Do something scary. Anyway, it's unavoidable.

If there was one defining neurotic question that has plagued me most of my cognizant life, it would be this:


I was almost released from the tyranny of this question by a much-loved prof who explained that decision-making is an irrational process: i.e. most times, there really is no right decision, only the one you make. There are always consequences no matter what. But the word "consequences" needn't be so loaded. It's really just another word for outcomes. How you feel about the outcomes depends on your ethics. I mean, if you rip someone's heart out with your teeth, and as a result they rip out someone else's heart , hopefully you come the realization that yours might have been a bad decision. But, that's up to you.

Anyway, I said "almost released" earlier because it took me until now, almost four years later, to really -- I mean corporeally -- understand that the decisions I make will not likely end the world (especially since I don't have access to The Button). It has also taken me a very long time to understand that my decisions are something I get to own, like a present I have left for myself under the tree. Decisions are not something a house fire, or someone's different opinion, or a disapproving look, can take away from me.

Even if my decisions make me look stupid, I take pride in having had the courage to make a decision at all. My decisions are the manifestation of the level of trust, or lack thereof, that I have in myself. They are mirrors of my internal life writ large in the world. So, in that way, they are pretty useful. For instance, I might say to myself, "OK, so that decision made me look more than a little stupid. Won't be doing that anytime again soon." Now I have a decision-making aid.


Of course, with great power comes great responsibility. Which means that taking ownership of my decision-making also means I am responsible for cleaning up the messes I make. Since starting this blog, I've made some terrible publishing decisions which, I am happy to say, after a day of self torture, I did remedy, going back in to the posts and deleting the offending sections.


Like a true friend, there is nothing my body won't do to let me know I've made a wrong decision, especially when my mind has ceased to demonstrate sound judgment. Usually, I feel heartsick right down to my toes. So for 2009, I have decided to trust my body more. (Then again, my body has also led to some decisions that have carved up my soul pretty painfully. But since my body pays for those decisions, too, again in the currency of heartsickness, I have decided to continue relying on my body anyway. No system is perfect.)

One thing I know for sure, my brain simply cannot be trusted.


Today, as I tramped through the snow in Trinity Bellwoods park on my way to meet my friend Jacline and her family for brunch, I saw something hanging from a tree. I almost walked past it but the birght yellow bag caught my attention, and I decided to crane my head around to see what it was.


What it was was someone's keys. Some person must have lost the keys on the ground, and some other kind soul found them and decided to string them up in the nearest tree like tinsel. During a morning run through my neighbourhood in Berlin in September, I came across a little canvas hanging down from a balcony a few storeys up. The canvas swung in the breeze at eye level, like the world around it was its own outdoor gallery. I had decided not to take my camera that morning so I wasn't able to photograph that exquisite encounter. Today, however, I did decide to pack the camera. And although the frigid wind was burning my fingers, I put down my bags and took the time to photograph the keys. And as I looked at the pictures later, I noticed the little ladybug key chain. How exquisite!


Tonight I had the option of spending the evening with some of my favourite people: Kim and Abi and John.



But I chose to stay home to clean my apartment and then to write or paint. Not because I would not have loved spending time with them (they are dear, dear, dear to me). But because I recognized the need for a ritual for myself tonight . . .

. . . Starting with my apartment burning down on January 2nd last year -- and from there continuing with my decision to move to Seattle in February (potentially to get married), followed by my decision to return to Toronto in March (potentially to get my shit together), then my decision to visit Abi and John in Berlin in April (to do something fun), then to sublet Abi and John's home in Parkdale from May to August while they were in Berlin (while I figured out what to do next), during which time I decided to return to Berlin for the entire month of September to assess if I might want to move there for good but ultimately deciding that I was in no condition to decide (turns out I was anemic), so I returned to Toronto in October, where I decided that it would be good for my soul to drink copious amounts of coffee with Kim as we jittered into November, the month in which I decided not to take a choice job most people would have given their first borns for, and, finally, in December I put my foot down with certain family members who had made decisions that had hurt me badly, so I decided it was time to speak up, LOUDLY, which I have also decided not to blog about in great detail (although god knows I'd love to vent) because I've decided that this is no place for that -- all in all, this has been one hell of a fucking nutjob of a year. There's no other way to put it.

