Obviously!
Soon to be seen on the Leslieville landscape.........Fine art of fighting artsy-fartsy City Hall
You might say Darlene Richards-Loghrin has turned fighting City Hall -- and the taggers who have repeatedly defaced her office building -- into a fine art.
The real estate lawyer, ordered earlier this summer by Toronto East York Community Council (TEYCC) to remove the mural adorning the side wall of the building she owns on Kingston Rd., recently commissioned a new mural for the wall -- from the same high school students who created the first mural.
TEYCC, led by her councillor and self-professed art connoisseur Sandra Bussin, refused this past May to exempt the initial mural as "art" under the city's graffiti bylaw, even though her wall had not been tagged a single time after it went up.
At the time Bussin, who has a fine arts degree from York University, declared she believed the mural was "not great art." She also insisted Richards-Loghrin accept funding from her ward's beautification budget to have a "new expression" done on the wall, something "afresh," with more thought.
But the feisty lawyer -- who was tagged eight times (once with ketchup) after she painted over the mural this past June 21 -- decided to have something new painted the weekend of Sept. 20 instead.
She said she went to the same five students and asked them if they wanted to try again -- which they agreed to do.
"I still think the kids got a raw deal the last time," she said. "I think it (the first mural) was art and it did have artistic merit."
She added there was a Kingston Rd. festival last weekend and a lot of people who came by said they really liked the new offering.
"I haven't had any complaints about it," she said.
Not so, says "Michelangelo" Bussin.
While she felt the current mural is "an improvement over the first attempt," she said she was at a board meeting earlier this week where a member of the community told her the new mural still "fails to meet community standards."
Bussin said she can't do anything unless there is a complaint made to the city's municipal licensing and standards branch.
"Let's see what happens," she told me.
Nevertheless, Her Royal Speakerness couldn't resist chiding Richards-Loghrin for her apparent stubbornness.
"I think her stubbornness not to take advantage of what the city had to offer is unfortunate," she said.
"I think a better rendering could have been done ... I think it (the new mural) failed in what it tried to achieve," Bussin added, insisting somewhat bizarrely that she doesn't have "a personal feeling" about the current mural.
No comments:
Post a Comment