Hidden Values: Contemporary Canadian Art in Corporate Collections

David Kimmel is a Ph.D. candidate in history at York University.

The capitalist class has for many years collected art. Corporate
sponsorship of exhibitions is nothing new. But now, Canadian business
underwrites a series of exhibitions celebrating its own good taste and
cultivation. How postmodern. How self-serving. Hidden Values is the
catalogue of three regional shows and a video featuring contemporary
Canadian art collected by companies and law firms from Vancouver to St.
John’s. It is a beautiful and expensive book, befitting its
socio-economic origins. The more than 100 color plates offer good
coverage in geographic terms, but the selection of works is badly biased
toward paintings, sculptures, and photographs created in the 1980s.
Preceding the pictures are two essays that attempt to advance the
argument that our country is endowed with good corporate citizens who
continue to fulfil their duty to support our young artists. What the
book fails to acknowledge is an equally remarkable hidden value:
Canadian art constitutes a fabulous tax write-off and is often a
tremendous bargain besides.

The two introductory essays are important contributions, but each is
slightly flawed. Robert Fulford’s organizing premise, that the
corporation is “the representative social institution of our
society,” is 50 years out of date. Nevertheless, he identifies several
interesting aspects of corporate collecting: buying tends to be more
conservative than it need be; it is often an act of keeping up with the
Joneses in the next office tower; and in building collections, Canadians
are clearly aping American corporations. Curator Robert Swain’s essay
is pioneering but not strongly written. In tracing out a preliminary
history of corporate collecting in Canada, he reckons with companies
that sponsored artists whose works became advertising materials, and
with the aesthetic sensibilities of financial institutions that sought
to promote an image of “stability,” “solvency,” and
“Canadianness” through architecture, bank note design, and
eventually art collecting.

Behind these ruminations lurks an important question that is never
addressed with sufficient scholarly candor: why do Canadian corporations
buy Canadian art? Being “so much the right thing” to do is the
answer Swain meekly suggests. Deference seems to be the price even
curators must pay for accepting corporate sponsorship.