High and mighty

As part of their sponsorship for the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Delta Airlines (they are the High’s Official Airline – every museum should have one) has put a Dali moustache on one of its 757’s to support the High’s current Dali exhibition.

It’s only words

‘Presence’ as it is commonly understood entails the unmediated co-extensivity in time and place of what I perceive and myself – it promises a transparency to an observer of what ‘is’ at the very moment at which it takes place. But the event, the performance, through its very durationality (the fact that it enacts the body as always already escaping into the past) points to the fact that there is no ‘presence’ as this is commonly understood.

Adam Art Gallery release for lecture on Marina Abramović

Outta space

The Dowse (it must be about time to drop the New Dowse thing) has had its ups and downs. It has certainly looked up more recently since the appointment of Cam McCracken as director and his reinvention of the art programme. Now we hear there is more good news for the Dowse as McCracken appoints his colleague from Te Tui days, Emma Bugden, as the Dowse’s new senior curator. Bugden, who is the current director of Artspace will leave to work at the Dowse around March next year. The great drift South has begun. You have been warned.

Image: Emma Bugden (foreground) lifting artist Alicia Frankovich during her Artspace performance

Here comes the son

We saw a great poem about a leaning sculpture on inininoutoutout a while back and said if it was ever drawn up into a comic we would love to publish it here. It was and, as you can see, we have.

Poem and illustration from Pippin Barr's stimulusresponse (click on image to enlarge)

Duelling cats

If you wanted to work out if the art world is out of the recession you’d be hard pressed to tell from the catalogues of the two big auctions coming up tonight and next week. Both feature Julian Dashper works on their covers – although Webb's have sneaked their drum skin round the back. In terms of anticipated returns (based on lower estimates) Webb’s have four works at $100,000 and over, Art + Object have two. For works with lower estimates $50,000 and over Webb’s have nine to Art + Object’s three. 

Good work is always difficult to get and Webb’s have secured high value works by Michael Parekowhai and Shane Cotton along with regular auction boosters Don Binney and Bill Hammond. Oddly Art + Object is featuring a Goldie as one of its top priced offerings which feels rather off brand for the 21st century auction house but, things being what they are, understandable. 

Bargain of the year? The small Julian Dashper velvet painting Arthur’s Pass estimated by A+O at between $4,000 and $6,000.

Images: Top, the front of A+O and the back of Webb’s. Bottom, vice-versa

Infinity pool

Like reflections in one of those Kusama rooms the world of lookalikes stretches as far as the eye can see. Here a photograph taken by one of OTN’s readers Derek Henderson in Orepuki in Southland echoing the Peter McIntyre’s view of the North Island town, Kakahi we posted the other day.
Image: Top. Bottom, Derek Henderson Dover Street, Orepuki, Southland. 2-45pm, 23rd February 2004

Fair’s fair

What ever happened to New Zealand’s love affair with the Melbourne Art Fair? Past fairs have seen most of the top New Zealand dealers turn up. Crockford, Gow, Langsford, McKay, Lett, McLeavey, were all there. This year it’s down to three participating dealer galleries and it certainly doesn't seem to be attracting much interest from prospective New Zealand visitors. 

And it is not as though New Zealand wasn’t featured at past fairs. In 2006 Michael Parekowhai’s large inflated version of Cosmo dominated centre stage and Ronnie van Hout was commissioned to make R.U.R. for the last one. Perhaps the dealers were using it as trainer-wheels to prepare for bigger fairs further afield, or maybe some of them have lost their taste for international connections altogether.

Creative New Zealand certainly pushed hard for the Melbourne Fair this year and while there’s a geographic sense to that, if the dealers don’t think it is in their best interest to participate, no amount of logic will convince them. Besides, you’d think any viable gallery could afford to get itself to Australia on its own funding if there was enough advantage to it. This year it seems not. 

Image: Maichael Parekowhai's Cosmo at the 2006 Melbourne Art Fair

Stop thief

HBO have developed this tricky but entertaining cube view with multiple camera angles for telling stories. Give Art Heist a go. If you don’t have broadband don’t even think about it.

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U is for under-bidder

Woulda, coulda, shoulda

Animal art

Whoever it was who said there has never been a great Panda portrait photographer was wrong.  
Thanks to D and the Animal Art Archives (AAA)

Win and a place on Walsh

Charles Saatchi is giving his one away, Russian oligarch Abramovich’s girlfriend is extending hers and Australian David Walsh is building his underground for $67 million. The Walsh effort is just one of a new wave of private museums that are fast becoming the must-have for rich art collectors. Walsh’s art-buying clout comes via his skills as a mathematician and professional gambler. The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania will feature British artists like the Chapman Brothers, Chris Ofili (The Holy Virgin Mary seen in Charles Saatchi’s Sensation show) and Damien Hirst (it’s a fly work). Walsh famously paid $4 million for John Brack’s The Bar at Sotheby’s and has signed up to pay for all the remaining life work of 65-year old French artist Christian Boltanski. The collection of MONA is reckoned at over $125 million in value. The Museum is near Walsh’s Moorilla Estate winery just out of Hobart and is set to open in 2011.

