Toronto is changing dramatically these days, as anyone who lives downtown can tell you. Seemingly hundreds of condo towers are going up, and the city centre is filling in nicely.

Queen West. Image: realestatebrothers.com

I was at an opening the other night and I could just tell that there were condo-dwellers scattered among the artists in the crowd. It made me wonder about the effect of the influx of a group primed for objets d’art – how will this affect the local market? Already Queen Street West and Queen West West, and Dundas West and Liberty village are full of artists, galleries, studios, workshops and boutiques.

The creative scene has been thriving for a few years now, and the local media is responding.The city finally seems to be comfortable in celebrating our own, whether local fashion designers like Jeremy Laing, local artists (Shary Boyle, Kristan Horton among many, many others), musicians, chefs, bartenders, architects and designers.

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Is fashion art? Or ‘only’ craft?

The Montreal fashion designer Denis Gagnon. Image: bestioledemode.com

It’s a discussion that comes up every once in a while, usually when an exceptionally talented fashion designer comes onto the scene. And it presumes that craft is somehow lesser than fine art. But I don’t think it’s any less relevant or important, it is just different. Craft relates to objects which have a use, while visual art is the pure transformation of emotion or thought into a language. But why shouldn’t artists or craftspeople be able to use the language of craft to express an artistic sentiment?

Consider Japanese Living National Treasures, who preserve the tradition of such crafts as ceramics, textiles and lacquerware at the very highest levels. I believe fashion is a craft that can become art. It certainly did in the hands of Alexander McQueen.

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It’s good to hear that designers – and design curators – seem to finally be thinking more in terms of what we need, rather than just what we may want.

Adaptive Eyeglasses. Joshua Silver (British, b. 1946), Adaptive Eyecare Ltd. and Oxford Centre for Vision in the Developing World_CVDW. Image: egodesign.ca

Now that the extreme overload of commodities in the world has reached the point of Freeganism, a reconsideration of design is long past due. Of course, that’s what we’ve all been saying for years, and it’s what Bruce Mau was arguing in his brilliant, if awkwardly curated, exhibition Massive Change at the AGO a few years ago.

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Fashion designer Jeremy Laing, it turns out, is also an avid art collector.

Jeremy Laing’s exhibition. Sign by Derek Sullivan. Image: VoCA

I discovered this on Saturday of the Toronto International Art Fair, when I led a tour for the Canadian Art Foundation’s young patron group, the New Contemporaries, and Laing took the time to show us around the installation that he curated.

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Check out my profile of the young design team Reigo & Bauer, in the current issue of DesignLines magazine. The Toronto couple has renovated a Deco-style building into a number of apartments, retaining many original details. They make the most of the space in their tiny apartment, which opens onto a fantastic roof deck. And they have set up their firm in the offices below.

Click the thumbnails to read (and click again to zoom in):

Harold Klunder, Invisible Plans ( Yellow Self-Portrait), 2007-2010, Oil on canvas. Image courtesy TrépanierBaer and Guy L’Heureux.

4. HAROLD KLUNDER – NEW WORKS – AT TREPANIER BAER

New paintings by one of Canada’s most highly acclaimed painters, Harold Klunder go on view at Trapanier Baer Gallery from October 16 – 13 November.

You’ve gotta love his self-portraits, no? I think they are really, really excellent. One of my favorites – not from this show – is this little series, below:

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Here is another example of how art and life – through design – are drawing closer together all the time. Mirror has a long history in art going back to at least the Renaissance and of course more recently the wonderful pieces by Michelangelo Pistoletto and Michael Snow, David Altmejd and Jeff Wall, among many, many others. Over the past few years, I’ve been predicting the return of mirror as a material in art, and now it’s seemingly everywhere.

Sweden’s Tree Hotel has a room called Mirrorcube. Image: geeknewscentral.com

I came across this awesome hotel room that looks very similar to one of Michel de Broin’s sculptures, his Superficial from 2004, which is essentially a large mirrored rock that he installed in a forest in Alsace, France and then documented. I love the idea of using mirror to create camouflage.

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So we went to New York for five days last weekend. It was the usual late August hot, humid weather but we had two amazing art experiences that made it all entirely worthwhile.

1. Big Bambu on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum.

Doug and Mike Starn’s 40-foot high bamboo structure exemplifies what I always say about artists that do design-y type installations. It’s important to go big. The installation should always overwhelm the viewer so that the viewer feels the effect of the artwork. And that may mean that the artist needs to work for days, months on the project to get it large enough. A lot of young installation artists should heed this advice, I think.

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Every city is full of those little artistic gestures, those flourishes made – sometimes deliberately, often not – by people who take the time to do things a little differently.I think they are too often overlooked – and I find them inspiring. Not as high art of course, but possibly inspiring for architects or designers looking for ways to inject more visual interest in our world.At Harbord and Spadina, a framed piece of fence, decorated with string that blow in the breeze. Continue reading →

I love this proposal by German artist Katharina Fritsch for London’s Fourth Plinth. I love that it appears to be in International Klein Blue, which I blogged about a while ago.

Katharina Fritsch, Hahn / Cock. Image: london.gov.uk

As you probably know, the empty plinth has been a site for artistic proposals over the past few years, including Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley and one of my favorite artists, Thomas Schütte.

Originally designed by Sir Charles Barry in 1841 to display an equestrian statue which was never completed, the empty plinth became a site for contemporary art in 1998.

Six proposals – all very good – by Allora & Calzadilla, Elmgreen & Dragset, Katharina Fritsch, Brian Griffiths, Hew Locke, and Mariele Neudecker can be seen at DeZeen, HERE.

Read more about the Fourth Plinth program HERE.