Luminato?
The Toronto Star ran a story (Luminato: Success or big disappointment?) this morning offering readers the chance to compare and contrast two opposing views with regard to the inaugural Luminato festival. I missed almost all of the festival, which is to say, I didn’t find it very visible. I’m on Christopher Hume’s side that it represented ‘A businessperson’s notion of a festival‘ but I take issue with his write up: a corporate critic’s notion of a critique. There is far more that can be said about the failure of Luminato, a failure which may not be so explicit simply because the business people involved don’t have the imagination to understand the measure of the disappointment.
Hume writes in his third paragraph, defending some of the work:
‘And who couldn’t help but love Xavier Veilhan’s enormous black balls hanging in the atrium of BCE Place? Or Max Streicher’s floating horses at Union Station? Not to mention Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive light show that has been illuminating the night sky for days?’
I take issue with that first sentence ‘.. who couldn’t love …?’ which is precisely the type of stock-phrase Orwell warned writers against sixty years ago. I raise my hand … I am the Dr. Who of that phrase, he who felt nothing for the works mentioned. I didn’t see the light show, but what did I miss that can’t be seen at the end of August during the CNE or during some other corporate promotion when they beam lights into the sky? I walked by BCE last week and saw the ‘big black balls’ (is there supposed to be a pun in there?) and yawned … like I haven’t seen that kind of thing a million times before. Newsflash: every Christmas you can see a giant dead tree at the TD complex and crap hanging from the ceiling at the Eaton Centre.
Last week in conversation I argued that given current law, in which corporations are considered people, it follows that corporations should have their own inhuman art events. The result is something like Luminato, a ten-day bore-fest while the fleshy people get an insomniac’s night at the cold end of September.
L’Oreal Luminato vs. Scotiabank Nuit Blanche
The most obvious initial criticism can be aimed at the names, and the requisite corporate sponsorship which makes it seem like the bank and the make-up company had something profound to contribute to culture. For centuries, arts festivals have amounted to ‘bread and circuses’ put on by the wealthy to keep the poor from rioting but (as both these festivals have shown) that is no longer necessary in the age of internet porn, video games, and the corporate video art of movies and television.
Nuit Blanche is a French import, and in Paris, the name means ‘white night’. Luminato is a made-up word which sounds Italian or Spanish, and obviously allusive of ‘light’. In English, both of these names just come off as pretentious. Consider that for the French, having a festival named in the common language suggests the integration of art with life, whereas, in English, having it come with a pretentious name suggests the separation of art from life. Apparently culture in Toronto, is something one ‘does’ it is not something that is ‘lived’. Further, the naming problem can equally be found in the awkward acronyms that are attached to the two other cultural events – TIAF and TAAFI. Are we stupid or something? Why can’t we have a simple English name for an art fair, one that indicates the lived experience of culture?
Having said this, I acknowledge the first steps that both festivals represent in moving toward such an integration … both attempts are steps forward in bringing this city a cultural experience.
But let us now consider what we might mean by that: a cultural experience? Is not the goal of both festivals to bring the city something of what Europe has been doing for centuries – cultural events born of a time when the wealthy needed their obvious circuses as much as the poor needed their non-technological entertainments? One thinks of the great weddings and performances, the type of theatrical productions linked to the Medici, and those that Leonardo da Vinci orchestrated for the Duke of Milan; in the sixteenth century, the mystery plays which helped inspire a young Shakespeare to write theatre which is now considered the paragon of English expression. To this day, there are street battles with rotten tomatoes, the running of bulls, and town-square horse-races and matadors … Europe knows something of communal culture, which survives because of human scale, it’s simplicity, it’s emotion, and it’s deep relationship to the past.
And so in this year, there are three examples of super-famous arts festivals happening in Europe: The Venice Biennial, Documenta, and Sculpture Projects in Munster, along with the annual events mentioned above.
