LOVE IT!

Art mavens like to describe the auction market for so-called important Canadian art as “blue-chip” – but perhaps, almost a half-century after Sotheby’s hosted its first live sale of such art in this country, the more apt descriptive is “immature.”

Certainly it’s immature compared to the markets in, say, the United States and Britain, where it’s common (and has been for years) for work, often challenging work by still-living (or relatively recently deceased artists) like Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Francis Bacon to rival and occasionally surpass the sums fetched by a van Gogh, Titian or Picasso. In Canada it seems you have be one very dead white guy buried, preferably, under a huge mound of snow or crimson maple leaves to receive that sort of approbation.

-The Globe & Mail

Nov 25 2012