Art that goes below the surface

Over at the Maclean's blog, my colleague John Geddes reviews a new show at the National Art Gallery in Ottawa. Called It Is What It Is, the exhibition is a selection of 82 works by 57 Canadian artists bought by the  gallery over the past two years. John contrasts the show with last summer's Pop Life show at the gallery that featured the work of Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, and he's struck by how little influenced this new Canadian art is by the superficialities of those big stars:

Some of the artists represented in It Is What It Is evidently assume that anyone likely to be looking at their work is probably more interested in political questions or environmental issues, say, than in movie stars or fashion. Others are tapping into the imagery of fantasy, but deep, surreal, dreamy, quirky fantasy, not the sort of fantasy that sells products. Does this make these disparate artists sound earnest or naïve? If it does, doesn’t that beat being shrewd or glib?

I haven't seen either show. But I did catch the Julian Schnabel exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario a couple of weeks ago, a show that, like Pop Life, plays off our fascination with celebrity and commercialism. Schnabel doesn't have much insightful to say about that, and he's really not much of a painter. The most interesting aspects of the AGO show are the way Schnabel uses his painting to explore the one medium where his real talent lies, which is film.