The Fleur du Cap Theatre Awards ceremony was held last weekend at the Cape Town Stadium in a function venue overlooking the field and about 55,000 empty seats.
As the stars of the performing arts scene settled tensely into their places and wondered how long it would be before the bar opened again, comedian and actor Alan Committie was given the tricky task of taking the edge off the occasion.
He hit just the right note by commiserating with his fellow thespians about the choice of venue — which was guaranteed to leave them feeling neurotic about the paltry number of tickets they would have to sell to break even on their next show. Indeed, the setting was a stark reminder about the often-difficult relationship between the two broad areas of human endeavour corralled into the department of sport, arts & culture.
This is a theme to which I have turned many times over the years, and “sport versus art” is a conflict that shows no signs of abating. It has become a truism that art is sport’s poor cousin, though the picture is complicated when you combine government budgets, corporate sponsorship and consumer spending. Art and culture, broadly defined, receives and generates plenty of money in the creative economy. It just doesn’t feel that way to penniless artists.
Phenomenologically, art and sport have much in common, though there is one key difference. Sport only makes sense, even in the friendliest of friendlies, if you are playing to win — whereas competition is anathema to art. Sure, there are stories of great artistic rivalries over the centuries spurring creative combatants to ever greater heights. But, ultimately, art has no meaning if it is produced to “win”.
Arts awards are thus something of a paradox. Certainly, they are necessary: they draw attention to the arts and offer recognition for (some) artists. In any given category, however, there is no incontrovertible proof that one contender is “better” than another. The consensus of a panel of judges can’t be compared to the numerical finality of a scoreboard or a league table.
Then again, facts and figures exist primarily to provide sports fans with ammunition for debates about the GOAT or to demonstrate that their favourite team has been robbed. Slow-motion replays also help to show that all umpires are biased or inept, and that the universe is fundamentally unjust.
If these sporting judgments are subjective, why shouldn’t the arts have their ranking systems, their competing claimants to the title of GOAT, their automatic qualifiers and top 10s and wooden spooners? Some aficionados will make claims based on box-office income or streaming numbers; others will state their case on aesthetic or ideological grounds.
I was intrigued to see Strauss & Co advertising the first of its flagship auctions for 2025 by pointing to “the return of the big five”. It was referring to SA modernist painters Maggie Laubser, JH Pierneef, Alexis Preller, Gerard Sekoto and Irma Stern, all of whom have works included in the Evening Sale Auction on April 1.
The packaging of these artists as the big five is mostly based on the value of their work at auction and, in Sekoto’s case, a kind of intangible political-cultural value. Preller’s Adam and Eve is expected to go for R7m-R8m, though this would not be enough to catapult him above Stern, whose 1939 painting Children Reading the Koran set a new African auction record of R22.3m at a Strauss sale in 2023 (Stern also tops the overall auction league, with a cumulative R717m spent on 488 lots).
This is the kind of thing one can sound very clever about at dinner parties. Say that arts marketing followed the example of wildlife tourism and expanded the brand to a big seven of SA modernists — who would you add? Gregoire Boonzaier? A safe bet in terms of auction value, albeit somewhat cliché. What about a contemporary such as Tretchikoff? Sure, but was he a modernist? George Pemba? An outside pick, maybe a bit sentimental; you wouldn’t have to spend too much.
Would-be art collectors who don’t have much capital to dip into yet can follow the Strauss auctions live online. It’s a bit like having a fantasy football team without the pressure of being a Premier League manager.
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