Ladies and gentlemen, we realize that the following may not be the best thing for a critic of any stripe (let alone a stripe so platonically ideal as ourselves) to admit, but we are nothing if not truthful; as soon as we received the notice for the "Love/Hate: New Crowned Glory in Toronto," exhibit at MoCCA, we were prepared to make the full swing to the right of that titular forward slash and hate every bloody inch of it. The whole affair reeked of David Liss' usual brand of adolescent lapel-grabbing tactics: the absurd typeface of the show's title (this, of all things, seems to be Mr. Liss' calling-card; if it looks like it was downloaded from wildandcrazyfonts.com, then it must be a MoCCA show), and the blustering air-headedness of the curatorial statement, which begins by declaring itself "spectacularly contentious," and continues thus (it's worth quoting in full):

"Traditionally it is the role of museums to sort through a particular theme, idea or art scene or movement and arrive at a proposition that will distill an idea down to a palatable, life-force sucking antiseptic theory that assumes an audience's need for clean, easily definable and consumable product. But that approach is, like, sooooo last century and naturally compels MOCCA to peel off into the completely opposite direction. And, more importantly, the best thing about the current Toronto art scene is that it is anything but a neat, clean, easily definable, generic mass or school like the scenes in other Canadian cities that won't be mentioned here. The Toronto scene is far too complex and far too interesting to be tagged by branding geniuses, marketing focus groups or pointy-headed academics. It's a big, contentious, eclectic, messy and confusing scene filled with as many armchair curators and critics as there are Maple Leaf coaches and that's what's so great about it! And that's what this sprawling exhibition celebrates - the unruly spirit, the gnarly soul, the dirt in the grooves, the talent, the eccentricity, the beauty and the unappealing splendour of it all!

"And just to get a little extra blood and oxygen flowing to the brain to enhance the viewing experience - and to promote good health and active cultural engagement - exercise machines, a pool table and a foosball game will be available in the gallery for your recreation and relaxation. To live in Toronto and be able to stay abreast of the art scene here, you have to be in good shape. Love it, hate it, hate to love it or love to hate it. It's bold, it's loud, it's unwieldy, its flamboyant - and this exhibition is proud to state that it's... TORONTO!!"

Sigh. If only.

Before we get to dissecting this ludicrous bit of cock-waving, let us put certain matters to rest: the show is not contentious, not bold, not terribly flamboyant, was only loud during the opening (courtesy the amplified shouting of Toronto's other perpetual adolescent, Istvan Kantor), and only unwieldy in the sense of its poor, half-hearted stab at curatorial organization. In fact, the show is, with certain exceptions here and there, a survey of leftovers, by and large old work from a selection of those who haunt Queen Street West. Mr. Liss and his "partner in crime" ( pace the statement) Camilla Singh have done nothing in the way of establishing context or drawing connections between work. Artists are isolated from each other, islands of their work separated by prairies of white wall.

Still, despite our irritated prejudices, we did not end up hating it. What with the grand assembly of re-runs, we couldn't muster anything much beyond a resigned shrug. And so it makes little sense to really tear into it; what one makes of it really rather depends on what one made of it the first time around. There are inclusions we could have lived without: the Movement Movement, for instance, possibly the silliest contribution to performance art that Toronto has yet to produce (what point, exactly, do their gallery jogs serve?   As a reminder of how little time people spend looking at art?   A comment on literally how far a vacuous idea will take you, assuming you know the right people?) Mike Hansen's red carpet installation (where a procession of flash bulbs astride said carpet go off as one walks by) struck us as trite when we first came across it at Pleasure Dome's 2007 New Toronto Works show, and, though it is a better fit here given its cloddish approach to bombast, our opinion remains unchanged. On the upside, Bruce LaBruce's collaboration with burlesque troupe the Scandelles, "Give Piece of Ass a Chance," was a light romp (buoyed by the radiant and unbridled enthusiasm of Ms Sasha von Bonbon). We liked Margaux Williamson's paintings and R.M. Vaughan's and Jared Mitchell's "Live Without Culture" banners well enough then, and we like them just as much now. Of the inclusion of the latter, we wonder if Mr. Liss and Ms Singh, a.k.a. the Bonnie and Clyde of MoCCA, were aware of the irony radiating like Chernobyl fall-out off of those ceiling-high banners; like the original City of Toronto promotional program they were meant to spoof, those banners sit atop yet another example of shit-eating self-publicity and mindless self-congratulation.

