Letter: Saskatoon residents should approve what Remai Modern displays

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In 2018 a friend from Calgary persuaded me to visit the Remai Modern Art Gallery of Saskatchewan.

It was a complete disappointment: the interior was like a giant white icebox, there was not one thing in the galleries that made sense to me, and the flat, rusty building exterior struck me as boring and ugly. I swore I would never again darken its doors.

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Last week, I decided to give it one more chance. This time there were a few things inside that I liked. The massive “Spinner Forest” installation by Nick Cave in the lobby is cute and visually fascinating. But I wonder what it must have cost.

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The Picasso ceramics — unlike his woodcuts — are elegant and sweet. Meryl McMaster’s photography is very well done if rather inscrutable. A couple of Denyse Thomasos’s huge graphic panels are nice, though what her strange angular style represents I don’t know.

The best object in the whole building is a lovely landscape by Dorothy Knowles — possibly the only thing on display from the original Mendel collection — tucked away in a corner.

My reaction remains that of excessive expense for insufficient value. We taxpayers were not consulted about the millions spent on the Remai Modern’s construction, and we are still not consulted on what it displays.

If the art world wants its works publicly displayed, they ought to submit their works for public approval before the public is asked to pay for them. Even Michelangelo did that.

Roger Schmitz, Saskatoon