One thing I can say about it, though: I regret nothing. Seriously. I have decided to accept that I am not a theoretical person. I need to actually go out in the world and get scraped up before I know for sure if my decisions will be, or have already been, not such good ideas. I have decided that I will gracefully pay any stupid tax I incur, and then pat myself on the back for having taken risks.



Tonight my beautiful, tender, loving friend, Abi, wrapped me up in a blanket of her wish for my safety in the new year, which, for her, looks like a cozy landing pad: a house or a condo where I can finally lay down my burdens, rebuild and rest. I love her for that wish. But I'm not ready to stay put. My brain can't say why, my body has just made that decision for me.

And that's the thing about decisions. They really are irrational. Inexplicable. I can't say why I am not ready to decide what will happen in April when my landlord returns for her apartment and I will be homeless again. But I've decided it's OK to be in this transitional place a little longer.

I have decided, however, that caffinating with Kim remains essential in 2009 because she is the best at kicking my existential ass at every coffee date. Everyone has been a lifeline during this ridiculous year, but Kim has been my daily partner in the incredibly disciplined practice of the world's most comprehensively satisfying daily mantra: Oy. OYYYYYYYYYYY.


One other thing I know for sure: whatever decisions I make going forward, they will definitely be the right ones because they will be the ones I decided to make.

Reading Pictures

Today I'm going to let the pictures do the talking (well, the leading). I decided to choose the images first and then see what comes up . . .

This one is from a trip to Mexico I took with my friend Dale about four years ago. That year I was living in Montreal, had started a dog portrait painting business and was rapidly running out of money. I had not yet started working for my brother . . . Mexico was a luxury I could ill afford. But Dale has a way of putting things into perspective. Referring to my fledgling business, which I was funding through some savings, he advised: "put everything into it, Liz, so that even if you fail, at least you go out like a Roman candle." I still don't know what a Roman candle is, but it sounded exciting and self respecting. It sounded so good, in fact, I decided to apply that concept to my life as well. Live large, fail big. So, I went to Mexico. And amidst all the unspeakable beauty -- such as flowers so exquisitely shaped and saturated in colour that they hurt my eyes -- I photographed my feet. Then, just as I began to pay for food with fumes, my brother swooped in to offer me a marketing writing job for which I had little experience, and trained me up into the freelance marketing writer I am today.


It's been almost a year since my apartment in Montreal burned down and I still don't know where to live (although I'm currently living in Toronto), or what to do (although I'm currently freelance writing for my brother's marketing company), or who I am (Potential novelist? Potential journalist? Potential painter? Potential contributing human?) Maybe it's that I want to travel . . .


I think about my childhood in Manila every single day and the attendant ache often leaves me breathless. Is it really, really true that I can never get back to that time? I mean, obviously, my brain gets that, but my chest refuses to believe it. I am starting to think that perhaps I need to go back to Manila and write about it . . . maybe that's what will help complete the picture, which really does feel incomplete . . .


I have always loved this stage of painting because although the painting is not yet cooked, already it's something I can taste. I often want to stop here.


I cried for a day after I photographed this stage of Pink LizChuck. I still like it better than the "finished" painting . . .


Sure it looks professional and all, and I get to pose like Chuck Close did between two of his large paintings, but here's the rub: when a painting is done I am always faced with this painful situation: having to start again . . .



(Thank god there are moments like these -- making and serving my Chuck Close cake.)

In grad school, I had a professor ask me if I was a Chuck Close stalker. The small detail that Mr. Close lives in the centre of the universe, New York, while we were all living in what amounted to a suburb of a suburb surrounded by box stores and industrial farmland generously spewing chemical pesticides into the air all summer, not to mention we were located hundreds of miles from New York, seemed to escape him. A Phd is only good for some things, I guess. But, yes, I do love Chuck Close's 1968 self portrait, which, I explained to this prof, is not the same thing as loving Mr. Close himself.