No, the most interesting part of the show is that excruciating pile of false, overweening enthusiasms that make up that curatorial statement, not for what they say, necessarily, but for what they assume. Clearly, this show is meant as some kind of response to that other Toronto show that befouled the Power Plant. This, one assumes Mr. Liss is shouting, is how you do Toronto right. But, whereas the Power Plant at least tried to tether their bland mess to the alleged wider cultural obsession with urban planning, Mr. Liss has seemingly nothing to offer aside from his own barometers of taste, and has let this dog of a show roam will-nilly. As a result, what ends up happening is that, far from showing the Power Plant up, or drawing attention to its deficiencies, MoCCA has done them one worse: drawing exactly the same conclusions, albeit with less intellectual rigor, no curatorial effort, and in sillier language to boot. All right, three worse.

If you peel away the boosterism, the swagger, the puerile attempt at outdated valley girl vocabulary (which is, like, sooooo nausea-inducing), what remains is exactly the same sentiment that made the Power Plant show such a waste of institutional energies. The idea that Toronto art-making is a varied affair is the most common of commonplaces, the most universal of generalities. This is not some fundamental defining fact of Toronto; the "this is the big-city" excuse that both institutions hide behind will not wash. There are far bigger cities in this world than ours, ones that also have numerous artists with disparate practices. That is, in point of fact, one of the defining aspects of cosmopolitanism: that, at any given moment, there are a number of people doing a number of different things. And so here, at the curator's disposal, is an entire city's worth of art, made at a given moment when, allegedly, there is much curiousity and attention being paid to Canadian art. Think of the opportunity, ladies and gentlemen: here, at this pivotal hour, is the chance to showcase our city's work, to assemble an epoch-defining collection highlighting Toronto's art-affective powers, to offer genuine insight into what makes Toronto art unique, and what happens? Mr. Liss and Ms Singh, just like Gregory Burke and Helena Reckitt, resort to that most definitive of Canadian characteristics: definition by exclusion; don't ask us what we are, here is what we aren't.

Of course, Mr. Liss and Ms Singh spin like whirling dervishes to distract from what their statement makes so painfully clear: defining movements, even attempting to point at them as they go by, is "life-force sucking," the tedious work of "branding geniuses, marketing focus groups or pointy-headed academics." (We wonder if they realize that this implies that they are too dumb to undertake such work. We wonder further whether or not they realize that they insult their audience by shifting the blame onto them for being so simple as to desire such summary in the first place). Fighting the appearance of homogeneity like it was a bad case of crabs, Toronto's art production is "big, contentious, eclectic, messy and confusing." Making excellent use of the imperative tense, we are commanded to "Love it, hate it, hate to love it or love to hate it." Of course, this is, in actuality, not a command but an evasion, a covering of any and all bases by anticipating any and all possible audience reaction, like an insecure child desperate for your love. Still, after all the carnie-barking has echoed its last, the curatorial statement boils down to this: Toronto is not Vancouver. Toronto is not Montreal. Toronto hasn't produced a school. Toronto hasn't produced a movement. MoCCA is just as afraid of pointing out commonalities or being decisive as everyone else seems to be. Enjoy your foosball.

So ladies, and gentlemen, here is our 64,000$ question: why is this? How is it that two centres of contemporary art of Toronto have failed to make anything of their own city? Wherefore this reluctance, and what does it bode?

First things first: let us, in our infinite wisdom, lay to rest the poisonous fallacy that is the root of all this uncomfortable evasion; the idea that art history and its institutions define schools or movements, thereby drying them out and fixing them in place, like a baking kiln would to a moist mound of mutable clay. This is a myopic, if common, misreading of the processes by which art history and art criticism (for really, they are, if not sisters, then sisters-in-law) function, one made for the most part by those who seek to establish radical credentials by throwing stones at the walls of institutions, as opposed to picking at their foundations.

In fact, this process of definition and organization happens rather late in the game, long after the fact, once there is a comfortable distance of hindsight. Artists are always the immediate means by which this happens. There are a number of famous schools of the 20 th century, and all of them resulted in a congregation of artists who willingly defined themselves by working together, showing together, and most importantly of all, by drinking together. A more apt metaphor for the process of art critical definition is that of a bunch of dinner guests who arrive after all the food has been eaten, and they have to sort out what was served by poking through the dirty dishes. In other words, by the time the critics come around to the process of definition, it has already occurred. And art historians get around to it by examining the jottings of the critics. And so it goes.

A note, then, to Mr. Liss, Ms Singh, Mr. Burke, and Ms Reckitt: the artistic coalescing and congealing which you so fear has, by the time you've got around to finding a spot in your programming calendars for it, already long-since happened. Your role in all this, in fact, your job (i.e. why you are where you are, and why the rest of us care) is to offer your two cents. This is what any large institutional group show is meant to be: an opinion, an argument. To collect a group of work under the pretense that there is no common thread is not only an abdication of responsibility, it is, to be crass about it, an abdication of your job descriptions.

