The outstanding success of the Yayoi Kusama exhibition certainly puts the pressure on Wellington’s City Gallery. Already the City Council has suggested that the long queues of fee-paying patrons outside this show should be a benchmark for future exhibitions. How to replicate this unusual mix of high art and popular appeal is no doubt the subject of intense discussion in the Gallery’s inner sanctum.
When it comes to popular appeal art exhibitions usually fall into one of four types.
- Unusual or spectacular visual effects
- Controversy
- High value works from overseas / Masterpieces
- Extreme rarity
The City Gallery has had successes in at least three of these categories - Kusama and Picinnini (visual effects), Mapplethorp (controversy) and Exhibition of the Century (Masterpieces). So where to next?
Some of the City Gallery’s audience-grabber exhibitions come via the MCA whose director Liz-Anne Macgregor is also hot on the heels of mega-audiences. Both must be kicking themselves that they didn’t sign up for Ron Mueck’s OMG show presently on at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Unfortunately for them Christchurch, under the directorship of Jenny Harper, is also muscling into the bread and circuses game and it will be that city that astonishes its own and other city’s publics with Dead Dad and the other Mueck lookalikes (30 September – 23 January 2011).
What other contemporary artists have Kusama-like crowd pulling appeal? Olafur Eliasson is probably one but his works are large and expensive to install. Damien Hirst might still grab the popular imagination and Jeff Koons, well selected, certainly would but both would come with a sky high entry fee. Artists like Kusama who thrive on creating OMG effects are not thick on the ground. So who knows, if the numbers pressure grows, we may even have a resort to curating provocative group shows.
