A haunting sense of deja vu was evoked last week as mass student protests spread across the country. The images of the protests echoed the archival photographs that were displayed last year at the Rise and Fall of Apartheid exhibition at Museum Africa in Johannesburg.One photograph, taken outside Wits University by an unidentified person in the 70s, shows a student holding a placard bearing the slogan: "A free university is a free society." Back then students were advocating for black people to be admitted to whites-only universities.Public protest and the spirit of resistance has remained a prominent part of our culture since the fall of apartheid but how is it manifesting in art now?Most of the current crop of young artists don't express political inclinations in their art. If the art at this year's FNB Johannesburg Art Fair was anything to go by, abstraction is the mode du jour . For some artists this has provided a chance to revel in art for art's sake, rather than carrying the burden of using art to effect social change. For others, like Jaco Van Schalkwyk, who showed abstract works at the Gallery Art on Paper stand, this is the only plausible response to a "feeling of helplessness " in post-apartheid South Africa .So is resistance art a legitimate category of art anymore? The Cape Town-based Tokolos Stencils collective who have left a trail of Marikana motifs around that city don't consider themselves artists.We perhaps mistakenly think of Brett Murray as a "protest artist" because he evokes protest imagery, with his subversion of posters and slogans from the 1970s and 1980s. Ironically, some of his work has inspired more resistance against the art itself, rather than against the political entity he critiques. For example, his Spear of the Nation prompted a protest march which concluded at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, where it was on show.In his recent exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town , an eerie sense of history repeating itself was the theme of his show. This sense was also prompted by the recent student protests. This feeling was reflected in the title, Again, Again , and in mirror image sculptures of large thuggish beasts conjoined at the head as well as the doubling effect applied to figures of African despots.In both the ANC's response to Murray's art and in young artists' apolitical stance, resistance towards "resistance art" is more common today. Even artists like Johannes Phokela - known for his satirical subversion of the traditional Western canon of painting and his enactment of pointed political commentary - is a little sceptical of the value of the political art of people like Ayanda Mabulu, despite the fact Mabulu has, to some extent, followed in his footsteps.Mabulu's main target is Jacob Zuma. At the Bag Factory stand at the Johannesburg Art Fair this year, he took his anti-Zuma stance to new highs (or lows, depending how you see it) with a work bearing the phrase: "Zuma is a shit-covered roach." That the work went unnoticed suggests that obvious attacks via art simply don't hold sway. It will be interesting to see whether a new generation of artists, who may have been at the forefront of the #feesmustfall protests, will usher in a new era of resistance art...