The collective pulse of the SA art world has been set mildly aflutter since artist-turned-provocateur Adilson de Oliveira wrote a searing takedown for online magazine Art Africa about the FNB Art Joburg fair held at the Sandton Convention Centre earlier this month.
De Oliveira’s wrath is directed primarily at the event itself, and indeed at all of the country’s “Basel-envying, Venice-cosplaying” art fairs, which he compares to the character of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman: “Nostalgic for relevance, blind to their own obsolescence.”
By the end of his scathing essay, De Oliveira has taken aim at pretty much everyone in the sector: “Our art schools are starved, intellectually hollow. Our critics have either defected to the market or evaporated entirely. Our museums are rot-wearing architecture. Our curators are careerists. Our galleries confuse visibility with value.”
Mixed reactions from the art community
Some among the parties named here have expressed annoyance and offence. Some have chosen to ignore or dismiss the piece. Others have celebrated it, cheering De Oliveira for brazenly expressing what everyone else thinks but is afraid to say.
This may seem like a parochial squabble, but as the major hub of the African art market — positioned as a go-between connecting the continent’s artists to collectors in Europe, America and Asia — the SA art industry is a high-stakes business. Ambitious estimates suggest that the African market could reach $1.5bn this year.
Commerce at the heart of the critique
Commerce, unsurprisingly, is De Oliveira’s main gripe. “Art fairs have never been noble,” he writes: “Basel doesn’t pretend to be anything but a mercantile carnival, a stock exchange in drag, glittered capitalism with good lighting”. In Venice, by contrast, the market is “present but coyly offstage” as “the Biennale at least flirts with mythmaking — nationhood, ideology, artistic positioning.” FNB Art Joburg, “like every other cursed fair in this country”, wants both “the liquidity of Basel” and “the prestige of Venice” but achieves neither because it is “too commercial to be serious, too hollow to sell”.
This is a necessary rhetorical position. It is important that someone keeps pointing to the basic compromise enabling arts patronage: the generally tacit agreement that artists will critique the geopolitical and socioeconomic mechanisms that create and sustain inequality, while knowing that the beneficiaries of these mechanisms are likely to be the people buying their work. The moment that this uncomfortable truth is no longer voiced is the moment art dies.
A selective commendation
Still, one may wonder, does De Oliveira have to go so far? His diatribe damns every figure in the local arts scene, with only four exceptions: the late photographer Santu Mofokeng, the “caged animal” Steven Cohen, “Africa’s most important performance artist” Tracey Rose, and the prodigal enfant terrible Kendell Geers. It’s an impressive quartet, but circumscribing artistic value in this way does seem a little harsh.
As every true writer will know, however, having chosen the route of polemic, De Oliveira has no choice but to pursue the path to its ruthless and hyperbolical conclusion. The true manifesto does not deal in accurate details; these must be sacrificed to the higher good of getting the point across. Of course one cannot make all the claims to which De Oliveira commits himself and remain judicious or measured.
The Kentridge straw man
William Kentridge is set up as a bogeyman — or rather, a straw man, easily knocked down as an “industry plant”, “the default setting for lazy curators and cynical dealers alike”.
The work of SA’s foremost artist is mere “charcoal collage gesturing”: “A looping animation of privilege disguised as politics. A white man’s epic drawn out so long we’ve mistaken it for meaning. The same corpse dressed up, year after year, pretending it’s still alive.”
This is stirring stuff indeed. My guess is that Kentridge, understanding the demands of genre, recognises De Oliveira’s fidelity to writerly convention; he probably applauds the bravura literary performance, as do I.
De Oliveira also employs a niche feature available within the tradition of the tirade: turning the spotlight on his own shortcomings, only to distinguish himself further. “I am under no illusion that I am better,” he adds. “I am worse.” He is the embittered outsider, formerly happy in the belly of the beast, now regurgitated. Bravo!
This article was first published in Business Live Lifestyle.
