I had a good friend hang out with me today who is visiting from New Brunswick.  In trying to think of places that were fun and affordable I decided to show her the Distillery District.  One of the downtown areas that was useless, and has now been wonderfully revitalized as an arts centre.  I had a couple of realizations while we were down there and in my conversations with my friend afterwards.

The first is that art, beautiful, tangible, thought-provoking art is not dead.  Sure there was one gallery with a whole lot of paint splashed on canvasses with clever titles like untitled 1, untitled 2, untitled 3.  Yet apart from that one gallery there were four more we visited that had imagery you could get a hold of.  Some were more obscure, with shapes and objects coalescing only on closer examination.  Others were overt in imagery yet profound in meaning.  I was particularly struck by the work of Mark Henson who incorporated surrealism into some stunning critiques of our consumeristic lifestyle.  (warning:there is some graphic/disturbing content following the link).  His work is on display at the Meta Gallery.

My other realization was that art must be imbued with some meaning from its creator.  The notion of creating a piece (particularly of abstract art) that leaves everything up to the viewer is ridiculous.  The idea that you can charge 2500 dollars for it means you are capitalizing on rich people with no taste.  Too throw paint at a canvas in random, though sometimes striking, fashion is not something only the select few can do.  If a person truly wants to seek their own meaning in imagery they can examine the cracks in a sidewalk, or the pattern of bricks in a building, or the time honoured cloud-watching.  The meaning can be vague, hidden in visual clues and hinted at in the title, but it must exist.  Meaningless art is not art at all.  It is at best visual nihilism.