This institutional ethnography of the Canadian art world opens with visual artist Beth McCubbin saying, “It’s a serious issue in the visual art world how language—or writing—has now been squished on to it.” Her experience of disjuncture serves both as a point of entry for the investigation and a critical standpoint from which to explicate the institutional art regime. Responding to her experience, this study examines the conjunction between language and visual art in the work of artists, in the work of curators and in the wider art world. This inquiry brings into view an increasingly textually and institutionally coordinated art world.

Keywords: Canadian art, institutional ethnography, knowledge, work