Winner of Candian Painting Competition

The winner of the RBC Canadian Painting Competition for this year. The Vancouver painter Etienne Zack will take home the hefty $25,000 first prize for his escape from shapes. What makes this painting worthy of the prize? It would be fascinating to see the criteria used to award such a prize. How do you defend the use of any criteria without sounding academic?

Bush the Disaster

At least they got this one right!

JG Ballard on Art

J.G. Ballard's (author of "Crash" and "High Rise") makes this comment on the ability of the avant-garde to shock. Consider the fact that a simple abstract painting 100 years ago could cause a riot in the streets!

"I've often thought that the whole notion of the 'avant-garde' has vanished. The nearest you get to that is a sort of 'designer' avant-garde offering a stylized rebelliousness ... a kind of Perrier avant-garde that's homogenized and made palatable for the weekend consumer.""Today if you want to be the equivalent of the pioneering artist of the 1880's -- if you want to be a Gauguin of the present day, you might actually go and buy a gun and shoot Margaret Thatcher and Princess Di! Its no longer enough to think in terms of changing the world through arts anymore. The arts are a form of purient entertainment." (from interviews with Mark Pauline. 1980's)