Many artists who are connected in various ways with the ongoing dispute believe the university’s removal of the campus artworks to be censorship of the worst order. Chief amongst these are Breyten Breytenbach and David Goldblatt who have delivered damning comment on the action that the university has taken. Their objections are multifold but coalesce around the accusation that the university administration has displayed a profound lack of courage in facing up to the challenge being presented by the threat of further destruction of the art collection.
Compounding this accusation is the fact that the university administration has disingenuously tried to cast its “executive decision” (UCT Newsroom, 2017) to remove the artworks as a concern for the integrity of the works themselves, on the one hand, and as an act of emergency curation aimed at promoting political transformation on campus on the other. There has been almost no consideration about the question of academic freedom on campus, and the importance of mediating the call for de-curation of the university’s colonial assets in a way that does not summarily deny access to the artworks. In all of this, mention has also been made of a concern about insurance liability (Meersman, 2017), also on several levels.
Curating the Absence 