Excerpts from the front

Ashraf Jamal:

With all the talk of freedom, the society is ghettoized, and art, apogee of privilege and taste despite its banalization post-Pop, has barely conquered the imagination of the country's citizenry. Tretchikoff remains the one artist that has crossed racial and class divides. That Tretchikoff was blacklisted by the cognoscetti as bad art or kitsch says a lot about just how segregated taste is. That the South African National Gallery will host the first major Tretchikoff retrospective in 2010 says worlds about the long overdue demystification and deregulation of taste, a move symptomatic of an entirely new moment in South African art history. The Spier Contemporary 2010 promises to reinforce this move. Spier Contemporary is no Turner Prize with front page tabloid coverage, national televisual airing, and the likes of Madonna as master of ceremonies. Uneasily positioned between a rarefied and popular imaginary, Spier Contemporary has no model to fall back on, which is all to the good because art, today, allows for no final arbiter or gauge. If accessibility and awareness is one key objective, the other far greater objective is to redefine the very nature of the event, the better to generate a more hydra-headed aesthetic and more lateral pulse points. So, while there is no clear agenda, there is, nevertheless, a hunch that by widening the net, breaking down the art cartel, and doing so without paying knee-jerk homage to a phantom democracy, one could be in for a surprise come March 2010...