Well, Angela, the coverage has merely reflected the mess you are making at the gallery. Suck it up. During a zoom meeting with staff -- luckily recorded by a participant -- Cassie also actually added, "My mother's family fled Stalin's brutality in Ukraine in the 1930's (Really? We're still gonna dine out on that?!). Throwing in more irrelevant bon mots, she added, "My father's family suffered under the repressive regime of Duvalier in Haiti, so it is deeply hurtful and deeply insulting to have my leadership of this museum likened to a dictatorship."
Really?! Can you imagine a man offering such a pathetic excuse after screwing up? Rhetorical. You can't. But, according to Cassie, the chaos at the gallery is because her mother fled Ukraine more than 90 years ago and her father hails from Haiti. OMG! Here's a bulletin: I worked with the daughter of a mother, a successful psychiatrist, who also fled Haiti under Duvalier and yet her whole family excelled brilliantly in Canada. Her father was a brain surgeon. Doubt Duvalier ruined their careers. As I said, stop with the excuses and blame game. You get handsomely remunerated to fix it.
And while I'm at it, with 16 directors under you, why did you have to hire an outside consultant to the tune of $525,000 to run the place? Here she is, Tania Lafreniere, whose bio says she is an expert in human resources and conflict resolution. In spite of your $1,100 a day, not working out too well at the gallery these days, eh Tania? Her post looks more like a cheesecake shot on a dating site than that of a professional executive:
It's outrageous, but here we go again with Affirmative Action (AA) run amok. Cassie was hired -- and I quote -- under the gallery's "diversity and inclusion program" (Pearson airport CEO anyone?) According to the gallery's stated culture, "The internal debate hinges on efforts to cultivate more diversity in staff, visitors and the art in its care, with a particular emphasis on Indigenous ways of knowing and being." This is presumably why the sign in front says, "PlJASHIG, WELCOME, BIENVENUE" -- the Indigenous name first because the gallery must be situated on someone's "unceded" territory.
How can you drum up more diversity among visitors? Either people want to go, or they don't. Cassie then played the old, familiar racist and misogynist cards played by everyone who has ever been hired, thanks to AA, but then proceeds to f-ck up.
Staffers on the call wanted to know why the gallery was so top-heavy, while rank and file positions were left vacant? Another employee said that much of the discussion around the gallery's new direction focused on the importance of having "brave conversations". What does that even mean? More diversity and inclusion, one supposes. Said another, "Decisions are handed down that we don't understand?" Way to communicate, Angela and Tania!
All that was just, "Normal growing pains in a place in transition," said Cassie. As for opposition, or even questions, "All that is rooted in resistance to progress. What we're seeing is what pushback looks like."
I'll say. More like incompetence looks like to me -- especially when taxpayers had to fork out more than $1.2 million in severance to staff who either quit, or were fired in recent years. Is the gallery an art museum, or a personnel agency? I'd say the latter, judging by its singular focus on hiring, firing and severance payouts.
And let's face it, Canada's National Gallery is a joke. The only things worth seeing are a couple of Group of Seven paintings that were rejects from the Kleinberg Museum in Hunstville; everything else is mediocre. I'd suggest focusing on buying and curating better art, not on internal cat fights, squabbles and payouts.
Sadly, dear readers, this is what AA continues to look like. It does no one any favours -- especially those of us who share the gender. Many of my posts may lead you to believe I don't like women. Wrong. I am all for women getting ahead, but based solely on merit -- not gender, ethnicity and inclusion. It's that kind of AA that I abhor. And it's ubiquitous.
Bottom line, the gallery is magnificent on the outside, but clearly rotten on the inside.
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