The best worst (Canadian) museum and gallery reviews
The blog Bad Art Museum Reviews brings the laughs, but it's a little light on CanCon
Everyone's a critic, but most of us stick to reviewing things we know. Sandwiches, for instance, or more sandwiches.
If you can find an entry on Yelp for, well, just about anything, the law of the Internet suggests someone will review it, and no one is safe from the blight of a one-star rating. So since October, the blog Bad Art Museum Reviews has been collecting — sorry, curating — the "best worst museum and gallery reviews" you can Google.
Should your three-year-old have a show at MoMA? Yes, and he can already spell at a Yelp-grade level.
As for New York's famed Guggenheim Museum, it's apparently a one-star "fart" gallery, but a "world-class dump."
Follow the Tumblr for more, but since we're CBC Arts, we feel there must be a line in our mandate or something requiring us to note that the blog's still light on the CanCon.
To be fair, the only one-star review we could find for Ottawa's National Gallery of Canada seems to have been posted by mistake — unless they've opened a tow-truck service in the Garden Court. But that doesn't mean the crowd-sourced haterade isn't flowing through our country, from the St. Lawrence to the mighty Fraser River.
Some examples, which we may or may not submit via Tumblr...
A tourist from Calgary left a concerned warning after visiting "that weird thing in Toronto," a.k.a. the Royal Ontario Museum. Tourists beware: Its name is lies, all lies!
Despite declaring ROM the "death of Canadian architecture," another visitor nevertheless gave it a solid two stars.
Architecture was also a major bugaboo for this American tourist, who wanted to drop by Edmonton's Art Gallery of Alberta. If she'd managed to get in, hopefully someone would've told her the building wasn't actually designed by Frank Gehry. (The late Randall Stout was the architect.)
This AGA visitor actually managed to check out the exhibits, which inspired this short-story-as-Yelp-review. It also inspired two very important questions. The first: "How can something be post-modern?" The second: "What is it with this city's obsession with triangles and pyramids?"
Do you hate art that looks like it was painted by a child? How about a "prepubertal [sic] child?" Definitely avoid the Vancouver Art Gallery, at least according to this guy.
We expect the same verdict might apply to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts — although this Yelp reviewer notes that their collection does indeed, include some "real art, like Monet" alongside "furniture that can be seen in last year's Ikea catalogue."
It all begs the question: What do we, as an audience, need from an art gallery experience? This dude can tell you what we don't. Stupid waterfalls. From his review of Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario...
Badartmuseumreviews.tumblr.com is where you'll find more reviews like these. (Yelp too, we suppose.)
What galleries and museums do you love — regardless of whether you've given them five stars online? Find CBC Arts on Twitter and Facebook and share your favourite places with us!
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