by Shawn Banks

Shawn is a real life American and South African art virgin arriving in South Africa on the first day of the Johannesburg Art Fair. We asked her to write a piece about what she expects at the Fair. We like her already.

As any “Citizen of the World” knows, Trans-Atlantic travel is not only exhausting but is often faced with both unexpected and expected obstacles. There’s always some sort of delay, your bags aren’t the right size, the sweaty potato-chip man next to you won’t stop sneezing, and your toothpaste is considered contraband. You’d think that after years of the travel industry evolving things would have been sorted out by now, but no, what one may assume to be a well-oiled machine is nothing more than a smoke-and-mirrors operation that is currently dissolving from the inside out. Why am I writing about air travel in a publication that is about art? Aside from the fact that I am writing this at 35,000 feet in the air on my way to the 2009 Johannesburg Art Fair, I feel the metaphor between something we hold to be established and assume to be better and the reality of the situation is astutely appropriate.
Coming from the American Fine Arts and Antiquities field, I have spent years working in what I too believed to be the most cutting-edge, most progressive, most established and efficient country in the industry with some of the most provocative and refined artists in the world. I have worked with some tremendous people and have contributed to many amazing exhibits and institutions, but there is something missing. Perhaps, we have rested too much on our laurels and have become a parody of both our art and ourselves.
Too often, people buy into the false sense of security in something simply because it is established, but the Western world, I fear, is becoming that of a Walmart surplus store with business ethics comparable to gang warfare and prostitution.
Just because a first-world nation may have deep pockets of resources and generations of experience under their belt for both collection and creation doesn’t mean there is any real content. What is good art that is continuously for art’s sake? Do we return to that mantra because in reality, we have lost all other ‘sake’s’? And when did art’s sake come to mean the same thing as ‘whatever I can create that will sell’? Will there ever be another fine art movement that is explicitly American or European or will increased globalization compromise any possibility of genuine indigenous creation? Maybe Gauguin foresaw this identity crisis and we should be seeking something as foreign and exotic as possible that has no other choice but to be the most reflective of their culture and immerse ourselves in their authenticity and take a lesson or two. Then again, Gauguin spread syphilis throughout Tahiti, and died a pretty nasty death, with his emersion hardly enriching the culture from whence he drew his influence.
I think the state of Western Art is more realized when you examine the true capital and cultural gains, which lie in museum gift shops and stagnating state-under-funded museums where the merchandise is as much as a reproduction as the contents of the actual exhibits, literally. This is how Western Art has reached its plateau, and is on its way down. Artists too often ‘pay homage to’ greater predecessors and aesthetics have become too universalized. But fear not, art lovers of the world, there is hope. Out of the ashes of first-world hegemony and dominance in fine arts (to say the least) can rise a new aesthetic and voice. Uncompromising to profits and unyielding to bureaucracy, it will be unapologetically authentic and unforgiving to a lack of content. It will be the next wave of the avant-garde and it will blow the lack-luster efforts of sedentary artists and the cesspool of regurgitated culture they live in out of the sewer water that they have created; it can be South Africa and once this complex and dynamic nation finds that which truly identifies and sets itself apart from the rest of the world, new and unparalleled heights can await.
I’m tremendously excited to be here for many reasons. There is such a plethora of diversity in galleries and artists each with their own oeuvre and motif and the featured exhibits/installations are most promising; however, let us not forget what perhaps the most important aspect of this art fair is, developing as a nation, through artmaking and understanding, to progress as one. So let the Johannesburg Art Fair this year perhaps be one small step for the art world and one giant step for South Africa, and surely one of many in the right direction to show the continent and the world what South Africa is made of.