At Torontoist, we're so used to writing about certain niche genres of art—graffiti art, video art, comic art, participatory art, billboard liberation art, performance art, outdoor art, nocturnal art, transit art—that we tend to forget about the encompassing category of "fine art for the commercial market." Canadian and international contemporary art enthusiasts will descend upon the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (255 Front Street West) this weekend from October 25–29 for the Toronto International Art......

Photo of Julie Doiron courtesy of Jagjaguwar. Feminism means different things to different people—and for many people it means something negative. From the angry feminist stereotypes to news outlets simply ignoring it, feminism is an important movement that's gotten a bad rap. Ladyfest Toronto is aiming to change that by throwing a festival that proves feminism can be both fun and political. The festival kicks off next Thursday (the 27th) with a party at......

Reminder: this weekend (September 14–16) is the Queen West Art Crawl, or QWAC ("quack"), where the streets and parks of trendy West Queen West become galleries. What's going on? Well, Parkdale is hosting an exhibition of performance art and installation called Play/Grounds. You can head over to Trinity Bellwoods Park for the outdoor art show/sale or Art That Binds. Check out what's happening at the Gladstone in the evening—you wouldn't want to miss the......

Beginning this Thursday, the fifteenth annual Junction Arts Festival will be swarming the streets with an entourage of innovative musicians, performers, and visual artists hailing from Canada, Denmark, Brussels, and the United States. Taking place on the one kilometre stretch between Quebec Avenue and Keele Street on Dundas Street West, the festival will present the works of over fifty visual artists as selected by the 2007 Juried Art Exhibition—and for the first time, will......

Two Steps Back, the eighth emerging artists show at Interaccess opened last week. Interaccess has been on a bit of a roll of late, having just hosted a workshop with Second Front, the premiere performance art troupe of Second Life earlier this week. This most recent edition of the show playfully orbits the themes of failure and obsolescence. Considering the defining moment of this summer has been an Apple product launch, this mischievous attitude......

Photo of Post Porn Modernists Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens by Julian Cash. It must be nice to write a column for The Globe: you can pass judgment on artists’ work without attending to pesky trivialities like seeing their shows, and project your own insecurities and feelings of lack onto people who are actually changing the world. Herein is a review of a recent show by Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens at Buddies in......

Torontoist has been saying for years that City Council provides better bang for your buck than any other piece of live entertainment in this city. At absolutely no cost (unless you count, you know, taxes), you can attend this extravaganza that combines the spectacle and epic scale of a mega-musical with the manic energy of a really good Fringe show. Each run lasts two consecutive days a month but is often held over to......

On your mark, get set, go register for Run The ROM! The 5km run is scheduled for May 12 and it’s the latest in the Run With Art series from The Movement Movement. The main movers of The Movement Movement, dancer/choreographer Jenn Goodwin and artist/curator Jessica Rose, are inviting the public to run laps of the museum for public art’s sake. You could be running through Ancient Peru or perhaps Heaven or Hell. Sounds exotic!......

By now, following the blog and mainstream media firestorm, almost everyone has seen this week's most discussed web clip involving a bride from hell and a bad hair day. The Star covered the buzz today with comments from Norman Jewison(!), the viral video was discussed this morning on NBC's Today show and it's been viewed almost 2.5 million times on YouTube. The big debate: it it real or fake? Entitled "Bride Has Massive Hair......

It’s an interesting and potentially important time for English language Canadian filmmakers, with several Canadian films managing to reach cult hit status, such as It’s All Gone Pete Tong and The Life And Hard Time of Guy Terrifico. With only five percent of movies seen by Canadians made by Canadians (according to the program guide) and the writer of It’s All Gone Pete Tong Michael Dowse expressing a wish for Canadian content quotas for cinemas......

The Art of Slam, a spoken word performance art in which poets spit their pieces in the hope of getting a good score from the audience, was probably best-documented in the 1998 feature film Slam. In the movie, a young Saul Williams becomes a rapper/poet/writer in response to the harsh police-as-predators community in which he lives. This music could accurately be described as intensely verbose, though never as misunderstood as its way more popular cousin.......

Shameless, the little magazine that could, celebrates its first birthday tonight with a semi-formal distillery district birthday fete. There will be dancing, there will performance art, and there will be cake. Will people really get all decked out in their former prom finery for a fancy dress launch? We're not sure, but any opportunity to wear a cumberbund should be acted upon posthaste. Mariko Tamaki and Leah Lakshmi perform, among others. $7.......

OCAD loves its pick-up stick parthenon, and they think you should to. Whatever your opinion of the checkerboard on air, you must like a good party. And tonight's Night of the Unboring aspires to be one. The dinner party is sold out, but tickets for the performance-y art afterparty remain. What kind of performances, you ask? Here's what they offer: "Live video mixing by Blue Guerilla Media will project the best of new media......

Good news. Eastern Front Gallery is up and challenging Bruce Mau's massively-hyped and masterfully-disorganized EPCOT AGO show with a rebuttal called Massive Response. The show, which opened yesterday, presents works by twenty-three artists, which run from the humorous to the mildly profound. The gallery is also presenting a series of lectures in tandem with the show. Tonight "curator Ron McKay delivers a provocative keynote address: “Spitting on a Hummer as Performance Art,” which will......

At 9pm tonight Fabian Marcaccio, an artist from New York, will be directing a firing squad of 8 paint-ball gun wielding painters at the AGO. Fabian will be making a large scale painting on the walls of Weston Hall, which happens to be the front lobby. While this is going on, a band will be performing an original score written for this event by Claudio Baroni, the South American composer. This will be unique performance......