Luminato? Nuit Blance? Compared to these we have a long way to go before we measure up. The works highlighted by Hume (there were horses at Union Station?) are examples for the type of redecoration which passes for public art today. I’m partially borrowing from Stephen Colbert’s famous critique of Christo’s ‘The Gates’ in which he mocked the orange curtains as ‘redecorating a bike path’ but it seems to me that the big black balls, the inflated horses, the London-blitz light show only serve to highlight our fear of beautiful environments which enable truly cultured lives, and of art that is made by human beings for human beings in small scale facilities and not former warehouse spaces.
Our society is cruel and appreciates violence, anger, and killing – in short, the inhumane. It’s made stars out of so many people who’s behavior is nothing short of reprehensible. It allows people like Harper, Bush and Blair to govern it. And it aligns culture with corporate sponsorship and thinks that ‘if it’s big it’s good’. Luminato was an arts festival by Boomers for Boomers – and so it brought Philip Glass and Leonard Cohen, Eric Idle and Gore Vidal to town. Given what I said earlier about insincere language, it could have accurately been called the Hasbeenato.
In the featurettes that comes with the Lord of the Rings DVDs, the production designers makes passing comments about how beautiful the sets were, and one designer stated he would have loved to have Bilbo Bagins’ study for himself. My question is, why is this the case? Why is it that we’ve reserved beautiful environments for fantasy films? Why couldn’t buddy build himself that same study if he was able to build it for the film? How is it that beautiful environments – and the culture that goes with it – has come to be seen as a guilty pleasure not for everyday life?
When I first noticed the CGI cityscapes being done for the last Star Trek series, I couldn’t help compare that ‘starchicteture’ with the actual starchitecture going up in my city. Daniel Liebskind’s so called ‘radical’ architecture seem extremely conservative when we consider what we could be building instead, inspired by those alien city-scapes.
This is the disconnect between art and life which needs to be bridged – the separation of imagination into something reserved for fantasy, and the other reserved for quotidian functionality. Liebskind and Gehry provide the example of how that does not need to be the case: the technology is there to build whatever our imagination comes up with. Why do we keep settling for boring things, and limit these starchitects to imagining the unimaginative?
The idea that greatness is expensive (funds are still be raised to pay for the ROM and the AGO) is absurd given how much money is wasted everyday. The decadence of our culture isn’t only in our vast consumption of resources, the improvishment of the 90% of the world so that we can live in a society that is disproportionally and grotesquely rich: it’s rather the squandering that takes place (which makes it seem so unjustifiable to our governments that they should introduce limits and attempt to redistribute resources – it’s easier to continue to be inefficient).
Our inefficient use of our unfairly achieved wealth is triply insulting since we aren’t building the Pyramids – some great wonder of the world which could be considered a universal cultural treasure. No, instead we’re getting The Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Luminato, Michael Lee Chin Crystals, Frank Gehry boats, and cold nights at the end of September for people who can afford to give up a night’s sleep. Considering the money that is potentially available, couldn’t we do something better, something we deserve?
Perhaps though, this all proves that we deserve nothing. These arts festivals amounting to easily forgettable trivialities, in which imagination is not free to express itself when our culture’s true imagination is dictated by television and movies (eagerly paid for and economically self-supporting). This all proves that culturally we already have way more than we need.
If we were asked to give something up in order that people elsewhere have more, chances are we’d barely notice. I barely noticed Luminato, and if the money used for it had been used for some kind of human betterment, we’d be better off. Waterfront light shows, inflatable balloons, hasbeen concerts are worth sacrificing to social justice.
Luminato sucks. It was made by a bunch of snobs for a bunch of snobs. We’ll stick to tried, tested and true for now.
I’d like to see artists pool together their funds and create a contemporary art exhibit that brings a large audience to a city. Without corporate sponsorship we wouldn’t have much of the public access we do today. That said, why can’t art lovers work for corporations? Please do some research into how people give back into communities.
