Contemporary American Art at the National Gallery of Canada (1967-79): The Surprising Legacy of Brydon E. Smith
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis draws upon Bruno Latour's concept of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) to assess the active mediator role played by Brydon E. Smith, the National Gallery of Canada's (NGC) first Curator of Contemporary Art, as the NGC began to collect postwar American art.Considering the ensuing expansion of its collection from 1967 to 1979, I focus specifically on Smith's survey exhibitions of artists James Rosenquist (1968), Dan Flavin (1969), Donald Judd (1975) and their related acquisitions, as well as one by Jackson Pollock.Documentary sources in the NGC archives and a questionnaire and interviews with former colleagues of Smith have provided important insights into his curatorial choices and methodology.This research clarifies how curatorial agency may shape the aesthetics and coherence of a public collection.The NGC's newly acquired credibility in a broader North American cultural context is demonstrated through the critical reception of Smith's exhibitions, publications and acquisitions.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".