But I don't love Chuck Close's 1968 self portrait as much as I love this boy . . .



He is one of my favourite people for one simple reason. No, two reasons. 1. He exists; I am grateful for him every time I see him, which is not often enough. And, 2. when I was collapsing the summer of my break up with my short-shelf-life life partner (SSLLP), this little boy was all of three, and yet he knew exactly what to do. He found me where I was sobbing beside the giant Buddha statue in his parent's garden and, like any good CEO, first assessed the situation before offering the right solution. "Why are you crying, Aunty Liz?" Believing as I do that honesty is the best policy, I said, "Because I have no boyfriend anymore." His answer was so sensible that even I, in my broken-down state, could see its rightness. "I'll be your boyfriend."

Only about fifteen more years until he's old enough and I'm not yet dead.

When I get frustrated, I tend to want to destroy that which frustrates me. As the Chuck Close adaptations were piling up in my studio, I began to detest the earlier iterations. They sucked. It was clear, they had to be destroyed. Since I had mentally consigned them to the dustbin, I was free to play with them first. The soundtrack for this activity includes grunts and screams and invectives worthy of John MacInroe.


But when the destruction was done, what I had was this serene white Chuck swaddled in snow . . . he seemed peaceful, which is how I felt at that moment. Dale owns White Chuck as well as another destroyed painting, Orange Chuck. They are among the few Chucks saved from my fire.


Painting over those Chucks freed me to do the thing I had wanted to do all that year. I had been walking around with this feeling that Chuck needed flowers on his face somehow. White Chuck and Orange Chuck gave me the courage to florify these Chuck twins. Sadly, Daisy Chucks no longer exist. The fire . . .


I used to have a strict No-Pet-Painting rule. People only. At that time in my painting "career", I was committed to capturing likeness to such a degree that the surfaces of my paintings were tight as drums. Yet my painting gods were Jenny Saville and Lucien Freud whose gestures are as thick as the fleshy bodies they represent. Their painting style involves paint so lusciously thick that my friend Kim and I decided to coin a new painting term: thyke. Kind of like Woody Allen's lerve.


When I painted Georgia, SSLLP's dog, I finally let go. It was the loosest, fastest, thickest painting I'd ever done, and it brought me immense joy. I was thrilled with how easily it was coming to me, and how happy it would make SSLLP that Xmas (our last, as it turned out). Still, it took another three years, two of which were spent at grad school, to convince me that pet portrait painting might bring out the best in me, maybe even be one of the things that transforms me into a contributing human.

This be my new site. Would love to hear what you think: http://web.me.com/lizzypea/LizPhillipsPetPortraits/Home.html

The Liz List: The Next Best Thing

Maira Kalman's book jacket is a good start (or, middle, as she would say):

What is this book?
What is Anything?
WHO AM I?
WHO ARE YOU?
STOP IT
FORGET IT

This is a Year in MY LIFE profusely illustrated. Abounding with anguish, confusion, bits of wisdom. Musings, meanderings, buckets of Joi de Vivre and restful sojourns.

The first the line of her book says it all: “How can I tell you everything that is in my heart.” She ends the sentence with a period because she can't. But she tries anyway. Although we are born alone and die alone, we will just as surely die without connection, so we have to try to connect. We have to try.


Remember A General Theory of Love from my last post? Remember how the neuroscientists discussed the over prioritization of the neocortex (home of abstract thought) vs. the limbic brain (emotional centre vital to our well-being and survival)? Well, Kalman’s book illustrates the struggle between the neocortex and the limbic brain: throughout, she wrestles troubling, difficult concepts to the ground because she wants to understand loss, but when she loses the battle to understand loss through words, she resorts to pictures instead. As I witness this entanglement, I finally get the difference between the two – except for poetry, and some poetic prose, language seems pressed into the service of explicating, while images exhibit. They don’t explain, they show, they perform, they reflect and they relieve. There is nothing we can do about the passing of time and the loss of loved ones, or even about the beauty in our world. We can only look, respond with our hearts, and carry on.



