Once not so long ago, before I had bothered to get a driver’s licence, I took a train from Johannesburg to Grahamstown for the National Arts Festival. Four hours into the journey, after my cabin-fellows and I had finally shooed the dysfunctional child from next door who had been licking our window since we pulled…
Visiting London in the week that the rand hit 19 to the Pound was nerve-wracking. Tuna sandwiches from Marks & Spencer suddenly cost R60, the summer dress I bought on sale for an emergency garden party turned into the sort of fashion splurge I envy lawyers for, and worst of all, the book stores at…
As promised, here is Richardt Strydom’s comment on the recent “debate” that has been raging around his winning image in the 2008 Sasol New Signatures competition: With regard to the public debate surrounding Familieportret No. 2, the following response: My opinion with regard to the date of completion of an artwork in general, and Familieportret…
At the end of August Sasol begrudgingly handed over R60 000 to Richardt Strydom (whose name nobody seems to be able to spell correctly) for his winning artwork in the Sasol New Signatures competition, Familieportret No 2. The photograph, which you can see here, depicts a young white couple standing in an unkempt garden, the…
A couple of browses through the exhibition space at this year’s Sanlam South African Fashion Week (SSAFW), which ended last Saturday, confirmed a reservation I have held for some time about South Africa’s fashion industry: there is not much local men’s fashion out there. True, the runways on the opening day of SSAFW did show…
Last Saturday evening, as the sun dipped behind the barn roof of the Drill Hall’s Point Blank Gallery and the Plein Street taxi mania subsided for the night, snowballs flew. They were real snowballs — not white tennis balls, not (quite) crushed ice — of the solid, glacial variety produced when a mound of fake…
A friend recently piqued my interest in the blog of fellow Thought Leader scribe Bridgette McNulty. McNulty is the author of the novel Strange Nervous Laughter, which I haven’t read — but that doesn’t matter because I am intrigued by the woman not because she has published fiction, but because of her propensity to make…
Yesterday was the official launch of the 2008 Women in Arts Festival, and I find myself, as I found myself at this time last year and the year before, planning my schedule for the next four days with a mixture of anticipatory cringing and warm, fuzzy optimism. Every year I pin my hopes on there…
On the front page of yesterday’s edition of the Business Times Anton Ferreira writes that despite certain obstacles in the urban job market, “big city incomes are surging” because of a profound increase in entrepreneurship. The focus of Ferreira’s article is that this phenomenon is somewhat limited to white urban populations, who, in an effort…
The gist is simple: art collectors who own contemporary South African art, by hiding it in private collections, are robbing the public of the important critical messages this art, being contemporary, i guess, is meant to communicate. Their display halls become mausoleums and the art it holds, the shriveled shells of the socially-engaged morsels the artist might have created were the industry not so perverted. The collector, spotting how dubious it is that he or she hordes works that would resonate with social meaning in a different context, brings the works to the Bag Factory between July 18 and August 2 and drops it in the Art Bin for “creative recycling”.
