding of The Five Thousand, is listed on the aftermarket website Discogs for €300. Plus shipping.

If some suburban-born anarchist-turned-yuppie who washed his feet and got a job working at BlackRock wants to relive the days when he wore a padlock around his neck and a safety pin through his nose and paying €300 for a Crass record will scratch that itch, then Crass records are worth €300 now — for everyone.

The reality of value under capitalism is that things are worth what people will pay for them.

Death Tennis with Manny, Casa del Popolo, 5 June 2024

Booster Fawn films Death Tennis performing at Casa de Popolo, 5 June 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

If you go into an artistic pursuit to make money, you’ve chosen the wrong artform.

It doesn’t matter if you’re Andy Fucking Warhol, a human factory for the production of value and a living commentary on art in the age of its mass reproduction. It doesn’t matter if you’re Damien Fucking Hirst, an embodiment of ostentatious conspicuous consumption, artificial scarcity, and capitalistic overvaluation. It doesn’t matter if you’re Fucking Banksy, an anonymous and collective nonentity that reflects all of us back to us in ironic cartoon-strip fashion.

There is no artform that is more valuable than money. In fact, making money is its own artform — perhaps one of the highest arts there is. Verily, there is an art to transforming labour into capital, the reverse-osmosis process of Marx’s notion of ethereality, in effect, solidifying thin air.

That’s why forgery of currency is such a harshly punished crime. Who dares reproduce that art?

La Majestueuse Symphonie avec Orgue de Saint-Saëns, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 29 May 2024

Olivier Latry and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal perform at Maison Symphonique, 29 May 2024. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

Quantifying experience is the new fashion to turn time into money, selling audiences occupied time. Still, there is no way to ensure that you’re going to have a good time, regardless of how much money you spend on this or that experience.

You might drop thousands of dollars on dinner and tickets to a show. But your date is in a bad mood, and doesn’t like the wine, and the air conditioning is too cold, and the hairdo of the woman sitting in front of you is too high, and her perfume is too strong, and there’s no intermission — or, there are two intermissions and that’s two too many.

Alternately, you might spend very few dollars and have the time of your life when you spontaneously stop into that little place you’d always been meaning to try, and it is just as cool as you thought it would be, and the bartender gives you an approving nod, the kind of simple and inconsequential gesture that validates you for weeks afterwards, an experience you can call up like a new favourite song to play on repeat when you need a psychic boost. And later, the symphony or the band or the DJ is right in the pocket, and your date glances over sideways at you and smiles, with teeth, because of course you somehow orchestrated this moment.

You never could have planned it, and you certainly never could have bought it. Remember: this fleeting instant is a gift. All that’s required is that you recognize it and understand its intrinsic value and quietly say thank you to God, or the Devil, or the four winds that blow for blowing it in your direction.

Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: Three Hundred Years of Flemish Masterworks, Musée des beaux-arts, 6 June 2024

A patron photographs a painting at the Musée des beaux-arts, 8 June 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

When you see a beautiful face for the first time, you don’t want to forget it. You’re terrified to lose it. You just want to close your eyes and let persistence of vision take over and imprint that image in memory, or on the insides of your eyelids, forever. The impression of that face becomes a tangible thing, physical, a vision that you can’t and won’t unsee.

When you see the most beautiful face you’ve ever seen for the first time, you might as well tear your own stupid eyeballs out of their bloody sockets, because there is no chance that you will ever see anything so beautiful again. When you’ve seen something — someone — that beautiful, seeing itself becomes obsolete. No blossom in full bloom or priceless painting and certainly no other face is worth looking at twice, and you may even wonder to yourself if you should have ever even seen anything at all.

They say love is blind. The boldest love, though, is a witness to beauty’s smallest detail.

Kee Avil with Nadège Grebmeier Forget, Centre PHI, 30 May 2024

Kee Avil performs at Centre PHI, 30 May 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Beauty is in the beholder’s eyes.

But it is humankind that only sees outward beauty. It takes a special kind of perception to seek the true beauty within, the sort of beauty that’s actually worth a damn.

One could lose a mint on cosmetics and surgical intervention to preserve and prolong some ideal notion of physical beauty. Nonetheless, you cannot moisturize rose petals or Botox blueberries. When they start to rot, they assume another incarnation of splendour. There is magnificence, too, in decay.

Enormous fortunes have been wasted in vain attempts to maintain beauty, to capture it for posterity. Napoleon wilted under a heavyweight redingote while waiting for a portrait artist to capture his likeness. We are already nanoseconds older after the camera shutter snaps.

Blessed is the true judge, because justice is merely a matter of time. Fear of time is fear of God. Those who understand this benediction though they may be stricken with poverty and doubt possess within them the greatest of fortunes.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider subscribing.

Cover image: Catarina Ykens II (1659-1737), Vanitas Bust of a Lady, 1688. ©️ The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Ring Them Bells

Errance, with Joël Lavoie, and Philippe Vandal, La Sotterenea, 25 April 2024

Left: Joël Lavoie; Right: Errance perform at La Sotterranea, 25 April 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“What good am I if I know and don’t do,
If I see and don’t say, if I look right through you,
If I turn a deaf ear to the thunderin’ sky,
What good am I?” —Bob Dylan

In The Divine Comedy, the well-known fourteenth-century Italian trilogy by Dante Alighieri, the poet Virgil leads the author through Hell and Purgatory.

Finally, Dante is pointed toward Paradise by Beatrice di Folco Portinari, a character symbolic of God’s loving grace.

It seems that Beatrice got the cushy job, while Virgil drew the short straw. Not only did “Bice,” as she was known amongst her squad, manage to avoid the underworld’s mud and blood and beer, but she also served as tour guide to just one — and obviously the best — of the three divine realms.

