At the city-owned Johannesburg Art Gallery, paint is peeling off the rain-damaged ceiling, the elevator doesn¡¯t work and parquet tiles are loose and cracked.
Years of neglect of the 111-year-old gallery, a once-grand building now surrounded by inner city decay, has led to the relocation of the bulk of the collection¡¯s more than 9,000 artworks. Original paintings by Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso sit in galleries elsewhere in the city, some of them private.
The situation is just one indication that Africa¡¯s financial capital, also known as ¡°the place of gold¡± for once being the site of the world¡¯s biggest gold rush, is on the verge of collapse. Water and power outages are frequent, streets are potholed and many of the abandoned high-rises in the city center have been appropriated by armed gangs who extract rent from squatters. Added to that, most capital projects have ground to a halt, the city has failed to collect on billions of dollars in debt and long-term loans have been taken out to service recurrent expenditures, according to the opposition party.
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