culture
Your Guide to Nuit Blanche 2011
The annual free all-night contemporary art event is back this Saturday, love it or hate it. Here's how to make the most of the white night.
Adventurous artgoers take over Yonge Street at Nuit Blanche 2010, 9:06 p.m. Photo by Miles Storey/Torontoist.
Because you can’t even blow your nose in this city right now without wondering about the economic implications (should the City pay for the waste caused by our head colds, after all?), this year’s Nuit Blanche brings with it some interesting questions.
As Rob Ford himself has said, Nuit Blanche is a cultural event that puts Toronto on the international stage, draws thousands of tourists, and generates over 70 million dollars for the city. It seems like so long ago that it consisted of a mere 400 artists and drew a measly 425,000 spectators. That was 2006. It’s 2011 now, and Nuit Blanche is boasting 134 projects involving over 500 local, national, and international artists, with attendance that’s likely to break one million. Its sheer size in both geography and attendance may draw the most ire from pessimistic Picassos, but it’s also the reason why Nuit Blanche is one of the few cultural events that—at least until now—was pretty much untouchable by budget cuts.
This year, the core exhibit, Flightpath Toronto, is a pop-up network of ziplines among the buildings of City Hall to simulate a bird’s flight (that began “popping up” several days ago, which kind of dashes the fantasy of it all, no?), so it’s safe to say that this free all-night contemporary art event won’t be getting any smaller, and nor will the queues. So much better to embrace the eccentric extravaganza that is Nuit Blanche! There are some organizational decisions that should help: the zones are tighter and closer together, so at least the commissioned projects won’t be such a journey to see, and the Night Navigator app (tough luck for Android users) and My Night planner are back. We already told you the curators’ highlights for each zone, but now Torontoist is here to offer our advice as to what to see, how to get there, and how to make this white night red hot. Planning on skipping it anyway? Have it your way, but you can still follow our live updates throughout the night.
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