Dr Wamuwi Mbao: Everything is interesting (If you’re interested)

There are people out there for whom there is no worse fate than being subjected to art. Suggest that a Saturday morning might be profitably spent looking at Lady Skollie’s “Groot Gat” exhibition and these hapless souls look at you as though you’ve suggested a game of recreational drowning. They would rather spend the weekend dredging a bog, frankly, than be tasked with having to look at things and form opinions and ideas about them.

The incurious are always with us. They’re the people who don’t read fiction, who won’t watch films with subtitles, who find going to a non-chain restaurant an interminable imposition. These treaders of the road more travelled are made deeply anxious by the idea of being made to look at abstract “-isms” in a gallery. They deem everything ugly, or pretentious, or too complicated. They despise things that don’t offer up easy solutions to the question of meaning.

Incuriosity takes root from a young age. The child whose parents never sought to foster the joy of being creative may become the insentient adult who scorns the museum and the gallery in favour of the padel court and the farmer’s market. Incurious people fill the world. They’re the ones ahead of you in the traffic, dozing their way through the green arrow. They’re the reason that the curry restaurant you went to the other day has steak and chips on the menu.

It’s a pity, because the experience of art can be as enriching as it is humbling. I say this as someone for whom a constant ongoing anxiety is that I won’t “get it”. In a previous life, I was commissioned to report on artsy happenings for a number of publications. Cue your nervous broadsheet correspondent standing in a darkened cube while a recording of one of the Cape’s devastating wildfires roars away ambiently.

Afterwards, thinking about how to describe it to readers brought the whole thing to life again. I could almost smell the charred fynbos, so that’s what I wrote about. A great deal of thinking about art in public is done by people who are writing and talking to people from the same world. A consequence of this is that a considerable amount of the population think that art is the province of an obtuse few: speak in reverent tones about ciphers and “transportive practice” and people will leave convinced that the whole art business is too much like hard work.

Technically, it is hard work — for the artist. For the spectators, looking at art gives us the opportunity to understand what happens when another conscious being acts upon a drive or an inclination to express an idea. That idea doesn’t always have to be a red splotch on a pillowcase (Portrait of the Artist’s Nosebleed) or a piece of spray-painted Sasko bread (GLUTEN WILL END US ALL). It can be an exhibition on textile cultures or food histories. It can be a piece of public art: my town places art in the most unexpected places: walking around town, you can spot a David Goldblatt or a Malick Sidibé. There’s a Strijdom van der Merwe sculpture across the road. Any one of these pieces invites us to spend a moment contemplating them.

Why here? Why now? When you learn to experience art, you begin to watch the world with a curious eye. Everything becomes interesting. We understand the world in more complex ways when we make ourselves receptive to creativity. Does that Fiat Multipla chugging by look the way it does because the designer was inspired by an espresso pot? Is that stridently awful Unisa building perched on Muckleneuk Ridge meant to resemble a knowledge-bringing ship? Extolling the virtues of being curious about the world makes me feel like a carnival barker: “Step Right Up! Step Right Up! See the Art Fair! Come Away Wowed! Tell Your Friends!”

Convincing your incurious friends that they could do with some world-expanding (be a bit more polite about it) might be hard, but it’s worth a try. Despite having the world at our collective fingertips, digital curation tends to make it all very claustrophobic and same-y. So why not go forth and enjoy being puzzled by the many interesting things the art world has to offer? It’ll do you good.

Dr Wamuwi Mbao is a literary critic and essayist

• From the September edition of Wanted, 2024.