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On the Death of the Art Fair and the Failure of FNB Art Joburg

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There is something tragically comic about watching a man believe his dreams long after they’ve curdled. Willy Loman, Arthur Miller’s haunted salesman, did not simply die because he was irrelevant. He died because he mistook irrelevance for meaning. His final act - equal parts sacrifice and delusion — was not noble. It was a grasp at a myth that no longer believed in him.

 

Standing in the cavernous halls of the Sandton Convention Centre during FNB Art Joburg this year, I was reminded of Loman. Not because the walls echoed with drama, but because they echoed with something worse: silence disguised as purpose. It was a spectacle built on residue, of energy once invested, markets once imagined, dialogues once ignited. And like Loman’s suitcase, the fair looked heavy with promise but empty of substance.

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Art fairs have never been noble. They were never meant to be. Basel doesn’t pretend to be anything but a mercantile carnival, a stock exchange in drag, glittered capitalism with good lighting. Its beauty lies in its honesty: here, we are buying and selling dreams. Venice, by contrast, tries to keep the market behind the curtain. The biennale at least flirts with myth-making — nationhood, ideology, artistic positioning — the market present but coyly offstage, like a diplomat’s mistress at a gala.

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FNB Art Joburg, and every other cursed fair in this country, wants both. The liquidity of Basel, the prestige of Venice. The hustle and the halo. They achieve neither. Too commercial to be serious, too hollow to sell. A golden lion is no longer on our currency.

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The myth of the South African art market is Loman’s myth. It tells itself that if it knocks on the door long enough, someone will let it in. That if it believes in itself, the global art world will believe in it too. But belief without infrastructure, fantasy without critical discourse, is theatre. And we are past the point of decent theatrics.

 

Year after year, the same dance is performed: the booths go up, the lanyards come out, the panels are announced, and we pretend this time might be different. But navigating FNB Art Joburg, and any fair in South Africa for that matter, is like being spun in a circle, blindfolded, and asked to pin something meaningful onto a moving target. It’s the art-world’s version of Pin the Tail on the Donkey—except the donkey has long bolted, and we’re left circling in an empty pen.

 

You never know what you’ll encounter, not because it’s exciting, but because it’s incoherent. Black portraiture that feels more algorithm than art—faces rendered stiffly, with hands so anatomically jarring one wonders if the artist has ever seen a pinky, or better yet, a middle finger. Work so drenched in uncredited borrowings from the Harlem Renaissance, The Black Arts Movement, and AfriCOBRA, that it feels like intellectual shoplifting, absent of context or homage, in both the minds of the curators and artists.

 

The stagnation is nowhere more visible than in the repetitive dirge of what Goodman Gallery continues to peddle. Every year, the same cast of over-shown, over-theorized, utterly unchallenged names. One must ask: is this really the best we can do? Or is it simply what sells, or once sold, or looks good in a catalogue? William Kentridge— who is what comes up when you look up the term, ‘industry plant’ in the urban dictionary —is now the default setting for lazy curators and cynical dealers alike. His charcoal collage gesturing, perhaps once urgent, now reads like wank in grayscale. A looping animation of privilege disguised as politics. A white man’s epic drawn out so long we’ve mistaken it for meaning. The same corpse dressed up, year after year, pretending it’s still alive.  I ask, with tears in my eyes, where the fuck is Kendell Geers – he’s in their stable right?

Goodman, for their part, have introduced a new “component” — Working Title — a supposed glimpse into “the next wave of contemporary African art.” Spare me. It’s a Marlene Dumas karaoke set via gallerist turned painter, painter turned gallerist, buttressed by textile works that feel like déjà vu sewn in panic. If this is the wave, may it drown us all quickly.

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Speaking of ghosts, this year Stevenson Gallery decided to dust off Steven Cohen — an important artist, a dying breed, an artist who still risks filth, elegance, and danger. Steven Cohen is a tiger of rare ferocity, a flamingo in full plume, a Hadeda screaming in a Sandton garden— all creatures whose beauty commands space and sky. Yet Stevenson Gallery cages him, folding the wild into tidy corridors. Even so, his elegance and danger shimmer through the bars, reminding us that the soul of such animals, like the soul of such an artist, cannot be fully caged.

The timing felt almost tactical: his retrospective at Iziko just announced, and suddenly, Cohen’s beauty is resurrected not with reverence but with timing. It should delight me. In a way, it does. Two years ago, Cohen’s work was literally hidden — sat behind a row of ballerina-like gallerinas at Stevenson, like an article of virtu in a storage room pretending to be on view. Now it returns to the floor, a resurrection of sorts, but it reads less like curatorial courage and more like inventory management.

