A Slow Death
by Virginia MacKenny
Mike van Graan's recent Artwit column 'Get Behind the Arts, Dear Sponsor' (Mail & Guardian, November 14) made the point that, given their rate of success, it is possible that the arts are a better bet for sponsors than sport. Given the level of achievement that South African artists are attaining not only nationally, but internationally the point is well taken - that is by artists, but not by those outside the arts community.
The news last week, broken in the Sunday papers before it even reached staff members, that the 'powerhouse' of education, the Durban Institute of Technology (DIT) was proposing to cut the Ceramic and Sculpture department from the Fine Arts School indicates a worrying trend on the part of senior management in education as to the importance of the arts.
Currently the Fine Art Department at the DIT is the last remaining place in KwaZulu Natal where students in the province can gain a full Fine Arts Degree (the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg Fine Art School is a shadow of its former self now reduced essentially to a service department under the heading Centre for Visual Studies, while the University of Durban-Westville Fine Art Department was closed down a couple of years ago).
The DIT proposal would seem to be exceptionally myopic as not only has the department consistently produced graduates of quality who have had both a local and international showing (Siemon Allen, Nathi Khanyile, Langa Magwa, Greg Streak and James Beckett, amongst others), but far from saving money the proposal if implemented will surely be as effective as ring barking a tree.
The death will not be sudden; students unable to get a full spectrum of the visual arts will go elsewhere, numbers will drop and the powers that be will see the department become financially untenable again. The province will lose a key resource and the knock-on effect to other art institutions and to the economy of the province will not simply be a philosophical one.
