Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (27 page)

One rather cold night toward the end of my stay, I found myself in a small house in Johannesburg with a black artist named Paul Sekete. I had been asking him about exhibitions, shows, internationalism. “I think art should make people happy, not just show them what it’s like to be happy,” he said. “I want to make people happy. That’s what we need from art.” It was late, and we were both tired. “Can you make people happy?” I asked. Sekete reached out one hand and began to tickle me, and I started to laugh. “You see how easy it is?” he asked. We had been talking about a white conceptualist we both knew. “That stuff—it’s okay, but it isn’t art,” he said. “Such a waste of time. Why do they keep doing it?”

A few days later, I saw the white artist—and his excellent work—and described my evening with Sekete. I got as far as recounting being tickled, and he interrupted me. “But that isn’t art,” he said irritably. “I thought you were here to write about the damned art scene, not to do more PC quasi-political reporting. If some guy tickled you in New York, would you write it up for an art magazine?”

It should be noted that each of them had given me an invitation to an exhibition where their work was being shown together and had used that invitation to demonstrate the point, close to both their hearts, that the art world had no racial differences, that they shared a vision in which they were all the same. But their showing together did not mean that they wanted the same things out of art, any more than the listing of blacks and whites together in the population registers of the new South African government means they will vote in commensurate ways or for reconcilable reasons. It’s slow, frustrating progress from artistic tolerance to aesthetic parity. But remembering how the artists I’d seen upon arrival had decried Barbara Masekela’s
invisibility to a flight attendant, I was struck by how hard these two artists were looking at each other, even if neither was fully convinced by what he saw.

Riason Naidoo, director of the National Gallery, said in 2013, “The market today is unrecognizable from what it was ten years ago. It has become more professional; there is more competition with many more commercial galleries, and there are many international museums and collectors acquiring South African modern and contemporary art, which can only be good for the artists. South African commercial galleries are now more visible at international art fairs from Miami to Berlin.” His point becomes only more relevant when one compares the recent past with all I had first witnessed two decades earlier.

As in Russia and China, there is an ongoing problem of censorship. In 2012, the ANC sought to censor a painting by artist Brett Murray of polygamist president Jacob Zuma as Lenin with his penis exposed; it was a reproof of corruption in South African government. In an ANC official statement, Jackson Mthembu announced, “We have this morning instructed our lawyers to approach our courts to compel Brett Murray and Goodman Gallery to remove the portrait from display as well as from their website and destroy all printed promotional material. . . . It is in our view and we remain steadfast in that the image and the dignity of our President as both President of the ANC, President of the Republic, and as a human being has been dented by this so-called piece of art by Brett Murray at Goodman Gallery. We are also of the view that this distasteful depiction of the President has violated his individual right to dignity as contained in the constitution of our country.” Zuma supporters soon entered the gallery and smeared paint all over the image, effectively destroying it. The leader of the Shembe Church, which has millions of congregants, ordered that Murray be stoned to death. Steven Friedman, the white director of the Center for the Study of Democracy in Johannesburg and a columnist for
Business Day
, wrote that Murray’s painting was regarded by many black people “as yet
another example of the contempt in which they believe they are held by white people.” In contrast, Aubrey Masango, a black writer for the
Daily Maverick
, worried that South Africa’s rulers “will hijack misinformed ideas of cultural identity and manipulate the real economic discomfort of the masses to generate sympathy.” Jonathan Jansen, the black vice chancellor of the University of the Free State, wrote, “I cannot think of a more necessary dialogue that must take place than between these two hard-line positions, but this being South Africa, heat overcomes light. Both corners in their rigid self-righteousness boxed the living daylights out of each other as they came flying out of their corners in this bloody fight.” A decision by the Film and Publication Board to “classify” the painting as offensive and potentially harmful to children was ultimately overturned.

In 2013, controversy erupted over the removal from the Joburg Art Fair of a painting by Ayanda Mabulu depicting President Jacob Zuma in a manner that the curators thought might offend the fair’s sponsors. Explaining his reasoning, the event organizer acknowledged that the decision was provoked by concern over the ability of the fair to attract future financial support: “I felt that the art fair has a responsibility to the creative economy and the painting could compromise that.” The painting was reinstated after photographer David Goldblatt, the fair’s featured artist for that year, threatened to quit in protest. Mabulu said, “It’s not the first time that I’ve been censored. I find it difficult to witness the same thing that was happening during the apartheid era happening today. It makes it difficult to understand in which direction we are going as South Africans, and artists, if we are going to allow the minority, two people, to decide what’s palatable for you people.”