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Elsewhere, Santu Mofokeng’s Concert at Sewefontein, Bloemhof is hung on a pink pastel wall so offensively saccharine one can hear the bones in his grave grind. He now resides in a section titled GIF - A name so lazy it aptly foreshadows the work on show. A lossless image format as conceptual provocation. Wow. Such sagacity. Robin Rhode’s video,  sits surrounded by black beanbags — unhygienic, inelegant, a winos holding pen disguised as engagement strategy (a beautiful metaphor for his work). A theme emerges: video art as bait. “Come rest, sip, recover — and while you’re here, buy something off the wall.” A crime Stevenson are guilty of too — Cohen’s performances on screen, flanked by neat rows of sellables. The provocation contained, buffered by commodity.

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But none of this compares to Georgina Gratrix’s flower monoliths — gargantuan, obnoxious, wasteful, self-indulgent oil-guzzlers that hit you like a fist the second you enter the fair. Ghastly doesn’t cover it. They’re like being sodomized with a paint-brush. A backdrop made for likes and shares.

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Blank Projects brings Kemang Wa Lehulere “home” — a brick library for Sol Plaatje, flanked by abstract oils that look like emaciated Julie Mehretu’s. But the real headline isn’t the work; it’s the sponsor. Wa Lehulere joins the BMW Art Generation, joining a panel for the fair’s talks programme (titled AUX). A talk promoted by a car company whose dynasty — the Quandts — built wealth through Nazi forced labour, then expanded first into South Africa in 1973, establishing the Rosslyn plant in Pretoria at the height of apartheid. A German luxury brand profiting under white minority rule, now rebranding through African art. Would Sol Plaatje have driven a BMW? Probably not — but here he is, invoked as cultural garnish for a corporation laundering its history through panels and partnerships. The paintings feel weak; the politics feel weaker.

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And then there’s ORG — a sanctimonious exit-through-the-gift-shop homage to the ‘institutions which champion African Art’, which seem to only champion and hawk ZEITZ MOCAA merchandise for fees disturbingly close to what they once paid Tracey Rose for her thirty-year retrospective: $300. A scarf here, a mug there, an empire reduced to tchotchkes. The farce would be funny if it weren’t so grotesque. – a Kentridge scarf is 54 dollars off from what Africa’s most important performance artist was paid for three decades of blood, sweat and teers.

And let’s not pretend this malaise is confined to Johannesburg. RMB Latitudes, dressed up as the enlightened alternative, performs the same circus in a different tent — a fair set against the manicured lawns of Shepstone Gardens in Houghton, where jacaranda blossoms fall like polite applause while banks and brands coo over ‘decoloniality’. The irony writes itself: how can any artist claim to dismantle colonial frameworks while literally framed in an Edwardian wedding venue built on inherited wealth? And we won’t even open the wound that is Investec Cape Town Art Fair — a fair funded by capital whose origins provoke boycotts year after year, whose very patronage stains what it tries to polish. The circuit is self-parodying now: institutions speaking the language of resistance while selling in the syntax of extraction.

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A common theme through any South African fair, is how the ghosts of South African art history are summoned badly. No better example of this exists, than the gimmicky, stale, and vomit inducing, ‘Exhibition Match’, which now plagues every fair. It bites heavily from Kendell Geers’, ‘The Conspiracy of Images (in your Eye)’ — a happening, a performance, a football match staged during the 1995 Biennale — which held merit in every brutal, brilliant detail. It was not a gimmick; it was an event loaded with meaning. The kits were intentional, symbolic. The venue — Mary Fitzgerald Square — hostile, broken, gravel-strewn, a concrete carcass of a city in transition. It was inhospitable to football by design: a stage that made the game itself a collision with urban decay, with history, with politics. The players were not influencers or hobbyists; they were heavy-hitting artists, locals versus internationals, clashing in a gesture that was equal parts absurdist theatre, political allegory, and dangerous play.

Fast-forward, and the same gesture has been co-opted, gutted, spat back out by lazy curators desperate for relevance without risk. In its place, a Discovery Football Park “exhibition match”: a PR-friendly, corporatized pantomime. Designer kits with artworks arbitrarily attached, the artworks themselves often irrelevant to the design. Artists jogging alongside influencers, media types, people who have no business in the conversation. Associations with A4 (a space whose very name and funding associations send shivers down my back despite the warmth of my  keffiyeh) and Discovery’s branded pitches turn what was insurgent into what is antiseptic. It isn’t homage; it’s parody with corporate sponsorship. And when it shifts to Cape Town, it plays not on the city, not in its bones, but at Fives Futbol, Grand Central Shopping Centre — a retail compound masquerading as cultural memory. What was once urban confrontation is now mall entertainment.

