When a golden toilet is a symbol of tarnished excess, how will we fare under the man with a Midas touch?
In January, US President Donald Trump asked New York’s Guggenheim Museum for a work of art to furnish the White House. Curator Nancy Spector declined the request for a Vincent Van Gogh, suggesting instead that she would be willing to part with Maurizio Cattelan’s America: a toilet cast in 18-carat gold.
It was a perfectly eloquent “up yours”. Spector could legitimately affirm that golden household objects are Trump’s preferred form of decoration. But even the president’s ironyfree, literal-minded advisers could see that there was a veiled message.
Cattelan’s 2016 sculpture invokes Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (a porcelain urinal declared an artwork in notoriously avant-garde fashion). It was plumbed in for public use and more than 100,000 people visited the Guggenheim to use it.
It was, as British art critic Jonathan Jones noted, “a comment on the insanity of the art market as well as the grotesque inequalities of runaway capitalism”.
While very few of those who queued for the gilded loo were likely Trump supporters, they were arguably drawn by the same ancient human weakness for lustre that made it possible for working-class white Americans to be wooed and duped by The Orange One.
Sure, people voted for him because he appealed to their racism and sexism but they also voted for him because they associated him with gold.
If the old aphorism says, “all that glitters is not gold”, the US is learning that an excess of real gold can also be equated with deceit. The more glittering the palace — call it Trump Tower — the more tarnished the occupant by lies, greed and moral decrepitude. The symbol of Trump’s sales pitch was his golden lift. The reality is more like his Russian golden shower.
You would think that in SA we’d be more wary of golden promises. The single defining event of the modern history of our country was arguably that fateful discovery at Langlaagte in 1886; its consequences were warfare, systematic oppression and the fundamental inequality of an economy dependent on the exploitation of cheap labour.
No amount of waxing lyrical about Gauteng-eGoli as a place of opportunity, no heady precolonial nostalgia based on the image of the golden rhino of Mapungubwe and no pragmatic assertions that — for better or worse — mining has been SA’s financial backbone, should dissuade us from scepticism about gold.
Yet the strike-it-rich gold rush narrative has a firm grip on our collective imagination. What else could explain hundreds of people scouring the emergency lane of the M2 outside Johannesburg on Tuesday? It appeared that a truck had lost some of its load and rumour had it that the spilled rocks and pebbles contained gold. Of course, what they found, even if they were fragments of ore, had little value in their raw form.
There isn’t really a market for the unextracted gold that may or may not be found in a handful of tiny deposits.
Too many South Africans, however, are desperate for the prospect of any form of income, any glimmer of opportunity.
Moreover, as a jubilant caller told Stephen Grootes on Talk Radio 702, the apparent miracle of gold appearing “like manna from heaven” seemed like divine confirmation that it was “game over” for Jacob Zuma.
Indeed, our national zeitgeist is such that we all want to believe a golden era is dawning under Cyril Ramaphosa.
The early signs seem to be good: compounds raided, arrests made, processes under way to reclaim stolen billions. But it is just as likely that all this — too little and too late — is more for show than anything else. Deals have been made and make no mistake there are plenty of bargains still to be struck. Not nearly enough of the bad guys will do jail time. Not nearly enough of the money will be recovered.
Ramaphosa is, we believe, the “right kind of rich man”. We trust that he hasn’t forgotten his trade union roots or his Constitution-drafting convictions. At any rate, he seems to prefer buffalo to gold. That’s something.
THE SINGLE DEFINING EVENT OF THE MODERN HISTORY OF SA WAS ARGUABLY THE DISCOVERY AT LANGLAAGTE IN 1886