Still, we have yet to answer our own questions, which hang Scheherezade-like above our head: wherefore this fear of schools and movements? And what are the Toronto schools and movements?

The latter is easily answered. We should point out, while we're on the subject, that the one successful show of a Toronto School was put on by Phillip Monk at the AGYU, a show we reviewed in our very first outing, and a show which, when seen in this light, we appear to have terribly, almost criminally, misjudged. Nostra culpa. Mr. Monk's "Sinbad in the Rented World" did indeed capture a movement, one that is terribly vital to this city's art production, and one that continues to work feverishly, and (most importantly) one that continues to expand and propagate: its queer movement. Like any movement, it is a web of friendships and collaborations (and sometimes romances). What rankled us when we first saw the show was, in retrospect, our confusion between conspiracy and school, our failure to recognize that what binds these people together is, first, a shared aesthetic, which in turn leads to friendship. The appearance of a clique (we believe our caustic words were "gay art mafia") masks the much deeper roots of artistic practice, which is truly the axis around which these souls orbit.

There are other communities in this city. Its video art scene is closely knit and can be parsed according to shared aesthetic concerns and influences. Its politically engaged art strain is taut and fibrous. Likewise, there are shoals of painters who can be corralled together. Furthermore, there are overlaps, like a variegated Venn diagram. In point of fact, we would venture to posit the following: that, contra MoCCA and The Power Plant, it is not a question of Toronto art practices being so disparate and varied, but rather, the complexity of arranging a Toronto show arises from the fact that there are a series of commonalities and communities (a.k.a. schools and movements) that are all interconnected. This is a small art scene, in a small city, after all; almost everyone knows each other, and certainly there is opportunity aplenty for all to be exposed to each other's practices. The challenge in erecting a Toronto show would be to track those threads of interconnection, to sort them so that one can have a clear picture of the living mechanism that is this city's art.

The former question (we will pause, ladies and gentlemen, whilst you quickly flip back to refresh the memory) is not so easily answered. Our fear of self-definition is, for our money, much more keyed into national psychology, and its remedies lie in the behaviours of the gears that crank this particular living mechanism.

Robert Hughes, in talking of his own native Australia's fear of self-promotion, outlines what he calls "the Cultural Cringe": "[...] the assumption that whatever you do in the field of writing, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, dance or theater is of unknown value until it is judged by people outside your own society."   We couldn't have put it better ourselves. Toronto institutions are at pains not to define this city because secretly, we suspect, they lack the authorial confidence to pound the gavel of critical judgement. Consider, ladies and gentlemen, that Toronto loves nothing so much as its prodigal children. They are somehow proof that there is something in this city worth exporting; we attain intrinsic value only when we are deemed valuable elsewhere - New York, say, Los Angeles, or Berlin (in fact, we understand that Berlin has established a "Kleine Toronto" section of the city).

This quandary has been alleviated slightly by the virulent advent of art fairs. Despite our apocalyptic belief that they signal the approaching bust of mercantile aspect of the art world, local commercial galleries can hock their wares on shores international (or at the very least, Miami Beach); but what of those without commercial representation?   The catch 22 of the emerging artist in this city (and this country, for that matter) is by now a matter of cliché: nothing attracts local commercial galleries more than the scent of those who have proved themselves Elsewhere; and no foreign gallery will exhibit you until you have built a properly substantial CV that demonstrates local interest and popularity.

And so the solution, ladies and gentlemen, is to be found (we fear) in the pages of any pop-psychology book on dating: no one will love you until you have learned to love yourself. The trouble is, we haven't. The evidence of this lies in a set of behaviours, behaviours which, we hasten to add, certainly set us apart from other great art metropolises. The solution lies, of course, in their alteration.

In theory, Toronto is primed to be a great self-loving art metropolis for much the same reasons that Mr. Liss confuses for a curatorial stance. In fact, he is right to point out our difference from Vancouver and Montreal. Unlike Vancouver, which has yet to get over its thrill at producing Wall, Lum et. al., and remains vaguely hostile to things outside of photography and installation, the appetite for art media is wide and promiscuous, and generally, there is space for any- and everything. Unlike Montreal, there is an active and generally open market for art buying, thus ensuring that there is something financially at stake for exhibiting artists in this city. The factors are in place. So what is amiss?