To illustrate her view, Kalman pits the extinction of the dodo against Spinoza's attempts to figure out a rational explanation for everything.


Kalman tells us that Spinoza was looking for Evdaimonia, i.e. the state of happiness. “… when I used to tell my sublime mother I wanted to be happy she would say 'what is happiness?'" In the end, however, Kalman informs us that -- surprise! -- Spinoza dies, just like the dodo. She wonders if he had his loved ones around him at his death bed. She sounds like she hopes so. Her painting of him, however, gives him another life, the life in Kalman’s imagination, and a life in this book, which gives him a life in my imagination and in anyone else whose imagination Kalman’s painting sparks.


Kalman poetically illustrates her recognition and acceptance of the immanence of death, (she lost her own husband, which, she says, will make her collapse if she thinks about it) in this juxtaposition of the rabbit and the fruit platter. On the rabbit page, she writes:

What can I tell you?
The Realization that we are ALL
(you, me)
going to die
and the attending DISBELIEF -
isn't that the centreal PREMISE of EVERYTYHING? It stops me DEAD in my tracks a DOZEN times a day. Do you think I reman FROZEN? NO. I spring into action. I find meaningful distraction.

On the fruit platter page she writes that lately she has become "enamored with Fruit Platters. I paint them." Such a simple statement. I paint them. Because what else is there? I understand exactly what she means. We paint what we love. We express what we love. Or, shortened to its essentials, we love. Behold, Evdaimonia.

In this sublime, exquisite and heartbreaking book, Kalman's gift is to paint for us the stuff of life:






And to remind us to find someone to share it with . . .


And to let us know that life gets even better when friends and strangers wear really great hats!

December: Month of Throat Lumps

It’s been an interesting week in my personal Blog-O-Sphere. The zenith was receiving an e-mail from a stranger who stumbled upon my blog a few months ago, and who decided, after reading my piece about sadness, that my blog was “a keeper.” As if that were not gift enough, this stranger admitted to having read my entire blog and continues to read it! A reader! An enthusiastic reader! That made my year. Thank you, stranger. And bless you.

OK, today I want to talk about gifts. But first: I hate Christmas. As Jews of the worst order, my family has, for generations, bought into the most treacle-y trappings of Christmas, like rats making quick work of someone else’s high-holiday meal. We exchange gifts that none of us need and pick fights for reasons stratospherically beyond all understanding.

But since I don’t want to be too revealing about my family dramas, nor do I wish to be a total curmudgeon, I’ve decided to write about some gift ideas that I believe will bring authentic joy to your and your loved ones' lives, all books of course.

Always the first to hitch my star to someone else’s wagon (preferably a celebrity's), I have created The Liz List in the manner of Oprahs O List: in her case, a beautifully staged and photographed array of her (read: her shoppers’) favourite things prominently featured in her glossy, multi-kajillion-dollar-generating monthly magazine. (Ha ha, Oprah, I have no deadlines to meet, I can publish whenever I want, and I have no overhead!)

Not to toot my own horn, but I really do think The Liz List is superior to the O List because I have actually read the books I am promoting; i.e. I am not putting forth some covert marketing campaign on behalf of publishers who have sent me free stuff (although I would certainly agree to flog their wares in exchange for free books. In fact, I’ll add that to my list of New Year’s resolutions: I will hook for books!)

Without further ado . . .

The Liz List




Every woman needs this hospitality-primer-cum-vital-life-lessons book; also any man who wants to date and relate to a real woman (which is the opposite of a Real Woman). Someone probably said it in a review somewhere already, but I believe Amy Sedaris is the Emily Post for gals like me and my friends and anyone else as funny, intelligent and funny as we are.

A book that provides recipes for cakes as relevant as this . . .



