Now smothered in money, the Vancouver Art Gallery will do all the right things under its current administration, yet it remains to be seen if it can transcend itself, become more than the sum of its line items. When art galleries set out to build new buildings, it's often less about art (ambiguity) than it is about business (certainty). This will go on for a while.
We are told that if all goes according to plan, the new and recently revised VAG (above) could open as soon as 2026. But by then we might have achieved Adorno's prophecy and find that what once went by the name of Art now goes by a different name -- and as McLuhan suggests, what wasn't considered Art, now is (a historic VAG example could be Paul Wong's Confused: Sexual Views, 1984).
How weird to be living in a city that, according to its boosters, claims to be a world leader in contemporary art, and therefore deserving of a proper building to display it; and yet having this declaration come at a time when Art, as we are beginning to know it through its gestures and relations, has left the building to Art as it was, as objects, once upon a time.
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