There is a difference between art and the art market, although you can be forgiven for not having any tools for understanding that difference, given how we in the media like to tell you about art. We tell you primarily about the monetary value of art; we focus mostly on weekend box-office and bestseller lists and auction prices. I'm not sure why this is; you can have your own discussions about the inescapability of labour value in capitalist society.
Right now, we are very excited about the record-breaking prices of the dead Canadian painter Lawren Harris, prices partly spiked by the promotional work of Steve Martin, the U.S. actor who really likes Harris and has just arranged a show of his work in Los Angeles. We in Canada are extremely excited about this largely because, well, the Group of Seven are largely – no, completely – unknown and valueless outside of Canada and it makes us blush so hard whenever we are noticed by the busy people in the United States – it's like when the really cool Grade 12 guy glances over at us Grade 10s. Some people are also pleased because it means their own collections of Canadian paintings might become worth more, but the number of these people is so tiny that I don't think their interests are newsworthy.
One thing that we have tried very hard to avoid talking about is whether anyone but Steve Martin really likes Lawren Harris's work, as art. I guess it's irrelevant. But I'll tell you anyway what I think: I don't like Harris at all. I find his stylized, glowing, bulbous glacierscapes to look a lot like children's-book illustration. Very good children's-book illustration, sure – pair them up with a nice story about a dog and a seal and you'd get yourself a Caldecott Medal. They are pretty and smooth, and perhaps inspiring to people who prefer the idea of a magical, spiritually pure, people-free, dream-like, crystallized North – a place like the planet Krypton – to real places. They would be great on posters advertising breath-freshening gum.
I was often told, growing up, in classrooms and public libraries, that the Group of Seven were important not just because they immortalized the raw majesty of the Canadian landscape, but because they were renegades – somehow daring, shocking to conservative audiences of their time. The large and bright brushstrokes were supposed to be messing with old-fashioned naturalistic representations.
This story is at best exaggerated. It is true that some early critics found their work garish. This may have been because all of them had backgrounds in graphic design and commercial art. And at a stretch one might say that this bold aesthetic bears some traces of influence of European postimpressionism – which by the 1920s was no longer avant-garde anyway. But their work was supported by conservative institutions from the beginning: The director of the National Gallery was instrumental in arranging their first group exhibition.
The Group of Seven was quickly selected by the Canadian establishment, and later by government institutions, as appropriate propaganda for a noble idea of Canada, and that is why it has adorned stamps and coins and phone-book covers ever since.
(One other thing: There weren't seven in the Group of Seven, there were 10. Twelve if you count Tom Thomson, who inspired them, and Emily Carr, usually associated with them. So even the magic number seven in their name is a fake.)
It is, of course, impossible to separate our knowledge of the value and status of an artwork from our attempts at subjective evaluation of it. We cannot ever look on the Mona Lisa for the first time and wonder if it is a good painting. It is always already the Mona Lisa. And my own negative reaction to Harris doesn't exist in a pure objective aesthetic vacuum either: Of course, there is an element of ideology in my rejection of the popular.
But it is important to remember that just because Adele sets all records in album sales this month and probably this year, we do not have to solemnly sing our praises of Adele. There is a lot to talk about the phenomenon of Adele beyond her booming voice, too: the idea of kitsch, the instant effect of the sentimental and derivative, the world-crushing power of the purely conventional.
Yes, we are pleased that we have found our own Canadian Adele in the international art world. I am not sure why we need to be excited that this might make some extremely wealthy art owners even wealthier.