As an artist in Toronto in 2010, I joined the Red Moon Collective, which was a get-together. They had parties, one another, mostly musically based. I was a photographer and poet, so it wasn’t the main focus of the group, but I still hung out with them. People sang, collaborated, and built friendships through shared work and repetition. Fast forward fifteen or sixteen years, and I’ve noticed something different. I’ve hung out with artists in Toronto recently, and they all seem more isolated. There doesn’t seem to be the same drive to work together in any sustained way. It feels like meeting people has become easier, but actually building something together has become harder. Apps and platforms like Vampr seem to be where people meet now, but like Tinder, they can also create a kind of isolation. The collective will to make music together, or to build something lasting in a shared scene, feels weaker.
What has changed is not desire. Most artists still want to collaborate. What’s changed is the structure around that desire, the environment it has to move through.
Toronto in 2010 still had pockets where scenes behaved like living things. Not organized, not formal, but continuous. You showed up to the same rooms enough times and something started to form between people. It wasn’t efficient. It wasn’t optimized. But it had persistence. You could walk into a space and feel like you were stepping into an ongoing conversation that had already started before you arrived and would keep going after you left.
That kind of continuity has thinned out.
Part of it is money. Not in an abstract way, but in a daily way. Rent rises. Work fragments. Time gets split into smaller pieces that don’t line up easily with other people’s schedules. The old rhythm of just being around—long evenings, shared studios, repeated encounters—starts to break apart. Collaboration stops being something that happens by default and becomes something that has to be arranged, coordinated, negotiated. And anything that requires coordination across exhausted schedules becomes fragile.
At the same time, the way people find each other has changed. Discovery is now instant. You don’t have to wait to run into someone. You don’t have to be in the same room three or four times before a connection forms. You can match, message, connect, and move on. Platforms like Vampr make that frictionless. But what they remove is not just friction—it’s repetition. And repetition is where a lot of real collaboration used to quietly take root.
Without repetition, relationships stay light. Not shallow in a judgmental sense, just unanchored. You meet more people, but you spend less time becoming anything with them.
Then there’s the shift in how artists are positioned in the world. Increasingly, you are encouraged to see yourself as a solo unit of output. Even when collaboration happens, it often sits inside that frame. Whose project is this? Whose audience is it for? How does it circulate? These questions aren’t always spoken, but they shape behaviour. Over time, they make collaboration feel less like a shared unfolding and more like an arrangement between separate careers.
And underneath all of that sits a quieter disruption that never fully resolved itself. The COVID years didn’t just pause scenes; they interrupted the habit of gathering. The informal infrastructure of art life—venues, studios, parties, residencies, the in-between spaces—lost continuity. When that continuity breaks, people don’t automatically return to the same patterns. They adapt. They work alone more. They build new habits that don’t require proximity. And even when proximity becomes possible again, the old momentum doesn’t fully reassemble.
So what you end up with isn’t a lack of artists, and it isn’t a lack of interest in collaboration. It’s a thinning of the conditions that used to make collaboration feel natural, almost inevitable. The density is gone. The repetition is weaker. The shared time is harder to hold together.
And in that gap, isolation can look like a personal choice, but it’s often just structure expressing itself through people.
The difference between then and now isn’t that artists stopped working together. It’s that working together stopped being the easiest thing the environment produces.
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