Naturally then when I glanced the Toronto Sun headline "Artsy Fartsy" my curiosity was piqued. It took some time to find the article (mainly because, like any groomed and well-read university graduate, I read the Toronto Sun from back to front), but when I finally managed to review Joe Warmington's article I too sat broken-hearted, having paid my dime, but no wiser than I started.
Warmington's article decried the attempt by some Toronto councilors to convert the Salvation Army's Bethany House at 420 Pape Ave into an artists' residence. Warmington tries to cover his clear discomfort with the topic of art by raging against government subsidies for the Arts as a waste of taxpayers' money.
"Just what the east end needs," he huffs, "a hippie style commune for poor, starving artists."
Warmington likely meant this as sarcasm. Amusingly, however, this is very likely what Warmington reader's do want. A local artist hippie commune is a means to the end that Warmington's suburban landowning readership loves the most: rising property values. White people, as Christian Lander has sagaciously observed multiple times, eat that kind of shit up. More verbosely, it's called gentrification.
NYC's Greenwich Village is the most cited case-study for artist-induced gentrification but any Torontonian is familiar with the beatnik mood of Queen St W, 401 Richmond, St Lawrence Market, the Distillery District, and Kensington Market.
Bribing artists to squat and act weird in your neighborhood isn't squandering taxpayer money. It's shrewd investing by scheming social architects who want to capitalize on the enduring fundamental truth that a yuppie and his money are soon parted. Or as well-meaning but oblivious white people like to describe it: "Investing in our community," even though it's not theirs just yet.
Rob Ford, predictably, vowed "to open up and rip up" such "deals" if he becomes mayor ...and presumably not recycle the paper either.
I initially suspected Joe Warmington, Rob Ford & Co. revile this kind of fiscal policy because they just don't get the concept of Return On Investment. Then I thought they're trying to cloak their naked philistinism with the mantel of fiscal prudence. More likely though, they're using penny-pinching politics to mask their primary aim of maintaining the current social architecture of drivable suburbia.
You see, artists do evil Communist things like walk and ride bicycles to ad a veneer of wistful romanticism, mindfulness, and profundity to their existence. It's also because they're poor. And that makes them cool. Unless they're stopped, artists and their eco-loving yuppie attendants will inundate council with requests for baby-killing Communist inventions like bike lanes and pedestrian festivals in the east end. This can already by seen in the west-end at Art Spin events where a gaggle of White plaid-laden 20-through-40somethings toddles around the downtown on rattling cruisers, taking in visual stimulus and sucking on croissants.
 |
| Sometimes a croissant is just a croissant. |
I can hear the Rob Ford campaign ad already:
"City councillors want to increase the artistic presence in the east end.
Artists on bicycles. In our city. We're not making this up."
------
A NOTE FROM THE CLOG: If you didn't get the croissant sucker image, then be blest; you are truly pure of heart.
No comments:
Post a Comment