And things are heating up in Cape Town now, as the Brett Kebble Art Awards approach. I, myself, will be flying down this Friday to set up step inside for the first time, and just about every ‘name’ in the SA arts scene will be at the awards dinner next Saturday, the 16th.
Any guesses as to who will win? I know we haven’t seen much of the work, but it’s no secret that artists who have been in the press a lot lately, whose body of work is known, have a major advantage over lesser-known artists, and usually take these kinds of prizes. I am thinking, however, that given Clive’s influence, this year’s winners might be slightly less conservative – tho the judges are mostly identical to last year’s (there’s been one addition). I do like, too, that the prizes are not broken by category any longer (1 grand, 6 firsts, and any number of merits in any category, rather than one prize per category), but my guess is that this weights work towards the bigger, and more traditional (sculpture and installation, vs. print and new media – and it seems that photography is still risque in SA, so maybe that’ll be the happy medium; literally….).
We shall see. (read: Prove me wrong! Prove me wrong!)
On another Capetonian front, the new artthrob is out (I am in the process of begging them to add my show to their listings). They’ve got a very nice feature on the work of Samson Mudzunga some stuff about the Kebble Web site (which I think is pretty poor on the info and buggy front; they very obviously outsourced this job, because it, in no way, stands up to the calibre of anything else the Kebbles are doing. I also have a personal bias: I’ve sent them great photos of my work for their show 3 times now, and asked them specifically to change the pic on their site – which I can only presume the web[not]masters got by taking a picture of a television screen, while blindfolded – with no luck, despite assurances), and a bit piece on [R][R][F] 2004 (Remembering, Repressing, Forgetting), which yours truly has a net.art site on.
Read up – my trip to CT will only give updates when I have i-net access, and we all know how dependable that is in SA….
