Nuit Blah

On Saturday night, I learned the secret that has tickled the corners of Mona Lisa's mouth for the past few decades: people, when gathered in their droves, ruin art.

Nuit Blanche is billed as an "all-night art party" - hundreds of artists take over public spaces with installation art and the public comes to ogle from 7:00 p.m. to sunrise. What a great idea, huh? Emphasis on "idea" - just as the emphasis in the event tagline ought to be on "party". I am inclined to be charitable (in a patronizing, supercilious sort of way) to the hordes of wide-eyed suburbanites and stoned adolescents that flooded the streets of Toronto: perhaps it was a hunger for art that drew them out. I thought that at first, courting death on my bicycle, as I set out for the night. But one hour later, the only "art" I had seen was a homeless gentleman playing bones on a city trashcan. What "art" there was was either obliterated by the crowds or by the artist's concern to create something more likely to entertain, or mystify, rather than actually provoke thought or introspection or debate. What resulted was mayhem, at best a freshman Burning Man (a football field of spaced-out undergrads lying on the grass, pondering the grandeur of a string of blue fairy lights attached to a cluster of helium balloons), at worst an extended commercial (numerous pieces offering a number to text a message to, which would then be projected on a screen or building-face - all appropriately branded by a major phone company).

It was actually a very interesting event, at least philosophically and in retrospect, given my last blog about Warhol, who said at some point in the seventies that commerce was his art. From that perspective, this was the ultimate Warholian declension: an event ostensibly about art, branded to distortion by its sponsoring financial institution (whose name I refuse to give anymore airtime to), and dressed up like a party. I guess, in the end, the art itself was neither "art" nor "culture", but a collection of (unintentional) baits set up to draw the event into place, and demonstrate the actual state of culture: a braying drunken bloated thing, desperate to filter every experience through some sort of technology - a camera, a screen, a phone - and I suspect, heaving, on the evening after, a collective sigh of familiar relief in front of its television set.

OK, yes, I am an elitist. I have no problem admitting this. But am I in favour of separating art from culture (society), essentially the work from the people? I give myself that impression and it concerns me. I wonder, sometimes, if I am the one missing the point.