It’s All Art in The End

Art galleries, eyepatches, existential crises, crossbow duels, good logos, and billion-dollar housewarming gifts.

Nov 23, 2022

IT’S 1190 AD—

—and a team of stonemasons is laying bricks on the muddy banks of the Seine River. They’re building a fortress that is meant to protect the city of Paris from English attacks. Even by the standards of medieval architecture, it’s pretty boring: four towers, a moat—pretty much what you’d expect. Strolling through 12th-Century France, you might not give this mundane stone fortress a second look. You certainly wouldn’t guess that 800+ years later people would travel from the farthest corners of the world to visit it.

The French countryside is still wild, here in the Middle Ages, and this particular area along the Seine is home to several packs of wolves – les loups – which is probably why, when the last bricks are laid and the royal banners are raised, they start calling this boring old building The Louvre.

It’s 1503—

—and an Italian merchant named Francesco del Giocondo is moving his family into a brand-new home. His wife has just given birth to their fifth child, and he wants to do something special to celebrate this exciting new phase of their lives. So he does what status-seekers of this era do: he commissions a portrait of his wife. And he knows the perfect guy to paint it, too: a local artist known as “Il Florentine” who happens, at this very moment, to be a little short on cash.

IT’S 2005—

—and I’ve just moved to Bangkok, Thailand. I followed a girl here (spoiler: she ends up becoming my wife) and, having saved a bit of money, I’m planning to finally do the thing I believe I’m destined to do: make art.

I spend my days writing precocious stories and poetic essays and the first chapters of novels that will never be finished. I don’t know it at the time, but these will be the best months of my life. Time passes, time wanes, and so too does the balance of my bank account. Writing short stories and not finishing novels, it turns out, aren’t very lucrative pursuits (even with a favourable exchange rate).

When I’m offered a freelance copywriting job through a friend of a friend, I say yes. I have no experience writing copy, but I can speak and write in English, and this seem to be the only qualification necessary. I write some (probably bad) copy for a BMW dealership. I write some (probably worse) copy for Sony. For the next two years, I will build up a half-decent portfolio featuring some of the world’s most recognized brands, and when I finally return home to Canada, I’ll quickly find work at the top advertising agency in the city.

That’s how it happened. Instead of becoming a poetic essayist or precocious story writer, I became a creative director who works with brands.

IT’S THE MID-1600s—

—and Louis XIV (aka. The Sun King) shows up on the scene.

He decides that the boring old fortress known as The Louvre will becomes the new primary residence of the French royalty—and those royals have acquired a lot of art.

Collecting a bunch of art in one place isn’t a new idea. This has been a common practice throughout history—from the forums of ancient Rome to the temples of ancient Japan. But an art gallery is something different. It’s more comprehensive, it aspires to agnosticism. It’s all about the quality of the art, the beauty, the technique, not necessarily its theological meaning. In the course of France’s colonial expansion, it has acquired (or stolen, plundered, ripped off) all sorts of exotic art objects from around the world, and if you’re important enough to get an audience with the Sun King, you might get a chance to see them.

And then: the French Revolution. Heads roll (literally), the royal collection becomes national property, and on August 10th, 1793, The Louvre opens up to the public as “a place for bringing together monuments of all the sciences and arts.”

And with that, the modern conception of the National Art Gallery is born.

IT’S 2017—

—and I’m having an existential crisis. I’ve spent more than ten years working in advertising, and, over that time, have poured tens of thousands of hours into creating new brands, recreating old ones, and generating the ephemera that keeps them alive. In that time, I’ve also managed to write one book. This ratio is troubling to me. How did I end up here, from those euphoric first months in Bangkok. How did I choose this life?

I guess there’s a sort of sublimated poetic meaning in this work I do. A brand platform is a type of creative non-fiction; it tells the truth in an aesthetically purposeful way. A product message is a narrative, and has the same essential components as any great novel or film: character, conflict, resolution. Much of the process we go through, in the course of delivering excellent marketing content, mimics the artistic process: the messy clench of conceptualizing, the discarded early drafts, the pain of trimming beautiful yet inessential bits (the cutting of baby-limbs, as per Hemingway), and that emotional ebb and flow between God-like confidence and crushing self-doubt.

