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/ 24 October 2005
Vanilla, liquorice and chocolate — will these flavours entice South Africa’s notoriously resistant men into wearing condoms? Recently, an Aids media project announced it would be distributing hundreds of thousands of free, vanilla-flavoured condoms to lure men into having safer sex.
The Timbuktu manuscripts, which went on show in Johannesburg this week, would be the last place you’d expect to find humour, pathos and sweeping tales of forbidden love. Academics and historians have expressed joy that the rare collection of 25 000 books, dating back as early as the 13th century ”reflects how we deal with existential issues of the human condition”.
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/ 12 September 2005
Cape Town artist Tyrone Appollis was forced to stand by this week while council workers demolished his sculpture depicting the 1985 “Trojan Horse” shooting of coloured student protesters. The demolition of the offbeat sculpture reportedly followed a call from a Cape Town council official to Appollis asking him whether he had ”space in his yard” for the work.
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/ 9 September 2005
Mining magnate Brett Kebble may be cowering from the spotlight after his recent business setbacks, but his art awards are about to scale new heights. The Brett Kebble Art Awards will be judged next year by the art world’s biggest show-off: America’s high priest of kitsch, Jeff Koons.
Fresh allegations of financial misconduct against Evert Knoesen, the suspended director of the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project, surfaced this week, sparking further turmoil in the tight-knit world of gay politics. The project collapsed in April this year as a result of financial problems allegedly aggravated by Knoesen’s mismanagement.
The Lesbian and Gay Equality Project spent more than R40 000 on a billboard advert intended to promote the idea of same sex marriage at a cricket match in Centurion. The expenditure has been cited as an example of the alleged misuse of funds by South Africa’s major gay organisation, whose work has been put on hold until the findings of an internal audit have been made public.
A community organisation has lodged a formal complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority against South African Breweries for what it calls ”disrespectful advertising in poor taste”. Soweto’s June 16 Roots Festival organising committee has issued a statement calling SAB’s Youth Day-oriented Pay Your Respects campaign ”a blatant abuse of drunken profits”.
The film industry has accused the Department of Trade and Industry of reneging on a pledge of R250-million to promote South African film. In a recent letter, the Independent Producers Organisation wrote to acting Director General of Trade and Industry Tsidiso Matona complaining that a motion-picture rebate scheme "launched with much fanfare" last year has not materialised.
Art imitated art this week when an unknown painter tried to sell a copy of one of Irma Stern’s most famous works from the foyer of a Johannesburg art cinema complex.The copy of the 1943 oil <i>Watussi Queen</i>, of a regal African tribeswoman, has been on sale at Rosebank’s Cinema Nouveau for R4 200.
An academic has come forward with what appears to be the first Mandela art fraud.