Marc Gauthier

* It’s this Wednesday evening that the director of the Museum of Comporary Art of Montréal (MACM), Paulette Gagnon, should deliver her first guidelines for the institution.

* Nudity and Censorship: The sculpture of Ron Mueck, A Girl, cannot be shown in the public transport system of Calgary. A case to follow because it promotes an exhibition organized by the Glenbow Museum, where the Quebec National Gallery will move The Nude in Modern Canadian Art in 2010.

* Lacerte art contemporain will attend the 10th edition of the TIAF (Toronto International Art Fair), starting tomorrow. The works of fifteen artists will be displayed.

* Amnesty International may protest against BODIES during the exhibition’s visit to Montreal.

* Did you know? It is a Montreal specialist, Peter Paul Biro, who was behind the authentication of the recently found drawing by Leonardo and valued at 150 M$.

* La Tribune de l’art talks about the Napoleon collection at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

* David Altmejd won the Sobey Art Award 2009, where he represented Quebec.

* The situation between the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation (CMCC) and the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) continues to be tense. There is a strike at the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Canadian War Museum since September 21st. Negotiations in front of a mediator failed on October 8th. The Canadian Museum of Civilization is still preparing for the opening of the exhibition Afghanistan - Hidden Treasures while the union say that the museum’s real treasures are its employees. In the mean time, the board turns away employees who wanted to talk directly to board members.

* An exhibition about hockey is grinding a few teeth in Toronto.

* The Met now has a blog that allows users to delve into the exhibits.

* What if LEGOs were used to create a life-size model?

* A drawing by Raphael could set a new sale record in December.

[Rapport du marché de l’art contemporain 2008/2009, p. 70]

* Artprice and the International Fair of Contemporary Art (FIAC) launched their market report for contemporary art for 2008/2009. The 144-page document is available on the artprice.com site. Damien Hirst is in a class by himself. Canadians who attain market success are photographer Jeff Wall (46th), conceptual artist Jack Goldstein (160), sculptor Rodney Graham (337), photographer Robert Polidori (358) and painter Marcel Dzama (461).

* Tate Modern and the British Museum will have the money to build their new wings.

* A spiral crossword in the New York Times to celebrate the anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum.

The National Gallery of Quebec [Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec] offers Emporte-moi / Sweep me off my feet until December 13, 2009. I was privileged to attend the launch yesterday.

My review of the exhibit will be aired on my radio show on Thursday evening. It will also be published on the French version of the blog around the same time.

In the mean time, here are some pictures taken from the show. Enjoy!

[Partial view of the exhibit. We notice works made by Christelle Familiari, Kevin Francis Grey, Sophie Calle, David Altmejd, Eve K. Tremblay and Michel De Broin]

The Quebec Triennal is presented for the first time at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal [Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art]. Entitled “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”, it offers 135 works created by 38 artists. Using this event as an excuse, I wondered about the Web presence of each of the artists presented.

To classify artists according to their Internet reputation, I selected three criterias: the number of links found by Google, the management of domain names [like artist_name.com] and the presence or absence of a page in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

[Julie Doucet, Pantalitaire 2, 2007, 8 collages, 30 x 137.1 cm]

The title of Queen of notoriety on the Internet is bestowed upon Julie Doucet. With 63,000 links on her behalf, 4 articles in Wikipedia, a website owned by a publisher and an official site, we can say without embarrassment that the artist is known on the Web, mainly because of her comics.

[David Altmejd, Berger [Shepherd], 2008, wood, mirror, crystal, horsehair and painting, 365.7 x 152.4 cm x 121.9, with the kind permission of the Andrea Rosen Gallery; photography: Ellen Page Wilson ]

Accompanying Julie Doucet atop the notoriety list on the Internet, David Altmejd ranks second with 51,400 links, 3 articles in Wikipedia and a cybersquatted site.

Among other results of this unpretentious study, I noted that many artists have websites well done: Nicolas Baier, Gwenaël Bélanger, Patrick Bernatchez, Michel de Broin, Raphaëlle de Groot, Manon De Pau, Doyon-Rivest, Romeo Gongora, Adad Hannah, Isabelle Hayeur, Bettina Hoffmann, Lynne Marsh, Serge Murphy, Jocelyn Robert.

Surprisingly, some artists prefer .net or .org instead of .com even when the latter is available. This is the case of Michel de Broin, Raphaëlle de Groot and Bettina Hoffmann.

It should finally be noted that David Ross and Carlos Sanchez were excluded from the rankings. The fact of the matter is that their names are also those of personalities known in other areas, which greatly disturbs the data.

Ranking of MACM Triennal artists according to their Internet presence

Julie Doucet: 11.30
David Altmejd: 9.14
Michel de Broin: 2.85
Isabelle Hayeur: 2.70
Jocelyn Robert: 2.42
Lynne Marsh: 2.15
Adad Hannah: 2.03
Bettina Hoffmann: 1.60
Nicolas Baier: 1.37
Michael Merrill: 1.26
Jason Sanchez: 1.23
Gwenaël Bélanger: 1.15
Patrick Bernatchez: 1.09
Doyon-Rivest: 1.08
Raphaëlle de Groot: 1.08
Serge Murphy: 1.06
Manon De Pauw: 1.06
Romeo Gongora: 1.01
Charles Guilbert: 0.70
Yannick Pouliot, WWKA, Louis-Philippe Eno, Chih-Chien Wang, Stephane Gilot, Etienne Zack, Cooke-Sasseville, Emanuel Licha, Manon Labrecque, Cynthia Girard, Karen Tam, Tricia Middleton, Jon Knowles, David Armstrong Six, Patrick Coutu, Valerie Blass, Anthony Burnham, Jonathan Plante, Adrian Norvid followed with less than 0.5.

Methodology

The name of the artist as well as the term art were entered in the search engine Google. I forced the search engine to include the term art in each of the pages found so that artists working with homonyms in other areas were not privileged.

The first five results are as follows:
David Ross: 163,000 links
Carlos Sanchez: 148,000 links
Julie Doucet: 63,000 links
David Altmejd: 51,400 links
Michel de Broin: 28,500 links

The last five results are as follows:
Valérie Blass: 360 liens
Anthony Burnham: 334 links
Romeo Gongora: 132 links
Jonathan Plante: 120 links
Adrian Norvid: 48 links

Each tens of thousands of links gave a point. Thus 163,000 links attributed 16.3 points.

The presence of articles in Wikipedia gave a point by page in each language.

Domain names purchased by a third person gave a point. David Altmejd and Lynne Marsh both “benefited” from this involuntary notoriety.

The presence of an official website gave a point.

It should be noted that this ranking has no scientific claim. It reflects the Internet buzz according to personal considerations from the author of this blog.

Each component of the scores can easily be criticized. Thus, Paris Hilton gets 3.3 million links, even when her name is bound to the word “art”. Moreover, the results vary from Google servers on which research is conducted. To be more effective, I would have had to use a search tool that searches the data centers of Google…

In the end, nothing beats a visit to the museum to let go of the buzz and feed one’s own thoughts!