The recent 18th edition of FNB Art Joburg has become oddly distinguished by a review that has gone art-world viral: “Death of a Salesman: FNB Art Joburg and the End of the Fairytale” — Art Africa Magazine. Adilson de Oliveira’s diatribe has been widely shared and discussed. It is an, at times, virtuoso takedown of the entire enterprise of art fairs tout court, but especially art fairs in SA.
Along the way he is viciously disparaging of swathes of the country’s contemporary art practice, and many of its galleries. Relentlessly vitriolic, the article spares only two artists — Steven Cohen, who is represented by Stevenson Gallery, and Kendell Geers, who has lived in Belgium for some years but is represented by the Goodman Gallery.
Stevenson is accused of caging the wild feral beauty of Cohen’s work, of using it as “managed inventory”, despite it being one of the leading bodies of work at the gallery’s booth at the fair. It is not entirely clear how the gallery has hidden Cohen’s light under a bushel, since they are, after all, engaged in selling his work. Geers is discussed in reverential terms, an avant-garde pioneer betrayed by the crass commercialism of the fair in De Oliveira’s view, by the “lazy curators” — Alex Richards of Stevenson and Phokeng Setai from Zeitz Mocaa — of Exhibition Match, the football-related art project staged regularly at the fair. De Oliveira accuses them of co-opting a Geers’ work from the 1995 Joburg Biennale, a football match between artists.
In fact, Exhibition Match collaborated with Geers, staging his installation work Masked Ball with great success at Art Joburg in 2023. Far from being “deliberately engineered out of circulation”, Geers himself has pointed out that there was very little documentation of the original football match in 1995, long before the advent of social media.
The stream of vitriol is perhaps most misguided when he says this: “Black portraiture ... feels more [like] algorithm than art — faces rendered stiffly, with hands so anatomically jarring one wonders if the artist has ever seen a pinky, or better yet, a middle finger. Work so drenched in uncredited borrowings from the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and AfriCOBRA, that it feels like intellectual shoplifting, absent of context or homage, in both the minds of the curators and artists.” One may not be much drawn to black portraiture as an artistic undertaking. But his opinion here is to suggest that those artists who practise it are ignorant of art history, or worse, plagiarising from it deliberately, and are technically inept to boot. It is, at best, an entitled opinion.
Ultimately, the viciousness of the takedown reads as a cry for help, and as a break-up letter to the artworld, a desperately Romantic paean to art that he loves and feels he has lost. Of course, the artworld itself is engaging in a lot of soul-searching in the wake of his performative “critique”, not all of it misplaced.
Partly this has to do with the failure of much of the institutional infrastructure of arts and culture in SA. The museum sector hangs on by a thread, and only then mostly by dint of the existence of private museums or university institutions. It should provide a solid base for artists to progress their careers to a pinnacle in terms of credibility, aesthetic and critical success. Another area in which we have a yawning gap is in art criticism, as, in fairness, De Oliveira points out. The media spaces for art criticism have shrunk, and institutional critique at universities has fragmented or is deprioritised. This leaves social media as a not-very-stable platform for education about fine art and collecting.
All these gaps cannot be filled in by art fairs, despite their best efforts to diversify their programming. In every other sphere of commercial activity or industry segment, trade fairs are understood by everyone as just that — marketplaces for product sales and promotion. Yet art fairs are also burdened with having to respond critically to their own socioeconomic status and identities, as if an intellectual and artistic negotiation with capitalism can exist side by side with selling art in a marketplace. It becomes a structural contradiction.
As an art fair on straightforwardly commercial terms, Art Joburg is a necessary element in an ecosystem that certainly needs some reinvention. And this year proved successful on those terms, with wider participation than ever from galleries and artists from the rest of Africa, visitor numbers up 7% year on year, and widely reported positive sales. The fair is also at the centre of a wider alternative art network incorporating the Contra Fair, Open City studio initiative and more. Art Joburg, just as it cannot be held responsible for the missing or underserved parts of the local art ecosystem, it also cannot be tasked with being involved in improving the spatial fractures that define Joburg’s geography, and that keep these various aspects of our art ecosystem apart.