So why doesn’t it feel like art?

Maybe James Joyce knows

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the protagonist Stephen Daedalus spends much of the final chapters explaining his theory of “proper” and “improper” art. For him, anything that is created to serve a purpose beyond the simple aesthetic value of the artwork itself is “improper”—it’s kinetic, it’s moving towards something outside of itself: a feeling, a desire, an opinion. “Proper art” on the other hand, is completely static. It is simply what it is, and exists for no other purpose. It doesn’t compel you to buy something, or change your mind, or call you to action.

You might think the term “fine art” is a reference to the ephemeral nature of classical artwork, or maybe the meticulous efforts that go into it, but it actually comes from the Latin word finis, or “the end”—the object of true art is the end in itself.

According to Joyce, the whole point of art is to just be art, and nothing else.

Why am I so ungrateful?

I’ve made a good living working with brands. It’s a good business to be in, because everything in the modern world is a brand. Corporations, sports teams, political parties. Each of us, in our digital lives, have become brands, promoting ourselves on social media in hopes of building equity with our loyal customers (aka. our friends and family). Countries are brands, artists are brands, and, yes—even national art galleries are brands.

IT’S 2021—

—and The National Gallery of Canada has unveiled its new brand.

I catch my first glimpse in posters hoarded around the building. The old red and white has been replaced by a palette of bright pastels. The updated logo looks very modern — chunky, solid, minimalist — the sort of thing you’d see if you looked at a Mondrian through a kaleidoscope. In digital executions, it’s always moving: bleeding together, overlapping, combining and connecting to reveal new shapes. It's a great-looking brand, aesthetically—but lovely aesthetics are table stakes. What (I wondered) is it supposed to mean?

Years earlier, in the midst of my existential crisis, I worked across the street from NGC and often escaped there on slow afternoons to wander through the European and American Wing. I wanted to feel unmoored from the present, set adrift in time and space—to forget that I spent all my time working on improper things.

For a long time, I ignored the Indigenous and Canadian Wing (I’d internalized our national inferiority complex), but after the rebrand I felt compelled to finally explore it. When I did, I began to suspect that all my self-conscious brooding about not making “real art” was (as you probably already suspected) totally absurd.

The Ritual of Citizenship

From the very first day, The Louvre’s collection is displayed chronologically. You move from room to room and witness the evolution of artistic expression, from Ancient Egyptian urns and Greek statues to Roman artifacts and Italian Renaissance paintings—all of it culminating in the French modern style. They called this path through the gallery the “ritual of citizenship” and the story it tells is clear: French art the greatest art in the world.

The Indigenous and Canadian Wing of the National Gallery of Canada unfolds chronologically, too—but this ritual of citizenship tells a totally different story and culminates in an entirely different place.

When you enter, the first thing you notice is that the Colonial art and Indigenous art, despite occupying the same room, is isolated from each other. It has to be, because almost all the art made by European settlers is decorative, painted on canvas or wood, flat, hung on the walls, while much of the Indigenous artwork is decorative and functional — tools, coats, bags, ritual objects — and is displayed on tables and in glass cases.

This natural segregation — the old paintings and portraits hung on the periphery, the carvings and clothing in the middle of the room — creates a fascinating effect. If you stand in the right place, you can look through the glass case containing a Naskapi caribou skin coat and see, beyond it, Plamondon’s portrait of Abbe David Henri Tetu in the far corner of the room, head sticking out of the collar like he’s wearing it. It all bleeds together. It overlaps, combines, connects.

My favourite example of this occurs in the room where all those bleak, empty, lifeless landscapes by the Group of Seven are mounted; sitting in the middle of the space is an Algonquin birchbark canoe—proof that, whether A.Y. Jackson and his crew knew it, those empty landscapes were filled with vibrant life.

