explorations in toronto art.

Considering my love of end-of-year lists, and my recent forays into web analytics, it seemed to make sense to wrap up the year with a bit of statistical info and goal-setting for this blog. I’m not one to put too much stock in pageviews, since that number doesn’t say much about what people actually thought about what I was writing, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Permit me to navel-gaze…

Top posts (determined by number of hits):

• Flash Forward Festival: half the picture.
• Nuit Blanche recap.
• Art with Heart.
• The Digital Image Bank.
• art fair culture.

I wanted to list the most commented posts and contrast them, but.. the level of commenting on this blog is extremely low. I hope to be able to do something about this in the coming year; it would be nice to hear other people’s opinions about the things I am writing about.

Busiest day: October 19, 2010, with 91 hits.

That day, I posted a refocusing entry, and updated the look of my blog with some additional info pages. I’m not sure why this turned out to be the day on which more people accessed my blog than any other day.. but such is a mystery of the internet. I averaged 10 hits/day in 2010, but in October 2010, I averaged double that. October was also my most prolific month, with 6 posts.

How often did I write?

I averaged 3 posts/month. I wrote the most in autumn (September-December), which is when I began writing regularly for BlogTO and taking blogging more seriously. I also set a goal for autumn, to write 2 reviews per month. I accomplished this for all four months I was counting, and hope to keep this rate going.

I wrote the least in February and May, only once each, and not at all in April. Looking back, I can’t account for this lapse, except that I was involved in a time-sucking curatorial project in April.

What are the goals for next year?

In 2011, I want to try to encourage more comments, and continue posting 2 reviews per month (hopefully at more regular intervals than in 2010– even on the same day of the week, biweekly).

I plan to push my BlogTO gallery profiles a little further. After having written eight of them (!), I can see how easily they could become formulaic if I don’t stay sharp. They’re short, and they’re a fairly simple brand of service journalism, helping readers decide if they want to visit and throwing in a few interesting tidbits, but in general, constraints often push creativity even further.

For the first quarter of the year, I’m taking a copy-editing class. I’m usually rigorous about spelling and grammar when I blog, but it might be a good exercise to go one step further: choose a house style and stick to it on here.

Briefly, I flirted with the idea of translating my posts into French, to see if I could do it. I’m tentatively adding this to my goal list: once a month, I will at least try.

I am also trying to increase the scope of things I go and see. I’ve been loving LE Gallery (and visiting it is very convenient for me), but I think it’s important that I try to look in other neighbourhoods around the city. My visit to Labspace Studio on assignment for BlogTO was eye-opening, and I’m going to continue to carve out my niche by writing about exhibitions, artists, and galleries that aren’t on the bigger radars yet.

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.