Intro

Hello. It is the Fictionalart guy writing. This is my first attempt to re-establish a web presence anything like the old Fictionalart blog, which went down the toilet with the achingly slow and pathetic demise of the "Modblog" blog thing.

Well over a year has already gone by since the original Fictionalart became inoperable.

The blog-0-sphere has changed a lot in the meantime. When I started my blog in summer '04, hardly anyone I knew knew what a blog was. People were still embarassed to say the word 'blog' out loud, preferring the perceived non-geekish (*more accessible*) term 'w - e - B - L - O - G', which would frequently be added in conversation for clarity's sake, through a good part of 2005, at least.

This was partly, or should I say hugely, a function of living in Montreal, where concepts originating in the anglophone world (i.e. everything, with the exception of apportez votre vin and Guillaume Latendresse) osmose into society at a rate even slower than in the ROC (rest of Canada) by a factor equal to the cube of the number of accents on your page in the phone book divided by the number of days you have spent in the US over the past 10 years.

Nowadays, at least, you don't have to explain what a blog is, BUT you do have to convince people that it's not completely full of spam. And of course the act of having a blog no longer sets you apart from anyone, except in the sense of, "Ohh, you're stilllll doing that blog thing, eh??".

All this aside, the amount of information available in blogs is huge, entertaining, changing the world and still not completely controlled by rich and powerful interest groups.

People interested in art could literally read about and look at art on the internet non-stop and never get to the end of it. One of my major inspirations in blogging, Chris Hand at Zeke's Gallery in Montreal, has single-handedly chronicled more art news and commentary than no more than a few zealots could possibly process. So why in God's name do we need yet another art blog?

In this blog, I am planning to take on a large, useful project in a way that hasn't been done in the past. The purpose of the blog will be to describe the Canadian Art World and promote it to whatever smidgen of the world is willing to look, beginning with Canadians.

Wish me luck.