Art and the City at #NuitBlanche2014

By Zahra Khozema, blogger at RU Student Life

There is only one thing I adore more than art, and that is its admirer. The more I fixated on trying to praise the art itself, at Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2014 I couldn’t help but find myself admiring the admirers instead. From the clusters of people dressed in onesies on the subway to the waves of tourist-type map-readers who flooded the Night of White streets. The traditional ‘standing-in-front-of-paintings-at-museums-sipping-wine’ system seems like an over-romanticized lucid dream in 2014.

At #snbTO, the art of Toronto was itself the artist and the audience was its artwork. Most works of light, like the ones presented at OCAD University, or of sound, like the Screaming Booths around downtown, centred around viewer interaction. Our moving and yelling and playing with light was the art. It was simple: no us, no art. The artist’s statement is of no importance to the actual reactions of its admirers who channel their own statements regardless.

At one point, because of the mass turnout that clogged the view for the people disadvantaged in the height zone (me), I had to resort to watching works and performances from the screens of iPads of the viewers in front of me. I found myself interacting with technology more than art. Are we really at a point that if an artwork is not transformed into another form of media (a digital photo, for example), it no longer has essence? Is the ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ state of mind worth missing out on the art itself, even if it is through the ‘standing-in-front-of-paintings-at-museums-sipping-wine’ system?

There was not one picture I could find, without cropping that is, that did not consist of someone else trying to do the same thing. The struggle to pick the right colour filter for the already colour-filtered-light-room was real for everyone.

Due to the rush, I did more walking and getting lost then admiring the artworks around the city. This frustration lead to a realization that this city in fact never lacked art. Nuit Blanche was just an excuse, we are already diverse, from street dancers to half naked drummers to crazy super hero characters. What we lack, instead, sometimes, are perhaps its true admirers.