Controversy subsequently arose over the appointment of two white curators for the South African Pavilion of the 2015 Venice Biennale and over their selection of only three women out of thirteen exhibiting artists, including only one black woman. Stefanie Jason of the Johannesburg
Mail & Guardian
noted, “Can a country whose reputation of butchering foreigners is being streamed around the world afford the further embarrassment of a pavilion in crisis?”

New Republic
, June 1994

Vladimir Zhirinovsky is founder and leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, and served as vice chairman of the State Duma, or the lower house of parliament, until 2011. The BBC called him “a showman of Russian politics, blending populist and nationalist rhetoric, anti-Western invective, and a brash, confrontational style.” Howard Amos, writing in the
Guardian
, called him a “nationalist firebrand.” A flamboyant, belligerent, crude, obstreperous, inflammatory, racist, sexist, homophobic, authoritarian buffoon, he has grown no more appealing in the two decades since I wrote this piece.

A
t a recent party in New York with various members of the Moscow intelligentsia, the topic of conversation was, of course, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. I was surprised to find that members of that liberal circle who had first championed Gorbachev spoke of Zhirinovsky with the sort of good-humored affection that so many Americans seemed to have for Ollie North in his heyday. “You know,” said one, “he’s just a cynic. Everyone in Moscow is a cynic. Everyone in New York is a cynic. It’s not such an interesting problem.”

Amused by my curiosity about their leading nationalist, the Russians suggested I join them the following evening to meet Zhirinovsky’s New York friends and advisers. At ten at night at the
kitschy Russian Samovar restaurant on West Fifty-Second Street, I was introduced to several bearish-looking men with broad features and beards, who wore turtlenecks with their dark blue suits. My attempts to discuss Zhirinovsky’s anti-Semitism were curtailed by the Unforgettable Eugenia, a seventy-two-year-old woman in a long sequined dress, who wore enormous plastic glasses and sang Russian Jewish folk tunes. “I spent last month with him,” one member of our group reported between songs, producing snapshots to prove it. “It’s a shame, you know—he’s really getting very arrogant, not nearly as funny as he used to be. Famous people always have this problem with their sense of humor.”

I wondered how funny he used to be and said that he seemed strikingly unfunny these days. “You’ve been reading the New York papers too much,” one man said. “Vladimir just likes power and attention. Everyone hated him at school; he was the class clown, and provincial! So he says whatever will make him popular now, but he doesn’t believe any of his own rhetoric. He’s not like Rutskoi or Hitler or Stalin. It’s all a joke, the biggest joke around.” I thought this was pushing cynicism pretty far, but I didn’t get to say so because the Unforgettable Eugenia began her grand medley from
Fiddler on the Roof
.

“Let’s go somewhere we can talk,” said Zhirinovsky’s friends, and they led me to a basement at the corner of Fifty-Seventh Street and Eleventh Avenue, where I found what appeared to be a reproduction of the lobby bar at the Intourist Hotel, circa 1986. A band in navy-blue jackets with yellow piping was singing Beatles songs in Russian. A mirrored ball revolved overhead, and every table had plates of those revoltingly grainy tomatoes and cucumbers I had thought you could grow only in the depleted soil of the steppes.

I asked whether Zhirinovsky were gay, a rumor I’d heard from friends in Moscow. “He’s never very interested in women,” someone remarked. “And he’s always got those good-looking young guards around him.” Someone else knew a male poet who claimed to have had a long-term liaison with Zhirinovsky. The vodka had been going around, so everyone was keen to be helpful at this point. “If you want to sleep with him, we could probably arrange that for you,” one volunteered. Another shrugged and said, “It might be fun to write
about afterward,” then added sotto voce, “but I know, believe me. I’d think twice about it if I were you.”

