I had already started writing my angry views about my president unzipped and exposed. When I started, I wrote it as a man, a black man, Saartjie Baartman’s brother, as someone raised by my grandmother with a moral stick. And I had joined in solidarity with those who are angry about the way President Jacob […]
art
Posted inNews/Politics
#Zumaspear and the politics of the cock
When I first saw the painting of the The Spear I instinctively felt that it was wrong for one reason: if it had been a painting of a female politician with her genitalia (however small) displayed at a public art gallery, I would not have supported it. I would have felt that it was an insult to […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Zuma only has his cockups to blame
The orgiastic furore surrounding the depiction of President Jacob Zuma’s genitalia in an infamous painting, The Spear, is yet to reach a climax in the public square. The painting has power for one reason, and one reason alone: it crystallised a public narrative in pictorial form. As I have written here before, sex is controversially […]
Posted inGeneral
Turkish delight too
It was like entering a futuristic cave, where a culture’s history washes over visitors in a ceremony of initiation, making it a pleasurable sensation of assimilating its distinctive perspective on the world. It was dark when we entered, but only momentarily, before a feast of colours cascaded, as if from nowhere, dappling faces and surfaces […]
Posted inGeneral
The innovativeness of (some) art and its social implications
Lately one has read a lot about how Apple became the world’s most valuable company because of its CEO, Steve Jobs’s emphasis on innovative product development, rather than his own business leadership style. (According to those who knew him, including his biographer, he was an uncompromising bully.) It may come as a surprise to some, […]