I couldn’t agree more…
this has to be the first article that properly sums up the ‘problem’ of Luminato……
well done..
What an ass! That’s right – keep criticizing the few altruistic qualities that corporate machines do have and then see how much more things will suck when they withdraw their financial support from our communities.
” We’ll stick to tried, tested and true for now.” – what an idiotic statement – that very sentiment tumbles empires!
You MISSED Luminato? HOW? Are you as blind as you are idiotic and simplistic?
Grow up kids and stop being so cynical.
Brandon – I approved your comment on the basis that you deserve to make an ass out of yourself by adopting such an agressive tone. The evil corporations do in the world deserves more critique not less, and it far outways whatever ‘altruism’ they show to placate such criticism in the first place.
I missed Luminato despite working at the very centre of the city’s financial district because the stupid horses were on top of Un Stn and I am not an airplane, but a simple person who walks to and from it ten times a week, with my eyes ahead of me and not up at the sky. Corporate art, like the lights and the balls, tends to orient itself to being missed by placing itself in skies rather than on streets, where it can be noticed and appreciated.
Simalarily, corporations hide themselves in security-lockdown office towers where they feel free to make ruinous descisions at the expense of the people who from that perspective have the same scale as insects. Maybe their altruism would be more genuine if they gained (and supported art that represented) human scale.
Narrow-minded and short-sighted. Too bad.
Hi TC.
Brandon you don’t really say how much more things will suck when they (arts festival supporting corporations) withdraw their financial support from our communities. Perhaps you could elaborate a bit.
[…] I felt the need to comment on the recent Luminato festival over at myblog. […]
Haha, altruistic?
Maybe you should do some research on the money spent on Luminato first, Brandon.
There is an article interviewing one of the organizers on EAP. Not surprising, she is a marketer.
But I will give you my experience, which left a bad taste in the mouth.
We went to the harbourfront portion of it so I can only comment on that aspect. What greeted us there was not art/artists but pavillions of corporate products. One such advertising tent was a thinly veiled rest stop for parents to rest their kids against pillows covered in logos. Another tent had Loreal hair dye products to sample. Those are just two examples of the tents they had.
The big light show, Pulse, was covered in didactics for Tellus. And while the technology definately had a cool factor, it lacked in content.
The saving factor was the musical performance.
If you want to talk about altruisism, why not talk to all the artists who volunteered their work/time for Nuit Blanche. I had friends who had volunteered who thought they would be giving back to the cultural community. Instead, they were asked to hand out bags of swag at a corporate event for Scotiabank.
Just to clarify,
The “stupid” horses were IN the Great Hall in Union Station, not “on top of it”. Therefore, in order to see them, you would not require an airplane, as you say, but you would simply have to be mentally present whilst walking through the station. I honestly don’t know how you could have missed them.
Need we complain about events in which our artists and arts organisations are engaged and working?
I would understand specific critiques, as all events and exhibitions have their issues, but blanketed criticism from someone who admits to not having seen or having taken part in anything, does not sit well with me. Neither does the singular Harbourfront Centre anecdote. For a festival which took place in 20-something venues, to base an opinion on one solitary venue is to misrepresent the others.
What about the positive things that have come out of these events? It appears as though you critics saw and participated in very little throughout Luminato and Nuit Blanche. Your comments are narrow and ill-informed.
I, personally, welcome the beautiful cultural initiatives our city and country offer us. Let’s hope these events iron out the kinks they experienced in their first year and give us something better next time around.
Re: stupid horses in the great hall.
…Granted. I go through Union Stn twice a day, but I do so through the Go Train level, which is beneath the Great Hall. I have (and had) no reason to go through the Great Hall, which I see as being meant for regular rail passengers (not the GTA commuters). It’s for this reason I missed the horses. When I wrote about the airplane thing I was working from a mistaken and vague impression that I’d seen a photo of the horses on the roof. My bad.
