TWO VIEWS ON THE CRITIC'S ROLE

View One: Some Thoughts, after a Year, on Vancouver...
Sanctuary or Fool's Paradise? Charlotte Townsend.

There is a lot of artistic activity here. maybe more, both qualitatively
and quantitatively than most places of this size in North America; but
it is still undiscriminating and overrated.

At best, the atmosphere is authentic and independent, at worst lazy and
self-satisfied. It is neither stimulating nor sophisticated.

Some uspects of all art have to dowlth the nature of society. The
lesser the art the greater the connection. Investigating the social
context in Vancouver isn't an irrelevancy. It also helps to preserve
the critic's sanity in the absence of much Art-as-Art, (Ad Reinhardt).

(Asking, for example, why artists stay or come here, how they live,
their history and economics, their outside contacts, their support
and promotion, their attitude to Vancouver as environment etc. etc.)

Il am sometimes dejected by this but it doesn't allov me to change my
views on the responsibilities of a critic on a local paper. These are to
cover, if not the entire art situation, then a fair and broad sampling

of it, and to hope that it will be understood that the frame of refer-
ence must often be adjusted to deal with the different kinds of 'art'

in question.

This is a compromise. I believe it to be inevitable on the job. I am
also afraid that it mav be a hopeless one.

Hope, insofar as I'd like to think of this kind of readership growing
rather than being refined out of existence, lies in more straight re-
porting, interviews and verbatim accounts. But some sophistication
is needed to arrive at this 'simple' way of looking at/interpreting art.