Like many people, I’ve been living a largely digital life for the past six months. The hermit-introvert side of me has been happy enough. But let’s be honest: a virtual experience of the world is dissatisfying most of the time, and for the rest it’s downright depressing.
As an arts enthusiast, I’ve learnt to adjust my expectations. There have been moments of invigoration, poignance, delight, but the medium and the interface always being the same, no matter how brilliant the artist in question, the art encounter has tended to be a bit ... samey.
In the ancient days BC (before Covid-19), I already faced a daily glut of digital content. I didn’t mind; I, too, thrilled at each new internet sensation. Because these were always balanced by, well, real sensations: the fully sensory experience of a live performance or a three-dimensional artwork.
It was also easier, as an arts writer, to feel as if I had the local arts scene sussed. I knew this wasn’t because I was cool — it was just because I got the press releases — but I had my finger somewhere near the pulse, at least in Johannesburg. Now the arts scene is diffuse, a rootless rhizome spreading infinitely across the ether.
Things are going to be like this for a while yet, even though President Cyril Ramaphosa has told arts venues they can operate at 50% capacity under level 1 restrictions. And the surplus of digital content is only going to grow. Is there a risk that the arts’ consumers will forevermore be somewhat jaded, overwhelmed, screen-tired, unimpressible?
This week I had the pleasure of two timely (and digital) reminders that art and artists will always find a way to surprise us, to move us, to challenge and inspire us.
The first was a 10-year-old carrying two sticks of dynamite in her hands. When Nandi Bushell sits behind a drum kit the guaranteed result is an explosion of rhythm, noise and joy. Bushell, born to a South African mother and a British father, is one of those musical wunderkinder who can play three instruments and make it look easy.
She has social media followers by the hundreds of thousands, she has YouTube views by the millions, she has been on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, she has jammed with Lenny Kravitz — in fact, all this happened in 2019. This year has brought her more fame. Most recently, she challenged Dave Grohl to a drum battle and the Foo Fighters frontman composed a hard-rocking theme song for her in response.
Discovering this crackerjack kid a few days ago made me wonder if I’d been living under a virtual rock all along. How could I not know about her?
Bushell subverts all expectations. A girl from Ipswich who likes punk and grunge hits from the past century? You’d blame her muso dad for foisting the Sex Pistols, Nirvana and Green Day onto his daughter were it not for the evident delight she takes in smashing those drums and blaspheming angelically while she shouts her rendition of Anarchy in the UK.
The other arts surprise delivered to my phone this week was also an SA-British story, albeit in a (very) different key. I knew about stellar soprano Golda Schultz, formerly of the Cape Town Opera and New York’s The Juilliard School, then of the Bayerische Staatsoper (the Bavarian State Opera) and the Big Apple’s Metropolitan Opera — and I knew that she was scheduled to sing in an audienceless Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
I was prepared to be annoyed by the self-congratulatory pomp and imperial nostalgia that has fuelled this event for as long as anyone can remember (this much was confirmed when the British establishment reacted with horror at the suggestion that Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia! might have passed their sell-by date).
What I did not expect was to find myself choking back the tears as Schultz and the BBC choir sang a sombre, strident rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone — to an empty auditorium, admittedly, but to a waiting world hungry for precisely that reassurance. Gone was the tipsy jingoism of Proms past; here was a black SA woman offering us a global anthem.
