The Prose of a Con-Artist
consumers. The ideological construction of this class meant that they upported only those artists who reinforced through their arti tic practice colonial visions without confrontation. Although the political composition of this country has since changed, the nation's ideological relationship with art remains the same; the bourgeoisie court painters have been replaced by academic artists. Like everything else in contemporary life, market forces have played a vital part in the development of the tragi-comedy called South African art. Typically, our museums in relying less on any kind of self-governing criteria and more on the advice and input of commercial galleries began to acquire the very works that had been produced for a "domestic" interior decorator market. These acquisitions in turn reinforce the direction taken by the galleries in the sort ofwork they choose to promote, hence the growth and development of such work. The absence of professional, non-commercial spaces and lack of alternative institutions for more progressive practices has in turn legitimized the national art historical direction through an absence of real voices of dissent. Modernism distilled into formalism has been the dominant language informing South African art production since the 196Os. This formalism, however, is not the "hard" language that became known as Minimalism, but a "soft" formalism perverted by sentiment. Under isolation, taste, style, nostalgia, and sentiment developed into the primary criteria informing the production and assessment ofart. Isolation later degenerated into xenophobia and by implication an ignorance of international developments in the language of art transformed into fundamental mistrust and rejection of the course that art history in many parts of the world was taking. The sentimental foundation that South African art was built upon became conducive to the proliferation of stereotypes, generalizations, and myths about the nature of its art. "Good" art was not judged according to international precedents, but according to the "morality" of the maker. The assumption was and remains that good art is morally affirmatory in the form of Kendell Geers