This morning, Mayor Miller and City Librarian Jane Pyper announced an expansion of the Museum & Arts Pass program. Initially kicked off 18 months ago, the Museum & Arts Pass program made a limited number of museum passes available at 24 library branches in "priority" neighbourhoods. As of March 7, the program will expand--but more for some museums than for others. One group of museums has agreed to expand their access program to all 99 branches of the Toronto Public Library. This means that soon library card holders will be able to pick up passes for the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Gardiner Museum of Ceramics, the Bata Shoe Museum, Black Creek Pioneer Village, the Textile Museum of Canada, the Toronto Historic Museums and the Museum of Inuit Art at all library sites. Another, smaller, group of museums is only expanding the program to 8 more libraries, for passes available at a total of 32 branches. These museums include the Royal Ontario Museum, the Ontario Science Centre and Casa Loma. It's also worth noting that the admission guidelines vary for each museum. For example, where the MAP pass is good for 2 adults and 5 children at the AGO, it is only good for 2 adults and 2 children at the ROM and 2 adults and 3 children at the Gardiner.

More info on the closing of David Mirvish Books in an email from Eleanor Johnston, the store's manager: "I think the most succinct answer to the question of the bookstore closing is that there are not enough booksales for the endeavour to be satifying. I don't mean to be coy, but to say it is not "worthwhile" would mean that it is all about money. Which it is not. There has been much satifaction in the projects and community around the bookstore. Thus the seemingly simplistic phrase "it's time" is the best way to describe it." One staff member ...

Sad News: David Mirvish Books on Art, a Toronto art-and-lit institution (with a Frank Stella painting to boot) told employees earlier this week that it will be closing February 5 or thereabouts. The Globe Books blogger James Adams went public with the news yesterday. The bookstore had already informally started to notify people coming in with gift certificates that they should use them up before the end of the month. I understand that Amazon has got the best of most bookstores, but this is a shock. For some time, people informally speculated that the ...

Whenever I visit my dad in South Florida, we go to the Aventura Mall. It's a long story, but basically my dad loves shopping. Love might be too weak a word, actually, but it gives you a starting idea. Interestingly, last time I was there I found something to love too—the mall's contemporary art program. Now this program does not mess around. There's work by artstars like Julian Opie, Lawrence Weiner, Louise Bourgeois and Jorge Pardo. Yes, a bit bizarre. In any case, I'm always interested to see ...

Stuffed from the holidays? Never want to eat chocolate and brie again? Got the "muffin-top begone" mentality? Great! Then it's the right time for you to visit "Local Flavour: Eating in Toronto, 1830-1955," an exhibit currently on view at the Toronto Reference Library's TD Gallery. Seriously though, this show closes January 11, and it is well worth seeing. So whether you're sipping on a watery maple-syrup-clease concoction or a full-fat latte, do go take a look. As with the library's much-praised circus history show, the highlight here is archival photographs depicting a specific segment of ...

There's always good art showing in Toronto--even art for the map-obsessed. But this is a particularly good part of the fall for some. Here's three reasons why: 1) Last Friday, Toronto artists Gwen McGregor and Sandra Rechico's exhibition Maps in Doubt opened at the newly relocated Mercer Union. (Recap: This artist-run centre used to be near Queen and Dovercourt, and now is near Bloor and Lansdowne--discuss the ongoing issue of "Is Bloor & Lans the new Queen West?" amongst yerselves.) What McGregor and Rechico do in this show is bring their different approaches to psychogeography to the fore. McGregor, for one, has been toting around a GPS for years, using the resulting data to create interesting maps of her everyday paths in New York, Toronto and elsewhere. Rechico (a former curator for wade) has a similar interest in space and mapping, but chooses to go more analog, having taken detailed, handwritten notes of her daily travels for the past seven years. Brought together for the first time by curator, critic and York U prof Dan Adler, Rechico and McGregor worked out four different ways of mapping their respective pedestrian travels in four different cities: Toronto, Montreal, Kassel and Munster. Each of these four mapping strategies and cities is presented on a different wall of the rectangular gallery space.

So according to Toronto Special Events almost a million folks apparently took in Nuit Blanche last night. At first to me that seemed a little hard to believe as crowds seemed quite sparse in Zone B... though I guess Yonge-Dundas Square made up for it. I myself did a rather quick tour of some of what promised to be the big sights of Nuit Blanche—knowing full well, of course, that many of the best Nuit Blanche experiences happen when you have time to take in stuff on the fly. In any case, here's my starter yeahs & nahs. ...

I was at the Royal Ontario Museum earlier today for a media view and was shocked to see that the admission price has quietly risen 10% or more across the board. Now admission fees are $22 for adults, $19 for students and seniors, and $15 for children aged 4 to 14. (They were previously the still-expensive $20 for adults, $17 for seniors and students, and $12 for children 4 to 14—those all being part of a 30% rise that came into effect June 2007.) This means that ticket prices on “cheap” half-price Fridays have also risen—to recap, it's now $11 for adults, $9 for students and seniors, and $7.50 for children aged 4 to 14. Frankly, this is the maximum such ticket prices should be all the time, not just 4 hours for TGIFers. This new price rise (which quietly came into effect July 1) has arrived soon after the ROM kindly received a $12.1-mil one-time grant from the Government of Ontario to offset its building costs. And just after the Government pumped another, much ballyhooed $1.3 mil into the ROM to give 1,200 free passes a month to the United Way and new citizens. (This deal, if renewed next year, gets the ROM gets an extra $60 for every free pass that walks through the door. How, you ask? The actual at-the-door cost of 14,400 tickets a year is just $288,800 or so. That leaves, oh, $1 mil for the ROM to shovel into its money pit.)

Ah, passive-aggression. It's the preferred conflict style of many an introverted arty type, myself admittedly included. Despite being a fan of the technique, I'm a little perturbed to see it exemplified to a T (to taxpayer-and-public-spacer-expense) in the Art Gallery of Ontario's latest outdoor signage. If you look at the photo of that signage above, you'll see the end of their large-print "We've closed up shop... for now" slogan followed by an overthunk admonition: "But feel free to visit the competition our friends: Bata Shoe Museum, Canadian Opera Company, Casa Loma, CN Tower, Gardiner Museum, National Ballet of Canada, Ontario Place, Ontario Science Centre, Royal Ontario Museum, Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and Toronto Zoo" At first I actually thought that the strikethrough and "our friends" scrawl was a witty graffito on the part of a Sharpie-toting copy editor. But no, it's part of the original poster print. So apparently, this mixed message is what made it through the AGO's own bureaucratic review chain as the acceptable way to publicly express its relationship to other Toronto museums and cultural institutions. The result is a mode of parlance that maddens in the same way as any snotty-ex email might. First, there's the backhanded compliment. Is it a better thing to be off the list (and therefore off the AGO's frenemy roster) completely, or is exclusion from same a snub? Dunno, might want to ask the Power Plant or the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art or the Toronto Public Library or the University of Toronto or the Design Exchange next time you see them.