Normalism and Legal Representation in Canadian Art

In this thesis, I consider a 2014 Supreme Court hearing involving the National Gallery of Canada and CARFAC-RAAV, our nation's preeminent artists' advocacy group. It is my proposition that CARFAC-RAAV's success in the hearing, which legally required the National Gallery to pay mandatory minimum fees to exhibiting artists, is part of a process of reification of an artistic productivism. Theoretical considerations build toward this conclusion focusing on the study of the antithetical tendencies of the legal and artistic orders. I argue that the former is based on a predilection for continuity and permanence, the latter on reflexivity and a certain anomalistic acceptance of things anew. When these two orders meet in the event of the hearing, a juridical rigidity of value and vision finds mooring in the artistic field. In this case, law becomes one important sinew of normalism in the Canadian artistic field.