GTA Trendwatch #7: Cultural vacancy

Statistics are showing that New York City’s creative sector is slipping away, the result of skyrocketing prices of everything from real estate to health care to the materials required to put on a show. By contrast, the City of Toronto responded to a Canadian Heritage designation – ambiguously anointing this town as one of five Cultural Capitals with an accompanying $500K handout – by launching TO Live With Culture 05/06, which applied circa 1988 clip art to a campaign supposedly asserting kinetic creativity. Yet, the web portal for Live With Culture simply repurposed existing Toronto Arts Council listings –  more blandness calculated to not dismay municipal mandarins. How old does "new media" need to be before it can be grasped by bureaucrats? Perhaps the official version of the internet’s impact on life and times needs to catch up to its cultural reality. Moreover, despite four or five locally-produced television programs each night theoretically covering entertainment, there remains a dearth of genuine GTA-based celebrities. It could be argued that the town itself is becoming more about show business – with its every choice of role, torrid relationship saga and cosmetic surgery procedure subject to intense scrutiny from the chattering classes – but that’s shortchanging the kind of guerilla notoriety an individual no longer requires a phalanx of publicists, or a recording contract, or an arrest warrant to achieve. A stamp of government approval isn’t going to help in the process either way, considering Toronto remains a place where a shirtless guy in a Santa hat doing push-ups on the sidewalk can actually ascend to something that resembles stardom.