by Lizza Littlewort

A rising South African art star has complained that she is tired of the Art Fair and wants the Tate Modern built in Johannesburg. “This art fair’s been going on way too long, and it’s just becoming part of the establishment now,” she said. “It’s been two whole years and that’s enough already.”
The starlet, who asked not to be named because she is still hoping to be shown at the fair, went on to say that it’s not the South African tradition for anything to last longer than two years. “Our greatest historical precedent is the Johannesburg Biennale, and there was only one of those, followed by ten solid years of bitter regret,” she said. “Since then, we had the Brett Kebble Award which went on for two years, and it damaged our reputation as being too edgy for our shirts. We have a responsibility to the international public to be in a state of perpetual anarchy, because that is what they want from African art. How can we cut off their only dream of escape from the boring European treadmill of functioning art shows? So the longevity of the Kebble Awards would have become a serious threat to local art if there hadn’t been an even more serious threat to Kebble himself.”
“The other problem with having an efficiently organised fair which could last a long time,” she continued, “is that it gets in the way of our creative imagination.” She explained that artists need to dream, and the less structure they have the wilder their dreams can be. “If you have nothing at all, it is easier to dream big dreams than if you actually have realistic possibilities right in front of you,” she explained.
This is why she is campaigning to ditch the art fair and rather get the Tate Modern. “We want a project that is so huge it’s completely unfeasible,” she said. “All an art fair does is sell art and build up the structures for a functioning establishment. In other countries, radical artists break away from the establishment. Our way of doing it is to break down the entire establishment. We don’t want second best, we want perfection. We don’t want any kind of institution at all unless it answers everyone’s needs.”
“Actually,” she added, doodling thoughtfully into her Moleskine, “breaking down the institution is not even that hard to do, since it’s usually falling apart anyway, and its demise requires little effort from the artists themselves.”
“We want to make a clear statement that art isn’t about money, and that we reject the commercialism of the fair,” she argued. “The Tate Modern isn’t about money, it’s about showing radical work that isn’t for sale. You know the one by Martin Creed with all the marathon runners sprinting through the museum? That show doesn’t need any money to set it up. It’s all about the idea. It’s about challenging peoples’ expectations of what they’re going to find when they go to a huge lavish contemporary art museum thinking that they’re going to see the same old stodge like the Rembrandts and Picassos that you see in every other guilded palazzo across the whole of Europe.”