From the Editor

July 3, 2023

9:30 PM

Western Canada’s art magazine since 2002

Portia Priegert

From the Editor

It’s no secret that recent years have been difficult for legacy media – a downward spiral in advertising revenue has led to round after round of layoffs and a corresponding decline in news coverage, particularly in the arts.

Now, tech giants Google and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, are threatening to boycott Canadian news in retaliation for new federal legislation that requires them to pay media outlets for news content they share on their platforms.

It’s unclear exactly how or when this will play out across the media ecosystem, or what impact it will have on Galleries West, which shares news items via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. As well, our stories are occasionally picked up by digital news aggregators.

While our news output is modest, usually a story every day or two as I get time amid other duties to pull together quick items on award winners, staff appointments and interesting initiatives, it helps keep arts communities informed about developments that may affect them. Occasionally, we scrape together a bit of money for original reporting, as we did with our coverage of recent developments at the National Gallery of Canada, a situation major media outlets were largely ignoring, choosing instead to direct their resources to other news.

If you usually get your news from social media and are not already signed up, I encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter. There’s no charge – it simply means we send you an email every second Tuesday about news and features from the previous two weeks. If you already subscribe, please encourage your acquaintances to sign up. For more timely coverage, another option is adding our website to your RSS feed.

Speaking of news coverage, we want to give a shout-out to Ottawa-based Paul Gessell, a veteran arts journalist with decades of experience at the Ottawa Citizen and Maclean’s magazine. Paul, now a freelancer, has broken story after story for Galleries West about the National Gallery of Canada. Last week, he spent part of his holidays in his home province of Saskatchewan tracking down information about a provocative installation the gallery has been trying to keep under wraps.

Curious? Check out Paul’s latest commentary, En Plein Air, which follows up on his earlier piece about the challenges that await the gallery’s new director, Jean-François Bélisle. Those two pieces have been shared more than 1,200 times, demonstrating the appetite for timely arts journalism in an increasingly polarized world.

News is expensive to produce – it takes time to follow up leads, track down sources and carry out research – but somehow Paul, who has a strong network of contacts, is able to produce the kind of stories that were once the hallmark of well-heeled media outlets.

In this issue, he also contributes a review of an Ottawa exhibition of recent purchases by the Canada Council Art Bank, including works by up-and-coming Inuit artists like Maureen Gruben, Ning Ashoona and Kablusiak.

As well, this issue features Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s review of Kapwani Kiwanga’s exhibition at MOCA Toronto, Alison Gillmor’s look at Faye HeavyShield’s retrospective at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Doug Maclean’s roundup of the spring art auctions, and two Vancouver shows – John Thomson explores the work of leading modernist sculptor Robert Murray at the Paul Kyle Gallery, while Yani Kong considers Fashion Fictions, a dazzling array of futuristic experiments, at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Looking ahead, we will publish articles about Plains Cree artist Ruth Cuthand’s beaded brain scans and the North American premiere of Jeremy Shaw’s Phase Shifting Index, created for his 2020 solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Until next time,