explorations in toronto art.

You might have noticed things look a little different around here.

As I’ve been meaning to do, I changed the appearance of my blog to better accommodate the longer posts I’ve been writing. This fixed a lot of formatting issues too. Phew!

I also added some info pages— you can find them on the sidebar. The new denizens of this blog are About, Statements, Archive, and Links; all pretty self-explanatory, I think. Check them out and tell me what you think!

The Statements page is something I’ve had planned for a while, but agonized over writing. I wrote it to guide myself while I write, and I shared it so you readers could find out a bit more. The writing I do here is part of my professional practice, so it only makes sense to treat it that way.

I have a soft spot for year-in-review lists. From the best albums of the year, to the what-kinds-of-exciting-things-did-you-experience surveys that I used to post in my old online journal, I find a certain satisfaction in organizing the year into lists, and ranking them in order of relevance.

Well, more accurately, I get a lot of enjoyment out of reading the results of other people’s lists of the year, organized and ranked. This December there’s been a double-dose, with top-ten lists of the entire decade, too. I realize most of this is a product of the media industry consuming and regurgitating itself, yet I can’t get enough of this fluff, especially in the long airport waits and idle internet reading time I’ve had so much of over the past week or two.

Because it’s no use trying to list my own top albums of the decade  or similar (I’m neither well-informed nor willing enough to add my drop in the bucket), I’ve decided to do this meta-style and gather my top five end-of-year-lists:

1. Torontoist. The originality of their “Heroes and Villains” lists, and the artwork, is what makes these two lists the winners. Though they are unranked, voting remains open until midnight tonight and they will choose a best and worst thing about Toronto in 2009. It is strangely cohesive, though it includes a mix of arts, politics, and general ups and downs. Special mention goes to the Toronto Public Library getting the love it deserves, The Power Plant (which I’m continually intrigued by following my late discovery of it), Yann Martel getting called on his bullshit, and saying no to negativity– somewhat ironic considering the list, but I’m glad they were willing to poke fun at themselves for making a list of Toronto’s villains.
2. The A.V. Club. I’m a sucker for an end-of-year album list that goes up to 25, contains some things I hadn’t heard before but sound promising, and is just really well-written and thoroughly justified. And certainly a sucker for a list that places some of my favourites near the top.
3. Now Magazine (Art Section). Any attempt to make sense of the phenomena that characterized the decade in the art world is OK by me.
4. Books. There are a few ways this can be done. The Globe and Mail breaks it down by genre, Paste gives us the context of the decade and identifies trends (and tops the list with a recent favourite), and Good Reads‘ voting system makes it parallel the bestseller list (and my mom’s book club) very closely.
5. Movies. To the A.V. Club again. Their listing of the top 50 movies of the decade (sadly nameless 00s), is made more interesting by their separate list of the ones “from the cutting room floor,” that didn’t make it on the top 50 list.

It is somewhat of an exercise in futility– I can’t see much usefulness in these kind of lists, other than my voracious consumption of them. I doubt that reviewers, historians, or anyone other than obsessive superfans will read them after January 1. But they are really more about the process of compiling and arranging than the end result, and that’s probably why we keep making them.