In the following rooms, there are Inuit stone carvings surrounded by the vivid geometric abstractions of Molinari and Tousignant. There are epic canvases by Norval Morrisseau (aka. Copper Thunderbird, aka. The Picasso of the North) in which the forms and codes that seemed so at odds in the first part of the gallery all come together. If you stand in front of “Artist and Shaman Between Two Worlds” and look slightly to your left, you can see, peeking out from behind the wall, Alex Colville’s wife, Roda, spying on you through her binoculars. That, for me, captures everything you need to know about the guileless incongruity of Canadian art.

It might seem obvious to display a national collection this way, but even The Met in New York, up until 2019, was displaying its collection of so-called “Native Art” in a gallery alongside pieces from exotic foreign places like Africa, Oceania, and South America. Indigenous culture might seem exotic to non-Indigenous people, but it is, by definition, not foreign.

How, then, do you define a national style when it comes from two such distinct places and has been made to serve such different purposes? How do you solve the dilemma of art galleries first established by The Louvre?

The answer: with a great brand.

The Big Idea

From Our Brand Story on the National Gallery of Canada’s website.

The word Ankosé emerged in conversation with Algonquin Elders and Knowledge Keepers. This powerful Anishnaabemowin word changed everything. Meaning “everything is connected,” “tout est relié,” Ankosé beautifully symbolizes the Gallery’s vision and purpose. It will inspire all of us to move forward in a good way. Ankosé is a call to action for the institution and for all who engage with us, to recognize the limitless connections that exist beyond the frame.

A brand isn’t a physical thing, it’s an idea, or rather a system of ideas. Like a religion, it has a foundational narrative and corroborating mythology; it has a set of symbols and a set of rules that guide behaviour; dissemination and adoption are its primary purpose. According to Joyce’s rigorous rules of aestheticism, a brand could never be proper art. But how could you call a solution as artful as Ankosé “improper”?

Beautiful brands are everywhere. Nice colours, cool logos, slick websites. But the philosophical concept that sits at the centre of The National Gallery of Canada’s new brand represents something much bigger: a mission, a responsibility, a different way of seeing familiar things. It’s an expression of something inherently true that cannot be expressed in any other way.

In other words: it’s a work of art.

BACK TO 1507—

—where, after working on the portrait of Signora del Gioconda for a few years, the cash-starved artist known as Il Florentine does what many artists do: he flakes out. He gets an even bigger commission and takes off. Understandably annoyed, Francesco del Gioconda refuses to pay him for the unfinished painting, so the artist takes the canvas with him, and, for the next ten years, between other gigs, he keeps coming back to it. There’s just something about it; something enigmatic, something special. But the artist is never able to finish it—at least not to his satisfaction. He gets older. His right hand is paralyzed. He dies a few years later. The painting ends up with one of his pupils, who is soon after killed in a crossbow duel.

It's not until the 1530s that the painting ends up in the hands of King Francois I and is put on display for the first time in a semi-public gallery (ie. at his chateau). And it’s not until the early 1800s (after a brief period hanging in Napoleon’s bedroom) that the portrait is finally moved to the place where it still hangs to this day: that boring old fortress on the Seine.

Il Florentine is better known today by his given name, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the half-smiling dark-haired woman he was commissioned to paint, Signora del Gioconda, is better known by her given name, too: Lisa.

The most famous painting in the world — visited each year by six million people, worth an estimated $860M — was a paid gig. It was kinetic, made to a purpose outside itself: to impress a wife, to satisfy a husband—a housewarming gift.

Paintings, sculptures, canoes, coats, novels, essays, newsletters, brands and logos—it’s all art, if you want it to be.

Postscript: Further Reading

Check out “An Indigenous Woman’s View of the National Gallery of Canada” by Indigenous curator and art critic Adrienne Huard, which documents her experience moving through the newly-designed Indigenous and Canadian Gallery when it first opened in 2017.

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