On Thursday the 25th of March, a new sculptural installation by Andries Botha was dedicated at The Hudson, a recently erected office building in De Waterkant on the edge of Cape Town's central business district. Entitled, Latitude 33º55'S. Longitude 18º 22'E, the work was commissioned by The Hudson's developer Gerald Phillips.

The Absa L'Atelier awards figure prominently in the lexicon of sought-after credentials for the South African artist. For that reason, it is surprising that the March 19th opening of the 23rd Absa L'Atelier Regional Exhibition at art.b Gallery in Bellville was a modest affair, attended by only an estimated eighty visitors. Art.b officials in fact indicated that this year's Absa L'Atelier was less of a draw than their other exhibitions.

"This is a really unusual trip for me," stated Andy Goldsworthy, an English sculptor and land artist, while visiting South Africa briefly in January. "Until I have made a work outside, I really haven't arrived in a place. And I haven't made a work here, so as far as I am concerned I am not in South Africa yet."

Diane Victor's recent exhibition at Goodman Gallery Cape, once again demonstrates her ability to combine flawless technical skill with boundless imagery and sharp messages, while still looking very current. Comprising 65 individual works, Victor's All Smoke and Mirrors at Goodman is made up of five distinct series of drawings, etchings, and embossings.

Brett Bailey and Jay Pather organized a program of interdisciplinary works for the 2008 Spier Performing Arts Festival, which they staged in non-traditional venues throughout Cape Town. Their emphasis on the interdisciplinary peaked with the Festival's grand finale, Talking Heads, directed by Bailey. Tapping into the fascination many local visual artists hold for the archive, Bailey chose an archive, Cape Town's historic Centre for the Book, for his "living archive", Talking Heads. Its contents, a collection of forty "experts from a wide range of fields", were installed respectively at forty café tables with black table-cloths and polished brass numbered disks in the Centre's main hall.

Art appreciation is an embodied experience, full stop. A picture in a magazine does not equate with a physical object in a gallery. A review, no matter how finely crafted, cannot substitute for the experience of looking. But we cannot be everywhere all the time, which partly accounts for the massive publishing industry that has grown up around art. The printed word here is dangerous, particularly when it manifests as opinion. All too often opinion, the rocket fuel of the art world, is treated as fact. Living in a society that constantly looks for affirmation and insight to some imagined centre – Johannesburg, Cape Town, London, New York – the risk this opinion poses is amplified.

On a cloudy Thursday evening in March, the Joburg Art Fair became an actuality. After months of relentless promotion, clinched in the last few weeks by a billboard campaign featuring the event's distinctive strips of horizontal colour, it was time for Foucault to make way for Fendi. Over the next three days, participating galleries, some foreign, most of them local, chalked up a whopping R25 million in sales.

It's a familiar routine: crap show by crap artist in crap gallery serving crap wine. Robert Sloon pulls up his jeans and braves another dubious Wednesday night opening in Cape Town "Um," I say. I'm wearing my glasses so it passes off as something intelligent anyway. I'm chatting to the gallerist at an exhibition opening in the centre of town, Cape Town that is, and I'm riffing on the centres of art power moving to Woodstock – how art is the vanguard of an insipid gentrification, inner city living, that leaves the poor worse off. The gallerist starts looking around to see who else has arrived. Maybe she's also started contemplating the cheap rent out there....to read more see v6.4

Five senior South African artists were recently asked by an Italian curator to each propose a list of young artists for a show in Siena, Italy. Amy Halliday attended the resulting show and reports on some of the discussions it elicited

Art South Africa's fifth and sixth Bright Young Things for 2008, Andrzej Nowicki and Jonah Sack