. . . and this . . .


. . . while also including an equally-relevant section on how to care for your vagina (in ways I never imagined existed, making me wonder if I am a hygiene horror show by comparison) . . .



. . . is alright in my books!


When popcorn is listed as an appetizer on a Menu for One, I feel that Sedaris gets me. I could make a five-course meal out of popcorn. Ms. Sedaris’s book also includes a plethora of helpful sidebar tips for all hospitality occasions, such as what not to say to a grieving friend:

• I know exactly what you are going through, I mean, I didn’t lose my husband to a boating accident, but I can imagine
• Give it 3 weeks, you shouldn’t grieve more than that
• What was he drinking?

Or, the ignore-at-your-peril guest-list rule all hosts should consider, such as avoiding these guest combinations:

• Astrologer and Astronomer
• Psychologist and Psychiatrist
• Director and out-of-work actor
• Serial killer and drunken teenager

Or, what not to do when you're the guest: “As far as the bathroom etiquette goes: number 1, no number 2.” (Oh crap! I guess I do write about ass! I told a blog detractor that I didn't. I clearly had no idea I was about to, and now I have. OK, Detractor, don't read my blog.)

Liz List Item #2


In A General Theory of Love, three neuroscientists -- Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon -- prove, through a bunch of scientific double-blind tests, that the root cause of western culture’s epidemic malaise is no less than brain damage. Thanks to our penchant for prioritizing our neocortex (where abstract thought lives), while casting aspersions on our limbic brains (where emotional well-being develops), we are sending our mental health to hell in a hand basket at lighting speed. Citing western parenting practices, such as this favourite: Ferberization (named after the so-called parenting genius, Someone Ferber, who claimed that letting fragile, dependent babies wail themselves to sleep is essential for establishing who’s boss), the neuroscientists figuratively shake their collective limbic brains at just how wrong we keep getting it. Ferberization, argue the scientists, actually alters the physiology of a baby’s brain, practically guaranteeing the little dictator will grow up to become an insecure needy adult, slouching towards his or her life along a super-short spectrum between depression and sociopathy. Nice work, Ferber. Parents, stop the insanity!

I wonder why we need neuroscientists to tell us something our bodies already instinctively and biologically know. But I guess our neocortical obsession has alienated us from our gut (or limbic) sense to such a degree that we do need neuroscientists to sound the warning bell, and then to speak in a language our over-smartened brains can understand. That said, damned if these neuroscientists aren’t literate to boot! They make their most compelling arguments with poetry, insisting that our brains respond more favourably to metaphor than to scientific and academic double speak.

Case in point: “Like the art it is responsible for inspiring, the limbic brain can move in ways beyond logic that have only the most inexact translations in a language the neocortex can comprehend (nice). . . And so people must strain to force a strong feeling into the straightjacket of verbal expression . . . (then this to bring the point home) Frost wrote that a poem ‘begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is never a thought to begin with.’”

What I find poetic is the revelation that we literally and physiologically regulate and modify each others' limbic functions through proximity – through relating, through connection. If you have been in my life for a long time, I will have helped build some of your neural pathways, and you will have helped build some of mine, entwining our thoughts across the ether. That’s why losing a loved one can feel like losing your mind. So when your friends tell you to buck up after a break up, tell them you are busy reconstituting a big chunk of your brain that disappeared when the bastard up and left, and when that's done you'll still have your work cut out for you remapping your new brain in order to do this little thing you like to call surviving!

If your family system did not exhibit healthy relating, your brain may have been damaged (that's my excuse). Fortunately, you can repair this damage through new healthy relating with other people, like loving partners, kids and good therapists (NOT Freudian therapists!) And all it takes is two of life’s most precious resources – time and proximity. Virtual connection in the form of e-mails and faxes don’t count. Neither do the baubles we buy ourselves to staunch the bleeding twins of loneliness and pain. No amount of clothes, cars, jewels, or any other relating replacements can create the healthy neural pathways that lead to stable, healthy and happy humans. To become a human of well-being requires the close and consistent contact of other loving humans. Plus time.

