Race to Where?

Student Number: 607h0493

One of the main appeals of exploring the countless art blogs available is reading the assortment of comments and debates that are often triggered by them. The widespread and heated discussions about ‘race’ are impossible to ignore. Blogs open up a crucial dialogue on ‘race’ that seems to be drowned out in so many other societal spaces. Blogs are not sites for purely academic arguments, as each individual is allowed to express their own view regardless of their ‘qualifications’. In the comparisons and contrasts between a popular South African, African and International blog, it will be shown just how beneficial and well used this culture of blogging has become, and the important role it can play in a move to a post-race era.


Sir Tim Berners Lee invented the original World Wide Web (WWW), which runs as an application over the internet, and is a vast network of information. Web 2.0, an advancement on the possibilities of the WWW, makes the internet ubiquitous and allows individuals worldwide to, instantly and easily, access a wealth of frequently updated knowledge, such as the history of the internet itself. Social networking, made possible through Web 2.0, has become an important part of internet culture. Blogs which is an abbreviation of weblog is where one most typically comments on events in the form of a type of online ‘journal’. Blogs are one of the more popular options of the social networking phenomenon and offer huge potential for discussion and international recognition. For artists alone, the benefits of the ability to use the visual element of the internet to showcase their work and idea’s, internationally, at very little (or at no) cost, are immense. I chose the three particular sites as I wanted popular blogs which I knew would reach a large audience and thus showcase a variety of reader’s opinions too.


Artheat is a controversial and widely followed website that comments on the international art scene, but with a particular focus on the work of contemporary South African artists. The website is relatively young with an archive back to May 2006, yet it has a large number of blogs and links attached to it, offering the viewer an opening to the formerly exclusive art world. The opportunity to follow Artheat and the other blogs associated with it on social networking sites, such as twitter or facebook , increases its appeal and accessibility to a variety of viewers. Mixtape is an interesting assortment of visual and text based blogs, managed by Linda Stupart, a critic and artist based in Cape Town, with a large number of other members that collaborate regularly about a wide range of topics. The particular post that I chose was a review on Nicholas Hlobo’s exhibition, “Umtshotsho”, by Stupart entitled “Grey Carpets in Grahamstown”. What really captured my attention was the large amount of comments that the seemingly innocuous review received. Someone called ‘suckastick’ had initiated an angry back-and-forth racial debate through criticizing Artheat (and institutions such as Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town) for their seeming white monopolization. Ironically, s/he chose the literal white (text) on black (background) space of Mixtape and Artheat to discuss this. The 21 comments, that seem to have been posted in rapid succession, were undeniably more interesting and thought provoking than the blog post itself. In the use of pseudonyms or aliases such as ‘suckastick’, blogging allows people anonymity and thus more freedom to say what they might not otherwise. It is also interesting to note the issue of censorship that comes with blogging, as both Sloon and Stupart have control over which comments they allow. This can be seen in Sloon’s threat to delete a reader’s comment if the ‘polemic’ was not fixed. The debate had become too intense. It stands to reason that in a country with a history as troubled as South Africa’s, with roughly 350 years of colonialism and 50 years of apartheid, that impassioned debates such as this are vital. As Robert Sloon said, “I think it is a good idea for everyone to explore their prejudices”. Artists have always been social commentators and blogging can only accentuate the possibilities, and responsibilities, of that position.


