The Honourable Minister Lulama Xingwana
..has given the artists and work significant more, uhm, exposure than had she just opened the exhibition.
In the Minister’s rebuttal of the media frenzy, she says ‘…Contrary to media reports, I was not even aware as to whether the ‘bodies’ in the images were of men or women or both for that matter. My reaction was guided by the view that these ‘artworks’ were not suitable for a family audience…’ – uhm, okay… given the context that statement boggles the mind but okay.
So, should the government decide what art parents can and can’t show their children?
In all fairness the minister did not sensor the show, and has given it and its artists and works much more valuable media time than they would have received otherwise, so inadvertently perhaps, she has been a true public servant and has served the arts, if by nothing else than having a personal opinion in her official capacity.
In case you missed the details at the root of the debacle, the Minister was to open an exhibition titled ‘Innovative Women’, curated by Bongi Bhengu showing work by ‘…contemporary black South African female artists…’ including Dineo Bopabe, Zanele Muholi, Nandipha Mntambo, Ernestine White, Ingrid Masondo, Nontobeko Ntombela, Usha Seejarim, Senzeni Marasela, Lerato Shadi and Bongi Bengu. The exhibition was sponsored in part, apparently to the tune of ZAR 300,000 by the minister’s department. So far so good.
Where things got interesting is when the minister arrived to open the show, saw some of the work she reportedly called ‘immoral’. Me thinks these are for the most part truly beautiful.
There has been a lot of indignation and criticism of the minister in the press, blogosphere and social network sites like facebook. Some noteworthy responses are up at Book SA. So I will not dwell on the lofty philosophical, ethical, moral or even aesthetic aspects of the story, but turn instead to the attention the minister has generated for these artists with a glance at some simple empirical metrics.
The Mail and Guardian claims that it was specifically the work of Zanele Muholi that irked the good minister, her portrayal of lesbian sexuality.
If we use Google News Search as a reflection of visibility we find the following:
- For the search term ‘Zanele Muholi’, about 22 results
- “Zanele Muholi” AND Xingwana 17 results
- “Zanele Muholi” –Xingwana, 4 Results
So my hypothesis seems to hold, nearly 80% of the references to Zanele Muholi also include mention of Minister ‘Lulu’ Xingwana. (Given the actual numbers involved, if anybody wants to call this a storm in a teacup they have my blessing.)
But of course Google News search has certain biases so we might instead look at Google trends where we can compare the actual keywords people have searched for – except there have not been enough searches for Google Trends to have any results. So instead we turn to the normal Google Web search, but restrict our searches to web content index over the last month:
- For the search term ‘Zanele Muholi’, about 568 results
- ‘Zanele Muholi’ AND Xingwana AND Minister 246 results
- ‘Zanele Muholi’ WITHOUT ‘Xingwana’ AND WITHOUT ‘Minister’, 262 Results
So in short the honorable minister ‘Lulu’ Xingwana has at least doubled the online visibility of Zanele Muholi over the last month. Not much of a silver lining I know, especially when considering just how gloomy the government’s patronage of the arts may seem.
Updates:
Nice piece at AfricanColours