I say, whatever it takes. If you love your children, or want to be a good parent to your unborn child, if you love your partner and want a healthy relationship for longer than an afternoon of shopping, or if you want to know why you don't like a parent or another relative, and/or if you just want to know why you are a fuck up and have been suffering so senselessly all your life, buy this book. You owe it to yourself and everyone else in your family and friendship circle. You are worth it.

OK, that’s enough for today. More from The Liz List throughout the week. (Self revelation is exhausting.) The book featured at the top of this post will be up for discussion next.

No, wait, one more thing, if I may: I do want something this year for Jewmas. Please, should the spirit move you, I'd love it if you left me a nice comment when you like a post (any nasty comments will be immediately returned for a refund).

Letter to my "Readers"

Sometimes I like to do this thing where I imagine I have “readers” (do I need to say "air quotes"?) And sometimes my “readers” do things like write me e-mails saying that my blog posts are “too long.” To which I reply, “then don’t fracking read them!” (Thank you, Battle Star Gallactica, for this most satisfying fuck replacement.) My insistence on writing my way could very well be the reason I have “readers” instead of readers.

Today an old friend in another city e-mailed me to tell me she wanted to talk to me about my blog posts, "just not via e-mail." Faster-than-immediately, I tapped out a reply stating that in no uncertain terms was my blog up for discussion, explaining that it is my uni-directional delivery channel for whatever the frack I want to write about. I’m happy to report that it took me only two minutes, ten at most, to remember that a blog is up for discussion, that its very essence is about discussion (which I have managed to side-step, publishing only the comments that agree with my views). So I erased my e-mail to the friend and decided to blog instead. Ahhhhh, that’s better . . .



True story: today I returned to the site of my “dream job” from which I withdrew my candidacy (for reasons I still don’t fully understand but trust were right because otherwise I have made the biggest mistake of my life – along with a few other doozies). The job was to be the communications animator at one of the city's coolest nonprofits. I busted my butt to get the job, performing my résumé instead of just listing my experiences and talents in doc form. I developed a beautiful and fun newsletter and then set the org up with an entire web 2.0 program, which I also populated with information relevant to them. After the second interview I could see what made this org so amazing -- passion and vision in the form of a few key people who devote their blood and guts to it -- was also required of the communications animator. I, too, have passion and vision (well, the vision is spotty but it means well), just not for this job. I realized I wanted to save that energy for stuff like writing and painting. Following some kooky “star mapping” idea from a book (that I not-so-secretly love: Steering by Starlight, by Martha Beck), I dropped off of everyone else’s map and created my own, praying I would land somewhere in more Liz-friendly territory. The only reason I have not yet hit the ground is because I’m still trying to locate the rip cord . . .




When I returned to the almost-job site today to meet a friend for coffee, I bumped into my interviewer, who glad handed me while breathlessly intoning that they’d found the “perfect fit” for the job (for which I heartily and sincerely congratulated him because it meant there was no going back for me). The rest of that moment unfolded as if in a movie. And that’s because my interviewer told me that they’d hired a filmmaker to document the interviewing process (What? You mean I could have been on camera?!!) at which point the filmmaker glided towards us, arriving in front of me with his perfect filmmaker hand outstretched to shake mine. He smiled down at me while his cerulean blue eyes (um, my favourite colour?) pierced my innards, sending covert messages to my knees to start the buckling process. It was the kind of moment I’d seen in Ally McBeal: idiot girl blows opportunity not only for dream job, but also for dream man. There was no question this beautiful-man-who-would-never-be-mine was sent as my come uppence. That’s what you get for following your own stupid fracking star.