AAchronym is an African blog that offers “Global African Arts with a focus on art-equity and cultural patrimony” written by S. Okwunodu Ogbechie, an Associate Professor of Art History. Ogbechie is the sole contributor to this blog, while the other two blogs are collaborations. Compared to Artheat, AAchronym is a much more internationally focused blog, seeming to look towards America more than the African continent itself. Despite AAchronym’s tagline. It is surely a comment on the growing globalization and resultant Diaspora, that Ogbechie is an African man living in California, USA. The global “Clustr Map” re-enforces this idea of a globalisation as the map pinpoints his readers to all over the world and also shows the world’s relatively recent interest in the African art market. Yet another factor that shows the true power and popularity of blogging worldwide is the application available to translate the blog into a language of the viewer’s choice. The specific post that I was interested in is about race inequalities in American Museums as it echoes the debate of Artheat in the need for change in institutions. In a direct contrast to Artheat however, nobody has commented on this post. Ogbechie himself barely comments on his own blog, as the article was taken from The Art Newspaper and written by Martha Lufkin. The fact that most of the blog posts on this site are originally from other sites is again different from the other two blogs. The small and rare amount of Ogbechie’s writing is of a more serious and formal tone than most blogs. After the African blog leaning towards issues of Race in America, I decided to examine an American blog and search for these issues.


Art Fag City is a very popular America art blog which provides “New York art news, reviews and gossip”, run by Paddy Johnson. The particular blog chosen is entitled Race Card and was written by a guest blogger and artist, Wayne Hodge. The blog post is a fascinating exploration of images used in politics in America which have strong racial implications through American history. Artheat’s ‘race’ debate is mirrored here, only to be furthered when politics is added into the mix too. The blog post was from 8 August 2008, when the arguments between Democrats and Republicans were even more intense than usual, with Barack Obama running for president. Yet the blog post debate of 10 comments dwindled off in the same manner as Artheat, the heated commentary went too far and was threatened with deletion. Further evidence of censorship on this blog can be seen in that no anonymous comments are allowed, which makes the commentators responsible, and therefore less likely, to air their views. It is interesting to note that on both Artheat and Art Fag City, the comments were rarely on the issue of the blog post, but rather on race, a topic obviously begging for and initiating heated dialogue. According to the statistics from the applications from the website, Art Fag city has 3127 readers and 2493 followers on Twitter. This speaks volumes about the attention this American site receives, compared to the 17 followers AAchronym has. Despite the large amount of followers, and the apparent issues about ‘race’ shown through the 10 fiery comments, there is very little result when one searches for blog posts related to racial relations in the art world.


While reading all three of these blogs I could not help be reminded of an interesting module I studied as a part of my Art History and Visual Culture course, led by Ruth Kerkham Simbao, entitled “Unpacking ‘Race’ ”. The course was not the expected lesson in ‘political correctness’. Instead, the in-depth and academic approach knocked all preconceptions and led one to be critical of the most seemingly innocent words, such as ‘white’ or ‘black’. Kwame Anthony Appiah, one of the authors on the modules weighty reading list, went into huge detail to convincingly prove the loaded ideology behind the terms themselves in In My Fathers House in the Philosophy of Culture. Appiah argues that ‘race’ is a “concept”: a social construct, based on arbitrary distinctions and is often used as a metaphor for culture (Appiah, 1992:34). In extreme summary, the white European man saw ‘blackness’ in direct contrast to his civilised and racially supreme ‘whiteness’ (Appiah, 1992:32). It is clear throughout all of the blogs mentioned in this essay, that the terms ‘white’ or ‘black’ are not used critically, or necessarily questioned as terms themselves, as Appiah discusses. It is interesting to note whilst reading the blogs, that regardless of place in the world, what is debated about by an elite group of academics is not what most individuals seem to think, or say. Blogs play an important role in providing a space for the non-academics to present their views, especially in the notoriously ‘clique-ish’ art world. Yet it is a pity that blogs have not yet been fully utilised to merge these two differing worlds together.


When one reads the blogs, and their comments, not only within South Africa with Apartheid or Africa and colonialism, but worldwide, it is apparent that ‘race’ as a concept, and thus ‘racism’, is still deeply embedded in society. There is a sore need for more dialogue in order to begin to resolve these issues. With the endless opportunities blogging opens for discourse, it is surprising that this has not yet been taken full advantage of, particularly by members of the art world. Each player in the art world has an equal responsibility and role to further this discourse and to face these issues head on. It is clear that blogging has the potential to provide the power to achieve this change.