WAM! The opening of the Wits Art Museum was sponsored by Bidvest, enabling the venue to create an event congruent with its standing as a new, important cultural landmark.
The recently renovated Johannesburg City Hall looks incredible, an enormous pipe organ providing the backdrop for the night’s proceedings and the more intricate cornice work, fresh paint and elegant chandeliers helping to create a stylish, elegant ambience.
That ambience was maintained, perhapes unexpectedly, throughout proceedings that enjoy the sort of profile that attracts government ministers, in this case Minister of Arts and Culture Paul Mashatile. Generally, protocol dictates that there be the serving of extra canapes while dignitaries arrive, fresh from a blue-light rush through the inner-city streets.
WALL AND ALL. Presented by Adidas Originals, I ART JOBURG was a big wall mural project that took place in the heart of The Maboneng Precinct, Johannesburg.
But Minister Mashatile was on time and on point, citing arts as an investment opportunity with some exciting examples of top-notch institutions (The Julliard School in New York being one) that have funding programmes from which South African corporates can draw inspiration.
The awards ceremony itself, featuring musical interludes and support from the Mzanzi Youth Choir, Richard Cock and the Johannesburg Festival Orchestra and 2013 Standard Bank Young Artist for Jazz Shane Cooper, was equally brisk – a plus in an age when so much money, time and integrity is wasted on the blowing of horns, rather than focusing on proper development and advancement of the cause concerned (the purported R65 million budget for the SA Sports Awards 2013 and associated events being a case in point).
MADIBA MAGIC. In the Nelson Mandela Capture Site, the uMngeni Municipality and sponsors Nedbank set out to create a unique heritage and cultural site that would mark the capture of Nelson Mandela in 1962 and boost the Midlands Meander tourist economy. The most visible aspect of the project is this large-scale sculpture by Marco Cianfanelli, which currently attracts up to 700 people a day.
Winners were called to the stage, celebrated with a bit of music, congratulated by the necessary dignitaries and then given their prizes. Here again, the Basa team, led by CEO Michelle Constant, seem to have a healthy perspective on what they are trying to achieve. The representatives of the victorious entities were presented, not with a giant cheque or useless trophy, but with an original artwork by Bambo Sibaya, the assistant curator at the Artist Proof Studio and the 2013 recipient of the Gerard Sekoto Award.
In other words, in rewarding useful work done by businesses with art and artists, the body is further supporting art and artists – a strikingly simple strategy, but not one that appears to have occured to many similar institutions.
INNOVATION. Suzaan Heyns incorporated concrete into the construction of the garments that formed part of the Reimagine Concrete Collection.
This was the final year to be sponsored by long-time Basa collaborators Anglo American, with Hollard Insurance set to step in as a new supporting sponsor for the next three years.
At this point in the evening, nobody was suprised when the handover was completed in a classy, poseur-free way, via the performance by the Mzanzi Youth Choir of a new choral work titled I Am, commissioned by Basa as a gift and composed by James Bassingthwaite.
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