I tramped home in the snow and then made coffee, which always cheers me up. And then I remembered something that added immensely the cheering-up process. After my first teaching stint at a fancy gallery where I taught a group of adult women watercolour painting (more like a weekly gathering of great conversation and laughter with some painting thrown in for good measure), I was so thrilled with the success of the course that I asked the "students" if they’d write me reference letters. The best was from a woman who thought quotation marks signified emphasis, so her biggest compliments looked like this: Liz is the “best teacher” I’ve ever had. She “taught” me “painting techniques” that have transformed my paintings into "works of art”! I feel like a "real artist" now!

Painting or Profession?

The first thing I read this morning was the following message routed to my e-mail via an online dating site. After introducing himself, the stranger asked me: “do you actually sell enough paintings to call it a profession?”

This question is perfect. It exposes everything that has ever bothered me about the art world.

“But there is no monolithic ‘art world,’ Liz!”I can hear my art friends protest. To which I feel compelled to ask this unpopular question: isn’t there? OK, it’s true that in Canada we look as though we have a number of discrete art worlds. Vancouver, for instance, is about big photography, Ken Lum and Jeff Wall. Unless you are a photographer or new media artist, don’t try selling your product in Vancouver. The Maritimes is conceptual art: NSCAD, Kelly Mark and the generation before her, Garry Neill Kennedy. And Toronto? Personally, I think boy art – graphic novel cartoony works. I think: brothers Clint and Griffin I-can’t-remember-their-last-names. Montreal, I think the so-called transgressive “bad-painting” portraits by Eliza Griffiths and Janet Werner, which are badly painted indeed, and contain content too cool for school: chicks from mainstream magazines who are either engaged in some psycho-sexual scenario with an old mustang and a bad boy, or just plain pouty princesses looking defiantly at the camera lens. I say camera because this is not painting, it’s fashion photography gussied up with a little oil paint to raise the profile and price.

I realize that taken together these cities could appear to form a biodiverse collection of media and aesthetics, and, therefore debunk the myth of the monolithic art world. But I would argue that’s not actually the case. Underpinning all these productions is a current of professionalism that transforms idiosyncratic expression – tied to a specific time, place and soul – into a set of standardized visual hooks that signify the presence of art.

Just to change the subject for a moment, I’ve been reading Michael Pollen’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” in which he describes the history and impact of industrialization on our food chain. The overproduction of two crops – corn and soy – has created a surplus of biomass that is impoverishing our farmers while creating a dire need for consumption of this excess, so the industrial system re-feeds this biomass to animals not evolved to eat grain, making the animals, and, by extension the people who eat them, sick. To me, Pollan’s report on the disappearance of biodiversity is a not just a lament about the state of our farms and, by extension, our physical health, but it's also a powerful metaphor for describing the state of our cultures and, by extension, our creative, mental and spiritual health.

How is biodiversity connected to the art world? Through the idea of industrialization – aka professionalization in an art-world context. Professionalization ensures artists become efficient producers of creative monocultures (oxymoron?) that adhere to a set of standards guaranteed to produce something everyone recognizes as art and, more importantly, purchases. Were it not such a cliché, I’d be tempted to say the professionalization of art has resulted in McArt. But I’ll restrain myself.

Friends of mine who have made it in the art world have done so because they took a professional, assembly-line approach to their practice, dividing up their time and vision into discrete silos of production guaranteed to yield a better ROI than if they had made something only their friends and family and local community could understand and appreciate. Instead, they have channeled their energies into writing grant apps, artist statements, reviews and catalogue essays about their successful friends’ international exhibits; they regularly send well-heeled portfolio packages to targeted galleries and curators; they slip into their Camper shoes and Comme des Garcons tees before heading out to party at key events in key global cities; they make work about identity politics or cartoon versions of themselves, their friends or people they feel safe enough to judge, expressing naked sexism masked as boys-coming-of-age drawings; and all the while employing social media tools to network with their heroes in the art world, promoting their latest features in New York magazine and the success of their current show in Shanghai through e-mails and FB posts thinly disguised as xmas or valentine’s greetings. These are professional artists. How can you tell? Their process is repeatable, their product palatable, their success more than probable.

