Thebe Mabanga on the players who are bringing arts and culture to the fore
The nominees for this year’s Arts & Culture Trust Award for Arts Journalist of the Year are crusaders who have displayed enormous chutzpah to speak their minds and champion the cause of a sector that is besieged by troubles ranging from finding finance for innovative work or pulling in audiences if such works ever see the light of day.
Between them Michelle Constant, Robert Greig, Roger Lucey and Mike van Graan represent major electronic and print media outfits and cover most disciplines in arts entertainment and popular culture.
Constant is a self-confessed live-music junkie who has been in radio for most of her career. She hosts two shows on SAfm Saturday Wired and Art on the Edge at midday on Wednesdays. Constant is also a contributing editor for men’s magazine GQ and author of the Blonde Date column.
Three of the many events she has covered on Saturday Wired are the Pukkelpop Festival in Belgium, Arts Alive and World of Music Arts and Dance (Womad).
“At [Arts Alive and Womad] you get to see artists in a relatively intimate space,” she says. “My issue with the festivals is their timing. Organisers do not talk enough.”
Constant adds that publicity for Arts Alive “was appalling”.
She says that when it comes to arts coverage, “there is too much content but not enough context”. She emphasises that arts need to be covered in a way that appeals to a wider audience. “My work with GQ has shown that there is a broader audience for music and arts in general.” In this case the audience is made up of men and women who are turned on by style and sports.
The Sunday Independent’s Robert Greig’s career as an arts journalist stretches back to 1976. This was interrupted in the early 1990s by a five-year stint as a Standard Bank consultant. The post was not for the bank’s arts sponsorship though “Oh God, they would not let me touch that,” he says. Greig’s tenure in the world of finance ended in 1995 when he became arts editor of the newly formed Sunday Independent.
What the arts need now, says Greig “are structures to ensure that the best work gets put on stage and funding for innovative work”.
He believes that coverage of popular culture should depart from a premise that the broader arts and culture influence and are influenced by it. “It is like building a dam,” says Greig. “You need to have a strong flow of current before you start construction.”
When free-to-air TV channel e.tv decided to extend its prime-time news bulletin to an hour, long-time TV cameraman and news production manager Roger Lucey saw an opportunity to cover the arts and present it to a broad, engaging audience.
“If sports get so much attention, I do not see why arts should not. For me there is no difference,” says Lucey.
When management approved his idea, the best support he got was a camera, three minutes on air and good luck wishes. Now Lucey compiles the Cape Town reports and edits and produces the segment, focusing mainly on grassroots arts projects in far-flung communities. Since his debut on February 5 Lucey has installed himself as an integral part of the news line-up and, thankfully, gets to be on air for far longer than three minutes.
It is hard to think of an arts journalist who has made more noise on cultural commentary over the past year than Mike van Graan. And it is he who has won this year’s Arts Journalist of the Year Award. The Cape Town-based arts consultant brandishes his Cultural Weapon, a column on the Artslink website which has also been nominated for an Arts & Culture Trust Award where he takes on everyone who has an influence in shaping the arts and culture landscape. This includes the Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, Ben Ngubane.
In a bare-nuckled open letter to the minister, Van Graan pointed out that while the department is trying to implement the Cultural Industries Growth Strategy, “we have lost an orchestra or two, a few dance companies have closed, our national gallery has been unable to purchase art work, and the odd musician has died as a pauper”.
Since 1986 Van Graan has woven himself into the arts landscape as commentator and practitioner. He has served on the executive of the Congress of South African Writers and the Theatre Action Group, and he is chairperson of the Western Cape region of the Performing Arts Network of South Africa, which he helped set up.
Van Graan’s talents as a theatre performer and director have seen him take to the stage in works such as Some of our Best Friends are Cultural Workers, Dinner Talk and The Tables Trilogy, all of which have featured at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival.
The Mail & Guardian predicted bigger things for Van Graan when it named him as one of the Top 100 South Africans in 1997.