Virgil, on the other hand, had to pull a double shift in the Infernal rings and the apparently never-ending drone of Earthly life. Plus, there were no unions back then, so going on strike wasn’t an option.

Sara Mericle, Infinite Vessel, Ateliers Belleville, 22 April 2024

Sara Mericle, Net (2023), ceramic and metal. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put into a bag with holes. —Haggai 1:6

Steve Bates, with Elizabeth Anka Vajagic, Mark Molnar, Timothy Herzog, and Sam Shalabi, Casa del Popolo, 29 April 2024

Steve Bates and friends perform at Casa del popolo, 29 April 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

From an ocean of noise, harmony differentiates itself.

Though noise and harmony are not mutually exclusive. Noise contains every frequency. Like sculpture, all that is necessary to reveal Heaven’s eternal song is to chisel the extraneous bits away.

Bourgie Hall’s 14th Season Launch, Bourgie Hall, 30 April 2024

Charles Richard-Hamelin performs at Bourgie Hall, 30 April 2024. Frédéric Faddoul for Bourgie Hall.

“THE TEMPERAMENT — MIDDLE — Circling and circling, I mold my temperament, urging the unruly into balance. Each interval must blend with the next interval, which must blend with the next … and back to the beginning. In the center we make a secret well together, this piano and I, to drown the leftovers. It is Nowhere.” —Anita T. Sullivan, The Seventh Dragon.

Beethoven’s Poetic Fourth Piano Concerto, Maria João Pires with The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 24 April 2024

Maria João Pires performs with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, 24 April 2024 at Maison Symphonique. Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

The clavier-style keyboard is a standard that brought music to the masses.

Yes, it’s a compromise. There aren’t any notes between its twelve tones, and there is a sense of bureaucracy about sitting down at what is essentially a musical desk, typing out a tune.

But the gift of portability and universality that the keyboard has given to the world is worth orders more than its conciliatory limitations. There is no other instrument that can bring a place to life, to fill a space with joy, wonder, and magic, quite like a piano.

A piano in the right hands is just enough of a music machine, no more and no less than perfect.

Quiet Night, 163 Av. Van Horne, 26 April 2024

Xander Simmons and friends perform at 163 Av. Van Horne, 26 April 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Happy are those who have what they need and no more.” —Saul Ha-Levi Morteira

In a time of war, famine, and death, it is vanity to seek out greater abundance when others are struggling for basic survival. But if one pursues only bare necessity, they will invariably find more than what they were looking for.

Such was the case last Friday evening when I attended what was billed as a “Quiet Night,” organized by Illy Duval in a cozy loft space on Van Horne. I arrived to find the room packed to the rafters with standing room only, except for a seat on the armrest of a battered old couch.

« Confortable? » asked the girl sitting next to me, smiling.

« Pas pire, » I replied, my legs awkwardly splayed akimbo.

Though I felt claustrophobic and couldn’t help but think, with scores of burning candles inserted precariously into empty bottles, of the Ghost Ship warehouse fire, I stayed and immensely enjoyed the music and the scene for as long as possible and ducked outside during an intermission.

Beneath the Van Horne overpass, I watched a group of skateboarders smoking weed and doing ollies and rail slides and was grateful for having had a reason to leave — both my house, and the gig I’d come to see.

Skateboarders underneath the Van Horne overpass, 26 April 2024. Filmed for NicheMTL.

Sandeep Bhagwati, How to inhabit these different temporalities?, Museum of Fine Arts, 21 April 2024

A patron rests in the contemporary art gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts, 21 April 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“People don’t know what they want any more. People are only sure about what they don’t want. The current processes are processes of rejection, of disaffection, of allergy.” —Jean Baudrillard, “The Violence of Indifference.”

The tyranny of mediocrity despises competition, finding every possible means to suppress it. The resistance of excellence, however, welcomes competition as the essence that makes the good better, the great greater still.

Lolina, with Man Made Hill, Tenses, and Please, Brasserie Beaubien, 27 April 2024

Catherine Debard performs as Tenses at Brasserie Beaubien, 27 April 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

We might imagine Hell as the past, Purgatory as the present, and Heaven as the future.

Certainly, there is an implied chronological teleology to history, where life is supposed to get better with time, progress bringing more knowledge as some ultimate form of truth emerges victorious.

This process appears to have reversed. Time is running backwards as the present reiterates Hellish precedents.

Alice De Visscher & Evamaria Schaller, Le Centre CLARK & Le lieu, Ateliers Belleville, 2 May 2024

Alice De Visscher & Evamaria Schaller perform at Ateliers Belleville, 2 May 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Alchemy is most commonly conceived as the transformation of lead into gold. But alchemy according to philosophers is understood as a spiritual process of transformation, embracing those parts of ourselves that we might think of as weaknesses and converting them into strengths.

Gold is the most precious of all earthly metals, superconductive, malleable yet solid, ambivalent, associated with the sun, the celestial body where universal life originates. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote, “Just as the physical sun lightens and warms the universe, so, in the human body, there is in the heart a sunlike arcanum from which life and warmth stream forth.”

Springtime represents the return of the sun, and thus accelerates matters of the heart.

Spring Symposium, Librairie Saint-Henri Books, 25 April 2024

Patrons attend the Spring Symposium at Librairie Saint-Henri Books, 25 April 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

My idea of Heaven is a place surrounded by all words, where no thought or feeling is misunderstood, where there is total communication, a way to say everything.

My idea of Heaven is also a place where there are no words, where nothing requires understanding because all is already known, and language is an obsolete technology.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider subscribing.

Cover image: Sara Mericle, Sun Bleach (2023), porcelain and glaze.

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