HALF ART
CHRIS THURMAN: Anxieties of the art critic in a ‘mentally malnourished country in love with its pain’
What are the stakes in this conversation?" asked Sean O’Toole. "What is at risk?" His questions were directed at fellow art critic Ashraf Jamal. The two men sat in front of an eager audience gathered in the atrium of the Keyes Art Mile in Rosebank on Wednesday night; they were there both to discuss Jamal’s book, In The World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art, and (we’d been told) to talk about "being a working art critic". With this as a premise, it was inevitable that beneath the surface of O’Toole’s opening gambit lay another line of inquiry: a 21st-century twist on the perennial question: "What is the function of criticism at the present time?" For a while now, arts critics have felt an existential anxiety. Do we have a purpose? Does what we do matter?When the video of Childish Gambino’s This is America slapped an unsuspecting world across the face earlier in May, delighting and confusing viewers everywhere, Wired magazine’s Rowland Manthorpe bemoaned how critics were not...
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