One thing I love about Toronto is the art. Sometimes random and difficult to fathom, the instances of public and corporate art are liberally shewn about this fine city, igniting thought provoking discourse and in general stimulating our day to day life. Sometimes I don't understand it, I'm not an art critic or anything, but I always appreciate the effort city officials and my fellow citizens go to to create, display and ultimately inspire. Here are two examples of possible interpretations of downtown art:

This piece, "bunch of random little donkeys with curtain", is one of the more mysterious downtown displays. Small burros run amok outside an iron curtain, symbolizing the freedom of commercial coffee growers in capitalist markets, away from the tyranny of communism. Or maybe they're just playing. It's also possible that the curtain is pants, and that the animals are a hallucination being experienced by a member of parliament who'd page has slipped him/her some acid. Lucy in the Sky with Donkeys? You bet.


Proving that small art is just as powerful as the larger displays, this artist has chosen to join a later volume from a standard encyclopedia set with a slightly off colour banana. This combination of nourishment of body and mind is clearly a call to a simpler time of pure essential maintenance, while at the same time calling attention to the price discrepancy in books available in Canada with the foreign US dollar amount, brought rather stealthily to bear with the use of imported fruit. It's an important enough message to cram into a streetlight at eye level.