Further, I feel my point about the airplanes stands since this basically came from having noticed architecture works better from a bird’s eye view, which probably has something to do with architectural miniature models also providing that perspective. But it’s not a everyday human perspective from ground level.
As for blanketed criticisms … I see criticism as asserting the right to be treated as a human being and not a mindless consumer with uneducated tastes. Luminato treated the citizens that way. As for ‘us critics’ I have no problem with lots of criticism – if it became as much of a hobby as scrapbooking, we’d begin to move toward a better society. Besides, you’re criticizing me, and I in turn and criticizing your critique. That’s the game.
Regarding positive outcomes: is it too soon to tell? (Re: measuring in memories and wonder …). If I hear someone tell me in twenty years time that the light show was a special memory from their childhood I’ll grant that as a successful project. But I also want to reiterate what I wrote about these being first steps. In order to iron out the kinks they need to know what they were, and I was trying to point out what I saw as kinks.
Andrew Harwood dropped me a line. I’ve understood it to imply that I have permission to post it here (unless I’m misunderstanding “I tried to add to your blog but couldn’t so here it is.”:
Hey Timothy,
RM Vaughan reviewed the Illuninati (LOL) Festival (I am all for a Satanic
Festival in Downtown Toronto!!! DUDE) in the Globe as well, I think two
weeks ago. Check it out. I tried to add to your blog but couldn’t so here it
is.
I am not sure the Illuminti organziers had any real audience in mind for its
festival – despite and including its corporate pitfalls. I have heard thru
the grapevine that it was started in part a response to White Night becuase
the Distillery (read Disaster) District was left out of Blanche Mange? – but
that is heresay??
It seemed like a festival for folks who are neither artists nor cultural
workers – but the people engaged (performing or exhibiting) in the fest were
too obscure for a general audience. It does bring up the question of why do
already famous or rich people want to be artists – like Leonard Cohen who is
already a brilliant writer and song maker – terrible singer mind you??!!
I know how difficult it is to organize even a small art event in Toronto. It
seems as though these larger ventures can forget who the audience is and who
to consult when curating and orgazning them. At least White Knight was
fun!!! If Scotia Banl remains a lead sponsor they have to belly up more cash
– they got lead sponsoship for palrty pocket change.
I say bring on more art fairs and festivals as we can jam into one city good
or bad at least they are now happening.
Sincerely,
Andrew Harwood
Though I share your point of view on a few things, I found your review to be extremely negative and broad-brush, criticizing your interpretation of the intent of Luminato without actually checking out much of it for yourself. Seems like your seething preconceptions about corporations got in the way of even trying to find anything good here.
I was personally very impressed with the horses. Their scale was purposefully huge – reflecting the scale of the Union Station environment and very nicely engaging the humans who DO find themselves below, and the fact that they were sewn fabric with all the detail and majesty of marble sculptures was extraordinary.
On the other hand, I absolutely agree with you about the black balls, and said as much to my companions when I saw them. As for human-scale art, there were several containers on the pier near the “l’art boat” dock (not particularly arty boat at all, but a fun, free harbour ferry) which had very human-scale artwork within them, including an incredibly cool hand-assembled whimsical cityscape made from the detritus of consumer culture. I think you would have approved, had you actually seen it.
We also saw a performance in the Spiegeltent that was terrific, and definitely human-scale. It was anything but corporate – a campy, raw, sexy, sweaty, and fun romp a la cabaret.
All this to say that the human stuff was there too. You just have to separate the sour taste of corporate marketing from the joy of discovering artists at work. ‘Newsflash’ back at you: the corporations aren’t going anywhere, so we should learn to live with them and teach them to do more of the things they did well, instead of raining on the whole parade with our preconceptions. Trying to go in with an open mind at the outset will help next year.
PS – I thought Nuit Blanche was extraordinary. I’ll happily thank Scotiabank for enabling giant crowds on city streets at 4am that were neither drunk, nor hurried. That in itself was thrilling.