‘Beauty which we had not previously known’: Walter Abell and the dynamics of modern art in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A re-reading of the writings of Walter Abell, a well known art critic and theorist in Canada in the 1930s and 1940s, suggests a different way of thinking about the development of Canadian art and culture. Instead of viewing Abell's treatments of art - as have other cultural historians - as a stable discourse, this essay suggests that they are better viewed as a series of often incongruous treatments that do not constitute a cohesive whole. It is the very disjunctures and aporias in Abell's discourse, however, that make it most meaningful. Instead of treating Abell's contradictions and shifting perspectives as problems, this essay argues that they signify the diverse, and at times incompatible, ways that artists, intellectuals, and Canadians responded to the the development of modernist art and the conditions of artistic modernity in twentieth century Canada. In this sense, they present an image of Canadian artistic culture as a fractures field within which different subject positions, conceptions of cultural history, and forms of political activism became possible.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".