I was somewhat distracted by the women who had come to join us, all wearing enormous quantities of turquoise eye shadow, one sporting a floor-length black satin dress and black satin gloves up to her shoulders with jet buttons. Feeling out of my depth in the political conversation, I got up and danced under the mirrored ball to “All You Need Is Love” and “Let It Be,” making good use of the slow-dance two-step that I had last utilized in high school. When I sat down, I pointed out that even if Zhirinovsky was really an actor and didn’t believe his own rhetoric, he might get trapped by it. “Don’t worry,” someone said. “He won’t get enough power to be trapped. He’ll just get influence. Russians are too cynical to elect such a cynic.” I expressed relief. “A cynic like that,” said one of the company, “could much more easily be elected mayor of New York, even president of the United States.” He slapped his hand on the edge of the table. “That’s why we live here,” he said, and burst out laughing.

New York Times Magazine
, March 17, 1996

In 1995, the Metropolitan Museum was planning a sensational exhibition of work from the National Palace Museum in Taipei, and they were courting press coverage. They anticipated safe, flattering articles about how loans of the first order were being brought over for a spectacular installation. My first draft of this story consisted mainly of a semi-scholarly discussion of Song dynasty Chinese painting, which I had studied in college. When plans for the show began to unravel, my essay had to be rewritten entirely. It ran as a cover story with an image of a landscape painting by the Song master Fan Kuan behind a rope and the caption “The Chinese Masterpiece You Won’t See at the Met.” Although the curator was distressed by that cover, the exhibition was among the most visited in the museum’s history. As I’d learned in Moscow and Beijing, controversy can be a great ally of art. If this exhibition was important enough to provoke national protest in Taiwan, it must be worth seeing.

O
n January 20, someone under the misapprehension that I was an employee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art hit me quite hard in the jaw. It was my last night in Taipei, and I’d gone with
art-world friends for a late drink at an attractive bar near my hotel. On one side of us, some skinny young men with loosened neckties were using portable phones; on the other, two young women in chic Japanese eyeglasses giggled. Nearby, a guy with jeans and a leather jacket was punctuating his Chinese sentences with snatches of California-style English. It was Saturday, around midnight, and we were drinking beer with salted prunes in it, as is done in Taipei. I was quietly describing my dinner that evening with Chang Lin-sheng, vice director of the National Palace Museum in Taipei; Maxwell Hearn, the Met’s curator of Asian art; Shih Shou-chien, director of art history at Taiwan University; and others.

The guy with the leather jacket, who had overheard me, walked over and leaned heavily on our table. “Don’t mess with our cultural patrimony,” he said in a tone of voice that in America is not usually associated with the phrase
cultural patrimony
. “We’re onto your tricks.” He was speaking loudly, and several people clustered around. They did not strike me as a museum-going crowd.

“You’ll never get the Fan Kuan,” one of them taunted. “You’ll never get any of the twenty-seven. You’ll be lucky if you get a few Qing bowls.” The mobile-phone users, sensing trouble, had removed themselves to the other side of the room. The young women with the eyeglasses followed.

“The conservation status of works of art is awfully technical,” I said gently. It seemed a harmless enough remark, but I could not have raised the tension more if I had advocated the subjugation of Taiwan to mainland rule.

“You Americans don’t know a thing,” a round-faced man breathed through clenched teeth.

Then someone said, “What are you, a spy from the Metropolitan?”—and socked me in the face.

A friend grabbed my arm. “Come on, someone just said you
do
work for the museum—there’s going to be trouble.” He hurried me out into the damp night.

The conversation at dinner had been about the exhibition of Chinese art from the Palace Museum that was to open at the Met in less than two months. The show was the flower of more than five years
of careful negotiation and represented economic, social, and cultural cooperation at the highest level. Many museum shows require delicate international diplomacy, but this one was unusually loaded with political meaning. At a moment when the United States was alternately currying favor with China and slapping its wrist over human rights violations, and when China was threatening to force a reunification with Taiwan, which it considers a renegade province, the exhibition would remind an American audience of Taiwan’s presence and its increasing hunger for self-determination. The opening date of the Met show—Tuesday, March 19—would be just four days before Taiwan’s first free presidential election, a display of freedom that had already led the mainland to rattle its sabers at almost deafening volume. Moreover, the show would be the greatest exhibition of Chinese art ever mounted in the West, curated to tell the tradition’s entire history—a history that is Taiwan’s, not China’s, to dispense because Chiang Kai-shek took all the preeminent monuments, paintings, calligraphy, ceramics, jades, and bronzes when he fled to Taiwan in 1949. The Chinese believe that the collection was stolen and should be returned to Beijing.