*insert something clever here about bombs*

I actually don’t have many deep, long-winded comments regarding the debacle currently arising around Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson’s bomb hoax at the ROM but do want to be explicit about my choice of link on this subject, the Torontoist being one of a handful of media outlets actually explaining the nature of the art project that prompted the evacuation of an AIDS charity-dinner do-dah when Jonsson’s fake pipe bomb (complete with the note, ‘This is not a bomb’) was found outside the ROM Wednesday evening.

This incident first came to my attention via the ubiquitous family television(s), and the esteemed reporters therein were content to simply relate the terror of the bomb scare, the great cost of the evacuation and subsequent cancellation of a lavish charity dinner and dismissively - nay, I’d say derisively - explain that this was all caused by a ’so-called’ art project by an OCAD student. The troubling thing about the media’s instinctive contempt here is that by refusing to discuss the matter and content of Jonsson’s intervention at the ROM, I had no means by which to judge Jonsson’s actions as either art or crime until I sought out the details first-hand - no way of knowing whether the ‘hoax’ consisted of a physical bomb, a faked explosion, a sodding phone call, even. So for the time being, what the general public gets is the vague impression of some cocky shit of an artist doing something destructive, and doesn’t he just deserve everything he’s got coming to him - which at the moment, would so far consist of $30,000 bail charges and the possible confiscation of his Icelandic passport.

Given how rapidly OCAD has caved in suspending not only Jonsson but also two of his instructors, I don’t hold out great hopes for any meaningful defense of the artist in this scenario, and I’m not sure I’ll be offering one here either - quite frankly, it’s just a student project treading pretty predictable conceptual ground, so I’m not particularly fussed about hailing his brilliance even with the subsequently spectacular results. But I’m loathe to see Toronto’s contemporary artists taking on the scorn of an outraged but ill-informed public just because of a student art stunt gone rather misunderstood. And at the risk of being disgustingly unfashionable, this wouldn’t be half the circus it’s become if that ritzy AIDS benefit weren’t an unexpected casualty of it all. In either case, the social divide arising here, the one that’s seeking to separate contemporary artists from the nice respectable folk, is more worrying than the temporary postponement of a fancy charity dinner.

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