This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "The Damaging Legacy of Apartheid" (created 2023-03-15) featuring a single speaker discussing the South African art ecosystem. The speaker references major events like the Cape Town and Joburg Art Fairs and examines how apartheid-era policies and current underfunding have weakened arts education, closed art centres, and prevented the growth of a local collector base. They discuss how certain African art forms—tapestries, painted wood sculptures and other works—are often dismissed as craft rather than valued as art, and contrast this with recognition of ceramics in China and calligraphy/geometric tile art in the Middle East. The speaker highlights the importance of artists claiming authorship (citing the Bongi Dlomo collection and an artist signing tapestries) as a way to assert value and preserve cultural transmission of art.
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big art fair that occurred in South Africa is the Cape Town Art Fair. It's one of the two big art weeks, the other being the Joburg Art Fair, which occurs later in the year. And actually, I attended that, and there was a discussion around kind of the lack of arts education in the current curriculum of many schools in South Africa, and also just the closing down and the lack of public funds or government investment and support for a number of the art centers and art institutions. So we actually have a very big challenge in South Africa not having grown a local collector base, and the same can be said for many countries across continents around the world. And actually, that was also something that was a hallmark of apartheid in terms of closing down these art centers and actually restricting the amount of art education that occurred in Black communities. And that does then play out into how people see art and whether they see art as an asset class or not, you know, and how art is then passed down from generation to generation and whether the stories about this artwork and what gives it value is also transitioned from generation to generation or not. And I think we don't then value this as a society, and then we don't make sure that we take care of it in passing it on. And I think another stereotype, the one that you touched on very importantly, is this issue of what is appreciated as being various forms of art and what isn't. So the Bongi Idlomo collection, I think, contains tapestry, and it contains these wood sculptures that are painted. Often those have been overlooked, very much like you say, you know, you'll see kind of artists who've been creating stuff and you drive past them in the road and actually you kind of just see it just as that, and people kind of then categorize it as craft and not necessarily see it as art. There has been that kind of, yes, long-standing challenge in the valuation and appreciation of African arts and art forms from other regions. It's been up to, for example, China to say ceramics are important to us and part of our history and heritage, and that's a form of art. And for the Middle East, to similarly say calligraphy and beautiful geometric patterns in ceramic tiles are forms of art. So that's really important for us, and I think in Africa it's exactly the same. You know, the Bongi Dlomo Collection contains these beautiful tapestries, and actually the naming of it is really important. And the one artist who was making these tapestries, she put her name on it, and that is this act of defiance of saying, I'm not going to allow for this artwork to just be relegated to kind of the artist unknown category.
