Mail & Guardian
Mail & Guardian
Melvyn Minnaar

Creator

Melvyn Minnaar

Guest Author

What’s in the shape of your champagne glass?

The preferred glass for bubbly is not flute-shaped, the boffins hold out. It’s round.

Oude Meester Souverein 18-year-old brandy. Crowned with five stars in the new Platter wine guide and double gold at Veritas.

From snake wine to fire water, brandy is all medicinal

In South Africa the dop to drink for just about all disorders has always been brandy.

The Paul Cluver Seven Flags was a top scorer in the Christian Eedes report.

The stars, and price, will tell you what wine to like

’Tis the season to be merry for top performers in the business of making wine.

Stephen Hobbs’s meditation on war and subterfuge

The cerebral edge of Stephen Hobbs’s art is shown in this wide-ranging and thoughtful exhibition.

Get this album: Noname Gypsy’s Telefone.

Money talks: In art, now, the cart pulls the horse

The rapid growth of “art fairs” globally could either be the upside or downside of the future of the art industry, writes Melvyn Minnaar.

Penny Siopis does it time and again

After 30 years, Penny Siopis’s work still takes chances with materials, inventing images and, in the process, negotiating happenstance.

Another public sculpture for Cape Town: Toy art?

For many hoping to see their work placed in the public sphere, the easy route seems to be an approach of "play-play".

Oh, so Irma! Exhibition brings Stern’s eccentricities to life

Artists Lien Botha and Clementina van der Walt have staged an intervention in Irma Stern’s house that interacts directly with her art in the museum.

National gallery a victim of Iziko structure

A director of Iziko Museums is back at work after winning a labour dispute, but the national gallery is a more serious victim of SA arts bureaucracy.

Nothing cheesy about cheese

The politics of provision are heating up as Slow Food’s symbolic snail sets out to establish global power. Right now the fuel of that crusade is raw milk. Established in 1986 in…

Putting olive oil to the taste

First one nostril, then the other, then both. Whiffs of cut grass, white pepper and, yes, a dash of artichoke, writes Melvyn Minnaar.