Hey folks!
When considering a full issue’s worth of arts writing, I’m reminded of a great quotation from Mr. Burns on The Simpsons: “I don’t know art, but I know what I hate … and I don’t hate this!”
It’s brilliant how much those words encapsulate the aesthetic tastes of probably 80 per cent of the people I know. (I often include myself in this category—I can’t explain why I love Jackson Pollock, but I know why I don’t care for Robert Rauschenberg; I know Michael Bay sucks, but the particular genius of Paul Thomas Anderson is always just out of my grasp.) Most of all, it captures one of the great paradoxes of writing about the arts in any form—it’s easy to explain where something fails in your aesthetic opinion, but much harder to suggest how it can be improved in a way that’s consistent with the artist’s own internal monologue. Where is it our place to suggest how they feel? Or how they should feel? Or to suggest they aren’t feeling deeply enough?
This issue features several pieces that approach the issue of what it means to be an artist and the compromises and challenges that entails. The difficulty is best encapsulated in our photo shoot about the day jobs of artists, the story of a U of T producer trying to make it in the competitive hip hop industry, and a defence of the distinctly un-lucrative proposition of getting a BFA. We also have interviews with artists about the struggles of their process, from Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo to the legendary Daniel Johnston and local gay filmmaking icon Bruce LaBruce (the only article in this issue, I should note, that asks the equally provocative question “Where is the line between art and porn?”).
One prevailing theme that runs throughout the issue is the relationship, and boundaries, between art and the broader world. We have a brief anecdotal history of Toronto’s struggle to produce public art in the face of unfettered development, and a profile of Kensington galleries that shows how a neighbourhood can become defined by its creative spaces. Even closer to home, two of our staffers take a tour of artwork hidden in plain sight across campus. And Dan Epstein’s piece on transmedia (advertising and installations that literally put you inside the world of a movie) directly addresses the question of what art becomes in the context of public space. Where do the barriers lie between audience and author, advertising and art, reality and play? Great art generally provokes more troubling questions than it answers, and parts of this magazine try to do the same.
We’ve included more illustrations and fiction in the magazine this year than in previous iterations, including a three-page “literary mashup” that turned out far more successfully than I would have ever thought. We received a remarkable number of entries from our open call, and while I would like to thank everyone who applied, I can assure you, we here at The Varsity couldn’t agree on anything. And we will be posting more stuff to the website, so look out for that.
We sincerely appreciate your feedback on the issue, our chosen pieces, or even your thoughts on culture in general. I hope you like the issue—I certainly don’t hate it, which, as I believe, is the highest praise I can give.
Thanks for reading,
Chris Berube
Features Editor