In same way industrialization has transformed once biodiverse farms into whole states devoted to growing only corn or soy, professionalization has created entire districts in certain city centres devoted to art galleries that show what amounts to corn or soy (it all looks pretty much the same), outside of which lies an off-the-grid set of alternative spaces that can’t possibly be selling art coz it don't look like what art's supposed to look like. Furthermore, it’s no accident that, by and large, the gallery districts share real estate with fashion districts, convincing art buyers that what they are procuring is not really a rarified object, rather they are buying membership into a coveted world as status-conferring as a pair of Diesel jeans.

Of course I’m exaggerating. And as I write this, I have to ask myself what the hell is the bug in my bonnet? It’s this: in much of the art I see, I feel as if I’m observing someone make clever statements, CNN like, about the world, but I can’t actually locate what the artist really thinks or feels. Sure there’s content but it’s someone else’s response to the world filtered through the artist’s professional hand/computer/video camera/irony. Like news anchors reporting on disasters with the affect of Barbie and Ken, their words sound pretty, but the tone is all wrong. I just don’t believe they are being sincere.
I know I’m being massively reductive here. And I swear to god I’m not bitter. I certainly don’t think my choices are above reproach. My grad show was based on referencing one of the western art world’s bluest chip artists. I wanted to get noticed, too. But I got tired of going to opening after opening, collecting openings like I was collecting chits I could later exchange for points on the cool-o-meter.


After grad school I moved to Montreal to unplug (a strange place to unplug, I know, but it’s easy to ignore art when you don’t live near a gallery district). Instead of attending openings, I made pet portrait commissions in my apartment studio. I called them “dumb paintings” as a kind of pro-active claiming of the critique I was sure my critics would hurl at me. (What critics? You need to be known in order to have critics!) At the risk of sounding naïve, I wanted to make paintings whose content would matter to the purchaser.



While my pet painting business might sound suspiciously like a painting pastoral, I am certainly not harkening back to some golden age when art was made in cold ateliers to be sold at flea markets. Art has always been elitist (by and large; of course, there are always exceptions). Even when painters belonged to artisan guilds, they made work for the church, monarchies and aristocrats (by and large). Generally speaking, the enterprise has historically involved fame, if not fortune. It has always induced delusions of grandeur. And it has always served the elite classes. To be sure, what the elite deems worthy has changed: case in point being the co-optation of outsider art and velvet Elvises which, in the elite’s hands, have been artfully re-deployed with winning results in the manner of fashionistas slumming it in a pair of old Jordache jeans found at a high-end vintage store.

In grad school, we were taught to turn professionalization into a fine art. As part of this training, we had to support our grad exhibitions with an 80-page thesis populated with contemporary cultural theorist’s ideas (all from France, of course) leveraged to defend our studio productions (because god knows our work was not defensible based on our own unpublished opinions. We required a legitimizing apparatus).

My ex once said a brilliant thing: he said it was ridiculous to use Derrida’s theory of painting as a reference point for discussing painting in general because Derrida was not creating a general theory of painting, he was responding to specific works. That has always stuck with me. As I observed my colleagues talk about French theorists like they were best friends, I realized that we no longer have to actually know someone to claim them as intimates, or to claim our own cleverness by proxy. All we have to do is mimic intelligence and intimacy in order to position ourselves as smart, sincere and art-world worthy.

When I was in Mitte, the art district of Berlin, I kept wondering if Canadian artists were behind the art I was seeing. It all looked so familiar. But no. These were Berlin artists. At the gallery that represents Neo Rauch, the front-desk gal informed me that the gallery culls its artists from Neo’s art school in Leipzig, trading on his fame as if it guaranteed similar success from the next generation. Later that day, an artist friend from Montreal doing a residency in Berlin told me he had recently been invited to Neo’s alma mater to give studio visits, but the students refused to meet with him because they consider anyone less than a curator a waste of their time. They know what it takes to make it (produce work like Neo’s), and they expect to make it, specifically at Neo’s gallery. Their professionalism practically guarantees it.