Beyond the “Popular” versus “Serious” Criticism Binary: Towards New Histories of Black Art Criticism

| african arts SUMMER 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 2 In 2019, the Standard Bank Gallery hosted a major exhibition of artworks produced by Black South African artists from the twentieth century (Fig. 1). Titled A Black Aesthetic: A View of South African Artists (1970–1990), the show was curated by Same Mdluli, at the time the newly appointed director of the Standard Bank Gallery, and this was her first major curatorial intervention as director. A Black Aesthetic was anchored by the University of Fort Hare’s storied collection of twentieth-century Black art, which was initially historicized by Edward J. de Jager (1992) in his well-known Images of Man publication (Fig. 2). Among others, scholars like James Macdonald (2020: 94) were congratulatory of the overall “success” Mdluli achieved through the various “curatorial imperatives” pioneered in this show. However, what interests me is how the exhibition inspired what Thuli Gamedze (2019) described as “a significant art historical exchange” between Mdluli and the prominent art critic Athi Mongezeleli Joja. This public debate between Mdluli and Joja was itself a milestone on several fronts. Unlike the controversy that circled the exhibition Black Modernisms in South Africa (1940–1990) held at the Wits Art Museum in 2016, wherein the exhibition curator Anitra Nettleton, Professor Emeritus at the University of Witwatersrand, was accused of perpetuating problematic race dynamics that privilege White intellectuals as “saviors” of Black heritage (Fikeni 2016), A Black Aesthetic exposed the intellectual disharmony that persists among the contemporary vanguard of Black professionals within South Africa’s visual arts space. Joja (2019a) penned a thorough and disapproving evaluation of the exhibition, and although he praised the show for its relevance and scale, he concluded that it lacked “the quality and rigour that would inspire critical curiosity and verve.” Joja (2019a) further lamented the “insipid article” contributed by Zakes Mda (2019) and Mdluli’s (2019a) own essay in the thick and beautifully printed catalogue (Fig. 3), which in his view, left “a lot to be desired” (Joja 2019a). In her terse defense against Joja, Mdluli1 evoked David Nthubu Koloane’s (1998) iconic essay “Art Criticism for Whom?” published over two decades prior. Mdluli (2019b) appropriated Koloane’s voice, quite cunningly, to discredit Joja’s review by expressing that “Koloane’s reflection on art criticism is thus important as a basis for framing why certain views on visual arts are often grossly misplaced” (my emphasis). According to Mdluli, Joja’s sentiments revealed an “idleness in arts writing” that was potentially “detrimental to demystifying the perception that art is elitist.” The reasons why Mdluli was not amused by Joja’s justified critique of her show, fascinating as it was, are immaterial here. What interests me is how Mdluli adopted the position that Joja’s criticism—although she did not point to him directly—fell within the ambit of critical writings about the visual arts that were “grossly misplaced” and further insinuated that such writings were reactionary and dismissive of “Black women in professional (visual art) spaces.” Mdluli disparaged Joja’s review by mentioning that “the exhibition received a good balance of well-considered coverage,”2 which “did not present a theorized, scholarly, and academic interrogation of the art pieces.” It is apparent that Mdluli was falling back on the “serious” versus “popular” criticism continuum in making these remarks. That is, the “well-considered coverage” of the show Mdluli mentioned in her response was paradigmatically populist—in the sense that it was targeted to a wider audience— nonelitist, and nonacademic, whereas Joja’s woefully “narrow short sightedness” and by implication “serious” criticism, was “void of fully grasping the broader picture of the narrative presented in an exhibition of this scale” (Mdluli 2019b). In his own rebuttal to Mdluli, Joja (2019b) recognized the disavowal of “serious” critical thinking about art implicit in Mdluli’s statements, postulating that: