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Jeremy Gordin says SA does appear to be in a state of perpetual hysteria these days As icy darkness fell over Johannesburg's northern suburbs last night and impis of men (sorry, I mean people) armed with the latest painting-defacing tools (cans of paint and their...
David Bullard on the curious case of the President's honourable member Keen observers of bogus piety would have been enthralled last weekend as the South African Media Synchronised Hypocrisy team went into their final stages of training before this year's Olympics....
Alexander Matthews says ANC trying to place a taboo on discussions of Zuma's version of masculinity Brett Murray's defaced The Spear stands as a monument to intolerance. After thousands of ANC supporters marched to the Goodman where it had once been on display, the...
The Spear – as I have written before – has become about far more than about whether a painting resembling President Jacob Zuma with his penis hanging out should be banned because it humiliates Zuma, his many wives and children as well as affronts the dignity of all...
ANC Today article says cheap offensive smut peddled as art doesn't add anything to advance civic liberties ENOUGH AND NO MORE! The artist, the gallery and the City Press editor "... propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a...
AN OLD west African proverb compares the artist to a dog. Positioned at the interface of the human and the natural worlds, the dog in most ancient African societies enjoyed a slippery and highly ambiguous cultural status. Neither a human being, nor a wild animal, it...
Mzukisi Makatse on freedom of artistic expression in South Africa The contextual and political understanding of the freedom of artistic expression in South Africa Now that the dust seems to be settling after the storm and hysteria occasioned by The Spear - Brett...
Amid the logic-destroying hysteria surrounding Brett Murray’s (now defaced) The Spear, the Film and Publications Board will sit to decide if personal dignity trumps art and freedom of expression. Eighteen years into South Africa’s democracy and our censorship system...
In his book Art and The End of Apartheid, John Peffer writes about the Medu Art Ensemble: “For them a true culture of the people would be one that was not exclusive to the elite of the world of art galleries, but was seen in the streets, on T-shirts and posters (…).”...