Month: December 2013

Eve Fairbanks sizes up Mandela’s successors:

People are deeply, deeply disillusioned with the leaders who’ve followed Mandela, both official African National Congress politicians and emotional leaders like Mandela’s offspring. Mandela’s relatives seem to have bucked his example entirely; some have banked millions in mining, an industry against which the apartheid-era ANC railed against as the heart of South Africa’s satanic injustice, while others have cashed in with a reality TV show.

The allegations against the politicians in actual office are more troubling. The country’s second democratically-elected president, Thabo Mbeki, was bitterly criticized for denying South Africa’s AIDS epidemic. Mbeki’s successor, President Jacob Zuma, was prosecuted for both rape and racketeering; he was acquitted of the former, and the latter charges were dropped on technicalities, but recently a huge scandal around taxpayer-funded upgrades to his massive home dominated the papers until Mandela’s—for Zuma, very propitiously timed—death. Daily, the whole black political class is accused in the media of corruption in the awarding of government contracts and greed in treating itself to swanky vacations and flashy vehicles.

“They were heroes,” one of the students standing beside me on the police line mused grimly, “but then they started buying cars.” As they buy cars, economic growth has slowed, basic education has fallen into disrepair, and inequality has deepened. This fall, The Economist concluded in a cover package pessimistically titled “Cry, the Beloved Country” that South Africa “is on the slide both economically and politically” and that the ANC’s “incompetence and outright corruption are the main causes.”

Applebaum argues that Mandela’s death should “should cause South Africans to look critically at the state he helped create and, above all, at the ANC, the party he led”:

There are reasons why the ANC continues to win elections, legitimately, even while failing to deliver much in the way of economic growth to its supporters. So far, rival parties have failed to capture the national imagination, even if some have done well in some regions. So far, the ANC has persuaded black voters that they would be “outsiders,” even traitors, if they voted for others. But Mandela’s aura—the patina of history and glamour he lent to the party—were also part of the explanation. During its last elections, in 2009, one South African journalist wrote that it felt as though the ANC were still “overseen by a pantheon of deities, including Mandela.” …

If South Africans really want to honor Mandela’s memory, they should deepen South Africa’s democracy, and vote for somebody else.

Reihan examines South Africa’s economy:

One of the key reasons for South Africa’s weak performance is that while high-growth countries saw large numbers of workers shift from low-productivity sectors, like subsistence farming, into high-productivity sectors like export-oriented manufacturing, South Africa’s high-productivity sectors have seen little growth. There are many theories as to why this has been the case. Some will attribute this to the rigidity of South Africa’s formal labor market while others will attribute it to a failure on the part of South Africa’s government to pursue a more ambitious industrial policy. Regardless of the answer, what is striking is that despite South Africa’s economic woes, the same political party keeps winning election after election.

He follows up in a later post:

[T]he ANC has made expansive commitments to its poorest citizens, which have often been cast in terms of racial justice. South Africa’s weak economic performance has thus engendered a great deal of bitterness, and a political and social climate that has led large numbers of educated young South Africans of all ethnicities to emigrate. The tragedy is that the South African economy had many advantages relative to other countries in its economic weight class, including a relative large English-speaking minority well-suited to thriving in a knowledge-intensive economy and relatively good infrastructure. Despite the ANC’s economic policy failures, it has not faced a serious political challenge, at least not yet.

(Photo: South African President Jacob Zuma attends a service at Bryanston Methodist Church during a national day of prayer, on December 8, 2013 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Mandela passed away on the evening of December 5th, 2013 at his home in Houghton at the age of 95. By Christopher Furlong/Getty)

Curiosity turned into a major discovery in the art world when inventor Tim Jenison stumbled into proving that the celebrated, hyperrealistic paintings of 17th century master Johannes Vermeer were achieved not through pure genius but through the aid of the camera obscura, a device that projects a perfect image of its surroundings onto a screen:

[Jenison] traveled to Delft again and again, scouting the places where Vermeer had painted. He learned to read Dutch. He paid for translations of old Latin texts on optics and art. Much later, he did a computer analysis of a high-resolution scan of a Vermeer interior, and discovered “an exponential relationship in the light on the white wall.” The brightness of any surface becomes exponentially less bright the farther it is from a light source—but the unaided human eye doesn’t register that. According to Jenison, the painting he digitally deconstructed shows just such a diminution from light to dark.

But still, exactly how did Vermeer do it? One day, in the bathtub, Jenison had a eureka moment:

a mirror. If the lens focused its image onto a small, angled mirror, and the mirror was placed just between the painter’s eye and the canvas, by glancing back and forth he could copy that bit of image until the color and tone precisely matched the reflected bit of reality. Five years ago, Jenison tried it out on the kitchen table. He took a black-and-white photograph and mounted it upside down, since a lens would project an image upside down. He put a round two-inch mirror on a stand between the photo and his painting surface. He immediately found that “when the color is the same, the mirror edge disappears,” and you’re through with that bit. Five hours later, he had painted a perfect duplicate of the photo, an astounding proof of concept by someone who can’t draw and had never painted a thing. Then he used his mirror trick to copy a color photo. Again, perfect. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he says.

[Illusionist and entertainer] Teller, who with Penn Jillette made a documentary of Jenison’s project, doesn’t believe it spoils the legacy of Vermeer or any artist who made use of the method:

“One of the things I learned about the world of art,” Teller says, “is there are people who really want to believe in magic, that artists are supernatural beings—there was some guy who could walk up and do that. But art is work like anything else—concentration, physical pain. Part of the subject of this movie is that a great work of art should seem to have magically sprung like a miracle on the wall. But to get that miracle is an enormous, aggravating pain.” To see Vermeer as “a god” makes him “a discouraging bore,” Teller goes on. But if you think of him as a genius artist and an inventor, he becomes a hero: “Now he can inspire.”

Jerry Saltz urges all but the wealthiest young artists to stay away from MFA programs, which after two years are “hovering near a quarter-million dollars” in cost. And besides, students have to deal with “a lot of bullshit”:

Iffy artist-teachers wield enormous artistic and intellectual influence over students, favors are doled out in power cliques. Zealous theoreticians continue to scare the creativity and opinions out their third generation of young artists and critics. Too many students make highly derivative work (often like that of their teachers) and no one tells them so. A lot of artists in these programs learn how to talk a good game instead of being honestly self-critical about their own work.

… I’ve taught at institutions across the prestige spectrum. Truthfully? Students who go to high-profile schools get a subtle eighteen-month bump after they graduate, in part because dealers and collectors (oy) see their MFA shows. However, once this short-term advantage dissipates, the artist becomes one in a crowd, with a mountain of debt, and may need to have a full-time job indefinitely to pay it off. There’s no surer way to throw away that early advantage than getting a job that saps their art-making energy.

Saltz also recommends a new essay by artist Coco Fusco, who “pulls back the curtains on the risky business and chancy racket of the Master of Fine Arts degree.”