The fact is that, by and large, the Toronto art scene is stagnant, and the behaviours and attitudes of its gallerists and collectors have encouraged and abetted its stagnancy. In every major art centre we can think of, there is an enormous amount of attention paid to graduating shows, of both the graduate and undergraduate variety. Consider that the British art scene was defibrillated back into international currency by the shopping habits of Charles Saatchi. What did he do?   He took his wallet to graduating shows around the city and bought these young turks (at least, the young turks he had a yen for) clean out, and then showed off his purchases like they were new outfits. Local reputations surged into international reputations almost overnight. And this is not the exception: gallerists in New York and Los Angeles keep a keen eye on the goings on of the graduate students that are pumped out every year. Any art scene needs a constant supply of fresh blood, and most gallerists and buyers know exactly where to find it.

The graduating shows here pass largely without comment, and there aren't that many of them; OCAD is the only undergraduate institution that has a smattering of graduating shows every year, and only University of Toronto and York have graduate programs. Imagine what would happen, ladies and gentlemen, if the gears of our art mechanism - the gallerists and the buyers and to some extent, the critics - actually paid serious attention to these exhibits. Imagine what would happen if there was some kind of continuity between our academic institutions and the city in which they reside; imagine if, like in the other great metropolises of the world, there was something immediately at stake in undertaking and completing an art degree. This would provoke fantastic competition among our students, and a little competition goes a long way, especially in a field whose practitioners and educators still value personal expression above craft (1). Imagine the talent that would attract to our city; imagine how much talent would opt to stay in this city, instead of being forced to go where the interest is. And it must be said: there is little to no interest in young artists in this city. Now, we are aware that the Bank of Montreal has just announced a high-profile competition for undergraduates, and this is certainly a welcome drop in the bucket, but it is nonetheless just a drop. One corporate competition is not enough to instigate a sea change in gallerist mentality. Our favorite anecdote of voracious gallerist greed is during the 2005 PS1 Greater New York show (a show curated from an open call), when dealers, in a furious bid to claim the Next Big Thing from among the 150 exhibitors, were going around with pencils, claiming artists by scrawling "courtesy of..." their gallery directly on individual pieces' identification tags. Now, such a feeding frenzy borders on the absurd, but consider the likelihood of such an event occurring here.

We cannot overstate this point: no prominent Toronto gallerist cares that much about the work of young artists. It goes without saying that the Yorkville herd hasn't cared for anything contemporary, let alone current, in as long a time as our memory is capable of conjuring (consider that the more active of the Yorkville galleries have decamped and moved south). They rely extensively, almost exclusively on their back catalogues of the scraps of middling work by senior, more international artists that they've snatched up through auction or other connections. Thus, they are doing nothing for Toronto artists, and nothing for the cultural export (and thus, the cultural self-image) of our city's wares. There is some consolation to be had in the fact that, very soon indeed, they will stop resembling galleries and start resembling slightly fancier and more culturally elite versions of high-end furniture shops. But that is a small, cruel consolation, indeed.

The Queen West strip fares only slightly better, in that they actually regularly exhibit the new work of people who live here. Perhaps the sluggishness of the summer season is to blame, but lately, darlings, we have succumbed to the feeling that we see the same shows by the same people over and over again. We walk through the Queen West galleries, and we are gripped by déja vu. Their stables of artists are just that: stable, to the point of narcolepsy. We exaggerate; indeed, some of these gallerists can throw up a hell of a show; Katharine Mulherin has been a particular favourite since the inception of this, our little endeavour, and more often than not, Paul Petro's offerings are worth a gander. We were terribly excited at the opening of Jessica Bradley's commercial gallery, as we believe she is a cultural operator of particular finesse, and a singular taste-making presence. But she falls prey to the very same syndrome we have been outlining at such great lengths: an irksome negligence of emergent talent, relying exclusively on sure-bet horses. Don't mistake us, ladies and gentlemen: among the gaping multitudes of artists that populate this little burgh of ours, a great many of are fine, intelligent cultural producers; and a minority are truly exceptional artists, whose new work we always anticipate eagerly. But this is not enough to carry an entire city's art scene.

Let our broken record skip again: fresh blood is needed. Certainly, there is already much to brag about in Toronto's art scene, and much to proudly publicize. Certainly, we are in the midst of some kind of gain of momentum, or at least an extended moment of some kind. But as long as galleries refuse to take the necessary gambles on as-yet unproven horses, and as long as institutional curators like Mr. Liss, Ms Singh, Mr. Burke and Ms Reckitt continue to be deferential and indecisive, until they surmount their fear of the definitive and categorical, our city's art offerings will never get the trumpet blowing they deserve, and our fresh blood will continue to seek grander opportunities elsewhere. There will still be schools and movements, groupings of the talented and brave who have opted to remain in this city. But, if we may indulge a pessimistic prediction, there will, in this murky indefinite future, be less reason to tout our accomplishments, and thus even more evasion of the definite and categorical, because by then, truly, our moment will have passed.

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