John Nyman
Arts Editor
First off, I agree with you: Nuit Blanche sucked.
The ways that we’ve chosen to respond to the increasing suckage of Toronto’s all-night contemporary art event, however, seem to vary.
Those in the art-loving community are often split into two camps. First, there are the optimistic few who still cling to hope in an undeniably good idea soured by over-commercialization and a bloated, apathetic fanbase. Meanwhile, the more extremely ironic revolutionaries (you may know them as hipsters) have often decided to dismiss the event entirely.
Even worse, Nuit Blanche has become a rallying point for everybody who never really liked art, artists or any part of the artistic community to begin with. Many of us in the marginally creative community are worried that our lifestyle is being linked to things like “debauchery” and “rowdiness,” or that people are even using words like that in 2010.
Despite the that fact people’s viewpoints can fall in different places, the ways a lot of us deal with Nuit Blanche are pretty much the same: we go downtown with low expectations, give up on seeing anything interesting within an hour or two and make it back home far too late. The question is: how do we fix this? As the number of attendees and the amount of government support and funding have increased over the years, Nuit Blanche’s organizers and artists have been under more and more pressure to appease more and more people, many of whom are only barely in touch with the spirit of the event. Nuit Blanche’s indie cred has all but disappeared.
And yet, there may be an an- swer. We just have to take a look at where it all came from.
Compared to past years, Nuit Blanche 2010’s commissioned projects (that is, the ones that got all the money) were strikingly clustered around Toronto’s downtown core.
In response to a popular demand to keep the event geographically tight, main event projects were moved out of traditionally artsy neighbourhoods such as Queen West, Liberty Village and the Distillery District, which received at least some investment in past years. Even a quick look at the event map shows the obvious division; once you’re off the subway line, it’s independent projects only.
Perhaps the event organizers have forgotten that these districts, where Toronto’s artistic community lives and works year round, are the real creative centres of the city but that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten that, too.
Aside from the work they put into gallery shows, small-scale performances and artistically-minded neighbourhood events on a regular basis, these communities still use Nuit Blanche as a celebration of art and creativity in its purest form.
With or without popular support, local organizations and collectives in these parts of the city come together every year to make their own version of Nuit Blanche great, featuring locally conceptualized artworks in intimate, low-budget and high-energy settings.
If there’s one thing we can learn from the world of art, it’s that there’s always an alternative. There’s another Nuit Blanche out there, and we should probably check it out.
