CONSIDERING YOU'VE PICKED UP a copy of this month's VISI, it's safe to assume you're a lover of beautiful things. After all, VISI has established itself as “South Africa's most beautiful magazine”. When you're captivated by something beautiful, what follows is a natural, euphoric and deeply personal experience.
Contrarily, paying homage to something beautiful can be as unnatural and distressing as navigating a minefield. The “appropriation” battleground is suffused with slippery slopes, sinkholes and foot traps in a foggy maze, where historical context, identity, monetary gain and power dynamics form a crisscross of laser beams to warily navigate.
In this morally awakened, aka “woke”, era, literal theft of the beautiful things of another's culture is so last century. Today, beauty lovers and creators should think conscientiously before adorning themselves in…
