You are being so real for saying that... I once asked a gallerist in Toronto about their view on Canadian art being represented in international art fairs, like do they find it particularly hard to "sell Canadian arts" to their international buyers and I get a vague response of "there is no such thing as a needed identity for art in Toronto" and that contemporary art is international itself, but I can’t help thinking that this very lack of a distinct “identity” is exactly what defines the scene here. It's almost like the absence itself becomes the presence, maybe somehow it could feel invisible on the global stage but who knows, maybe that is the quiet tension that Canadian artists carry with them: the pressure to be both recognizable and undefined at once.
You are being so real for saying that... I once asked a gallerist in Toronto about their view on Canadian art being represented in international art fairs, like do they find it particularly hard to "sell Canadian arts" to their international buyers and I get a vague response of "there is no such thing as a needed identity for art in Toronto" and that contemporary art is international itself, but I can’t help thinking that this very lack of a distinct “identity” is exactly what defines the scene here. It's almost like the absence itself becomes the presence, maybe somehow it could feel invisible on the global stage but who knows, maybe that is the quiet tension that Canadian artists carry with them: the pressure to be both recognizable and undefined at once.