As Revue Cinema faces closure, the fight to save Toronto culture reaches crisis point

If it feels like Toronto culture is under relentless attack, that’s because it is. But there are different battlegrounds, different fights, and different opponents, making a united defence all the more challenging to mount.

Who is to blame? Certainly the big corporations who were once happy to toss quarterly-report pocket change to arts institutions in a bid to burnish their cultural bona fides, and have now callously pulled up stakes. And while pandemic-era market forces are also at play in almost every situation, the changing habits of live-arts audiences only lit the match of the current dumpster fire raging across the city. The gasoline was provided by a frighteningly disparate number of sources.

But there is one brutal through-line uniting these varying calamities: an active distaste and fundamental ignorance of what the arts can do. To put it more bluntly, perhaps in the language of those in positions of power, who have brought so much ruin to Toronto’s front doors, can understand without misinterpretation: stop destroying our vibrant past to ensure your empty, soulless future. As a city, we all have a responsibility to ensure that communities are built not on convenience but culture.

Think about it this way: we are now firmly in an era in which it is impossible to imagine building cultural institutions instead of destroying them.just before the pandemic hit, back in December, 2019, I half-joked that the cinema would be the last to ever be built in Toronto. That gag now seems to be a hard fact.

The situation at the Revue might have shocked much of Toronto, but the bottom has been falling out for a while now. Look around while you can. Because unless a host of forces – all levels of government, all manner of recession-spooked sponsors, all kinds of private citizens from all neighbourhoods – come together, then Toronto might become a mere frame of a city, devoid of a picture.Switch gears. Give your brain a workout and do today's Daily Cryptic Crossword.

Source: Energy Industry News (energyindustrynews.net)

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