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And yet, try to find Geers’ original match. You won’t. No accessible articles, no critical writing, barely a trace. It has been deliberately engineered out of circulation — a quiet, strategic erasure of a moment too unruly for the current, controlled narrative. Geers’ work and reputation in South Africa have been deliberately ignored not because they lacked value, but because they refuse convenience. They don’t fit the market’s appetite for palatable dissent or box-ticking politics. They demand discomfort, and discomfort doesn’t sell. Hence why I brought up his exclusion. Surprise!

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The irony is grotesque: you’d swear he was in Goodman’s stable — so why is he absent? Why is the artist missing while his ideas are looted, sterilised, and repackaged for Instagram? His provocations neglected, his influence violated, his history paved over by mediocrity wearing designer kits. It is replaced by branded content, influencer thirst, and marketing masquerading as memory. The horse has bolted, and in the absent barn, we have mules which neigh gesture to brand,  history to hashtag, and revolution to revenue.

Some booths don’t even try to pretend. Everard Read, for example, makes it painfully obvious they are there to sell — not to provoke, not to position, not to converse. Maybe there isn’t anything wrong with that. Maybe clarity is a mercy. But in a fair supposedly tasked with shaping discourse, one wonders: is naked commerce the only honest position left?  

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The fair, in total, is a hot, blurred mess. Galleries no longer have identities — they’re Nike shoes without swooshes, stitched together in sweatshops of compromised taste. You wander through and everything blends: derivative portraiture, faux-scientific decolonial jargon, shoplifted Harlem Renaissance gestures, afterthought Kentridges, Mofokeng’s stripped of dignity, and works priced in the hundreds of thousands framed like provincial student shows — light reflecting off cheap glass, not even museum grade.

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The audience is no better. To paraphrase Fab Five Freddy, it’s white wine, white walls, white noise, and white dresses. No one reads the wall text (if it exists). No one debates form. They adjust hems, angle selfies, drink the free Chardonnay and pretend proximity equals significance. Critics have vanished, if they are present they hold microphones to their wet lips and perform the khaki panted used car salesmen act in front of, ‘The new hip and happening artist’s’ excrement. Everything has been replaced by influencers, junior curators with ring lights, patrons of prosecco and no reading lists. No one will say the emperor is nude, because the emperor might buy something — or invite them to the afterparty Kalashnikovv (rebrand in peace) will inevitably throw.

This is not failure by accident. It is failure by design. Our art schools are starved, intellectually hollow. Our critics have either defected to the market or evaporated entirely. Our museums are rot wearing architecture. Our curators are careerists. Our galleries confuse visibility with value.

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You’d swear we have no canon. It seems we barely have an archive. We have gestures — political, aesthetic, commercial — unmoored, unearned, untethered. Not postmodern. Post-interest.

FNB Art Joburg, and all these subsequent fairs, aren’t failing because they’re bad. They’re failing because they are unnecessary. They are the Loman of the continent — nostalgic for relevance, blind to their own obsolescence. The tragedy is not that they are dying. The tragedy is that they don’t know they’re already dead.

Perhaps from this wreckage something might grow — leaner, sharper, less Basel-envy, less Venice cosplay, less tethered to old names and exhausted CVs. But it will not come from these regimes, or these booths, or this mausoleum which confuses nooses for the queen’s ruff.

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And I am under no illusion that I am better. I am worse. I stood there once, flogging hollow relics in the temple, dressing up décor as if it were gospel, posting self-absorbed images of myself in front of a photograph of Sue Williamson in black face. An assumption I was better. Lost, now found — but it tastes like smoot from the kōro of a Buddhist temple. I was Willy Loman with a scissors and glue, convinced the dream still had legs. In truth, I was just a stomach cramp in the belly of a beast built to eat everything, briefly upsetting its digestion before being spat out. And now I stand here, bitter, not because it’s broken, but because I finally see it had a metabolism faster than the neural pathways in my brain.

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South African art deserves a new language. A new urgency. A new nerve. It deserves to rupture, deflower, embalm, burn, make enemies, make meaning. But first, we must bury what has already died.

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And when we do, for the love of God — no fucking flowers.