The Toronto Mayor’s Arts Lunch took place on May 28 at the Arcadian Court with almost 400 people in attendance. It’s not arranged by the Mayor. This annual event is put on by the Toronto Arts Foundation, the 20-year-old sister organization of the 41-year-old Toronto Arts Council. The event celebrates the annual Toronto Arts Foundation Awards which are announced and handed out there. Most of the nominees attend and the range of nominees is always a lovely portrait of the ever-changing face of the arts in this town – the old who persevere, the young who are handed (or grab) the torch to carry it forward, and the rest of us somewhere in between, debating whether we should have dessert, or should have said no to that second glass of wine.
Perhaps it’s called the Mayor’s Arts Lunch because the organizers hope that mayors will be more likely to attend if it’s named for them. Although for the previous four years, one could be forgiven for thinking it was because the mayor, conspicuous by his absence, was the event’s main roast.
This year’s host was actor Allan Hawco (of Republic of Doyle Canadian TV fame), his Newfoundland brogue getting more and more conspicuous as the event went along. He got things off to a hilariously irreverent flying start by “proposing marriage, on behalf of the city’s arts community, to the city’s powers that be: government, corporations and all that.” Make the relationship legit, was the gist of it. After all, we’re smart, funny, entertaining, sexy, and you’ve got the financial means to keep us in style. You’ve been screwing with us for years, after all, so why not make an honest community of us?
The biggest difference this year from the past few was that not only was the new mayor, John Tory , conspicuously present, but he actually took his turn at the microphone and had some encouraging and thoughtful things to say about the role of the arts in making a city great. It’s a fact, he informed us, that the quality of the arts in a city has been proven to attract investors. And as if responding directly to Hawco’s semi-decent proposal, he said (twice) that the arts community would find in the city under his aegis a partner that was “steady, reliable and ambitious.”
It’s the “ambitious” part of the utterance that makes me uneasy, because of another bandwagon the mayor seems to have been on ever since he visited Austin, Texas, which boasts possibly the world’s largest music festival (and where people wear T-shirts saying “Keep Austin Weird”). Tory’s go-to phrase these days is about turning Toronto into “Music City.”
It’s a laudable thought, so whence the unease? Because it sounds as if he’s talking about making something from scratch. Absent is any sense that he realizes what we have, and what we are, already. If, to borrow a phrase, what he wants to do is turn Hogtown into a musical silk purse, he should know he already has a live-and-kicking shiny silk sow – something that the Toronto Arts Foundation (and in its own way this little publication) has been celebrating for the past 20 years. He should keep in mind that a healthy sow, well cared-for, will produce lots of musical little piggys. And that’s the way to bring home the bacon. We are already an astounding musical city, Mayor Tory. Build on that.
But if the mayor thinks turning Toronto into “Music City” requires some top-down exercise in reinvention, it’s an exercise that is probably doomed from the start. Consider the upcoming Pan Am Games, which will be deemed a failure if measured by the attendance by people who have bought into the rhetoric of “it’s only worthy of our attention if we’re the very best.” There’s a great risk that Toronto will turn its back on the Pan Am Games as a kind of second class Olympics. If only the rhetorical bar had not been set so high. If only local grass roots participation in healthy physical culture and sports could manifest ordinary bums in those world-class seats. This self-defeating aspect of our city’s psyche is at risk of being perpetuated and reinforced right in the very moments when it could all so easily begin to change.
It’s more a question of timing than anything else that Panamania, billed as this summer’s leading cultural event, actually has very little presence in this edition of our magazine, which covers a wealth of events from June 1 through September 7. After all, what we celebrate in every issue of The WholeNote is not so much any particular festival that gets staged, but the ongoing festival that the city is, year in, year out – an ongoing buzz and roar of the human spirit – expressed through music and the lively arts, day after day after day.
To those of you who are summer visitors to our diverse and welcoming city, and just happened to pick up this magazine, a hearty hello!! We hope you will be able to use The WholeNote to guide you along the main highways plotted out for you by your hosts, but also along our side streets and in our neighbourhoods. This great city and its environs are truly a crossroads, not just of the Americas but also of the wider world, expressing itself in music and song all year round. Come back – any time.
publisher@thewholenote.com
