Artists must win the hearts and minds of South African audiences: iLIVE

30 July 2014 - 14:55 By Khanyisa Majola Bhuti
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Khanyisa Majola Bhuti.
Khanyisa Majola Bhuti.
Image: SUPPLIED

Yes it is true; to lead an artistic life is a huge challenge in South Africa. The foremost challenge is probably the admission to one’s self that one is an artist.

This admission will most probably trigger a number of questions about being an artist and how to go about leading that life, of all the questions that do arise, the most crucial should be the one of how do I become an active participant within the arts.

The assumption is that by the time the artist reaches the stage of admission and questioning they have already defined their skill.

To be able to define the skill is beneficial to their relevance within the arts. Choosing to be active is a gamble lacking in immediate returns. The industry does not sustain itself, therefore to make a decision to sustain one’s life through artistic output, is probably the bravest and most foolish gamble to be made.

It is fitting for those of us who have already made this admission and continually negotiate how to actively participate, to regard ourselves as brave, foolish but most importantly visionaries. For, to chart our course towards significant contribution in the field of arts requires imagination, wisdom, intuition and self-reliance.

It is equally crucial for the artist to be aware of the fact that all economies thrive on scarcity and the fact that the arts do not have a clear position within the South African economy must sharpen the artist’s imagination instead of crippling them with fear. All artists must collectively admit that our economic insignificance is attributed to the challenge of lack of audience response.

This challenge affects both the successful artist as well as the struggling artist and should be top of the agenda of issues to be tackled by all artists.

Audience participants are the people who commit themselves to consuming artworks, purchasing tickets of live and recorded performances in various fields within the arts industry.

The blame for lack of commitment and passion from audiences should be primarily placed on the media, whose primary focus continues to be on foreign arts and artists. The Open research’s media research mention the following points as some of the key causes that contribute to SA artist’s disadvantaged position:

  • That of the 40-60% advertising space allocated to the arts only 15% is seriously used.
  • Of the 25% space allocated for critical or analytical intervention only 2% is accounted for in commentaries or opinion pieces.
  • At the time of their research they found that the SABC had no clear policy on how to present the arts to audiences, this despite the fact that part of its mandate is to support traditional and contemporary arts.

South Africans are abreast with political and sporting agendas because the media sufficiently feeds the population of the relevant information.

The result of all this neglect is the scarcity of arts journalists, budget constraints for the few arts journalists who do remain, and even more depressing the high levels of professional artists who resort to mimicking overseas artists just so they can get some attention from the media, which in most cases ridicules the mimic.

Most artists usually bow from the arena of full time creative participation for grand entrances in offices mandated with funds allocation in public or private sectors.

The artists who remain in the playing field divide themselves in factions of the qualified and unqualified even though they all gain the same results in their artistic outputs, lack of audience response.

The arts ministry regards heritage a public good, thus the unequal investment and focus on all spheres of the arts, artists are then reduced into mere accessories in monumental heritage occasions by the government.

The bewildered artists opt for self-serving solutions disillusioned by their outcast state. Political affiliations, straddling between being an artist and a broadcaster, clinging to celebrity titles solves only income woes but does nothing to inspire response towards the arts on audiences.

These unfortunate events regrettably breed a generation of shallow, self-obsessed and territorial artists. Preceding generations of South African artists had a combined mission of fighting against racial injustices; most of them are regarded as irrelevant today because they also face the same challenge of lack of audience response.

The duty of audience development befalls the present generation of artists. The shared responsibility of this duty needs to be executed without being oblivious to the persistent class, racial and sexist divisions among the general population in our country.

South African artists will never have artistic or even economic relevance until they have unified themselves in the task of audience development for the entire arts fraternity.

The fact that South Africans are more eager to donate funeral costs to bury destitute artists than supporting them unconditionally whilst they are still alive is hard to grasp.

Artists and audiences need to collaborate to transform the present humiliating working conditions South African artists find themselves in. When this generation of artists has lost its grip on time would they have built a solid foundation of audience development?

Will the coming generations of artists be proud to speak our names or ashamed of the self-serving legacies we leave behind? Will we ever win the hearts and minds of South African audiences?

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