OjuOponIfa

In the beginning of the nineties, when a group of young – perhaps fresh from school -- fine artists stepped out to the public in an exhibition titled Young Masters, they created more than a stir. They unsettled some seated posturing. Audaciously, they not only proclaimed that they were poised to offer fresh coating to the features of the gallery, which as co-notated in the subtext of their show, had grown stale; they also conferred status of ‘master on themselves’. Of course, they did not get away so easily with the audacity; they were named, labeled and critically pummeled, even as it was clear that since many of them were fresh from art school, they were driven in this mission, by the exuberant resourcefulness, enterprise and energy conventional to their age; and were merely responding to the dynamics of shifting paradigm in global art discourse at the time – this era was in the throe of post modernism debate, remember. The ‘freshers’ as they were described in one particular critiq...

A Bio-Sketch Of Arts Writing In Nigeria By Jahman Anikulapo (Delivered as a Keynote at a seminar on Arts Journalism at the Goethe Institut, Lagos; 2003) No one should pretend that the story of arts writing in Nigeria’s popular media has ever been formally articulated. The chequered history has never been written in any form. What exist are faint, sometimes, vague ideas of what had been and what is. Albeit the various recorded comments about the origin of arts writing in the country have been largely a function of the personal interest of the person doing the chronicling. Thus we shall crave the indulgence of this house, if the little story we shall tell today about the origin nay the story of the Nigerian arts writing is largely from very personal perspective. But we could proceed that the story of arts writing in the media is as informal as the way the vocation itself came into being. Those who have said that the vocation of the arts writer was parasitic of then larger body of Jo...