Paint job

Everybody knows that even though we prefer it white, Greek sculpture used to be painted, but who’d of thought this is what it looked like. Bit of a shock. The picture representing a recreation based on colour stains and traces was in the exhibition Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum.

Ill Met

Rules around photographing in New Zealand galleries and museums are often confusing and Best of 3 took a recent stab at working out the muddle. In passing she explains that the Metropolitan ad campaign we posted on yesterday was a result of encouraging visitors to create their own pictures. Which made us think about whether or not this change how we look at the Met’s ads. It's got to be a no. The ads have the Met’s name on them with all the authority that name brings and the Met is responsible for how the objects in its care are protected physically and with respect. Would New Zealand museums allow the same kind of photo to be published using Mokomokai? Of course not. The idea is unimaginable. So too with Egyptian Mummies.
Image: Photo taken by Met visitors and used for Well Met campaign.

Prize winning idea

The Walters Prize opens tonight and the word is that at least one of the artists has made a new installation rather than attempt to re-present in some way the exhibition that led to their selection. This is a big leap forward for the Prize. It should open up more interesting shows and give artists an opportunity to be more adventurous. Trying to recreate an exhibition that was designed for a specific space is always tough as many touring exhibitions have shown. Besides, the two-year gap between prizes can be a lifetime in the work of some younger (and some older) artists when it’s evolving fast. The exhibition of the four Walters Prize finalists (Dan Arps, Fiona Connor, Saskia Leek and Alex Monteith) will be open to the public on Saturday.

Other stories on the 2010 Walters Prize that have featured on OTN:

Food for thought

Where’s Walters?

All the art that fits

The Walters Prize rules ok?

Location, location and location

No pressure

That was then

“Now… you can email a painting to Moscow and they email you back the money instantly!”

Art Dealer Larry Gagosian in Annie Cohen- Sotal's book Leo and his circle: the life of Leo Castelli

Ad value

Back in the eighties the National Art Gallery – as it was then – showed an Edvard Munch exhibition. The advertising agency tasked to publicize the show came up with a campaign including an image of his famous painting ‘The scream’. Their headline? “Edvard Munch. What a scream.” They also offered up a Munch image of a young girl at her mother’s deathbed with the header “Lighten up Edvard”. The NAG didn’t run with the idea and the agency was told to come up with something less crass. Times change. Judging by a recent advertising campaign, the Metropolitan Museum in New York would snap up the Munch idea in a heartbeat.

Other tasteless art ads on OTN

Artnews
McDonalds

Now how long would that take?

One door closes and another opens. Since Massey University’s One Day Sculpture frenzy last year, we haven’t seen many (well, none) one-day works created by anyone. But funny-guy Austrian artist Erwin Wurm has opened up new pastures for quick-hit sculpture with his exhibition penciled in to open in China. The One Minute Sculpture. Opportunity knocks.

The real thing

We’ve always been fascinated by those then-and-now photographs showing where artists made iconic paintings: Cezanne’s Sainte-Victoire, the house that served as a model for Eward Hopper’s House by the railroad, that sort of thing. 

Closer to home, a couple of New Zealand bloggers have been scouting out the locations of New Zealand art works. You can see Lara Strongman at work here and Pauline Dawson chasing up the locations of famous studios here.

Toward the end of the eighties we tried to persuade the City Gallery to let us do an exhibition looking at the life and work of Peter McIntyre. Our angle was how his paintings had struck such a chord with New Zealanders while being virtually banished from its public art galleries. The exhibition never got off the ground but during the process we got to know Peter and his wife Patty and spent some very entertaining days with them both in Wellington and at their holiday home in Kakahi. While we walked around the small village Peter pointed out the locations for some of the paintings he’d made for his 1973 book Kakahi. 

Here are a couple of them to show how McIntyre observed the small rural town and how little it had changed over the 15 years after the book was published. Nowadays it is a different story

Images: Top, the main street of Kakahi in 1988 and Peter McIntyre’s early seventies painting. Bottom, McIntyre’s painting of the local marae and the same spot in 1988 when new carvings were being added to the house. The tarpaulins closed the site off to women.

Lookalike

Images: top, Threadless Spoiler t shirt by Ollie Moss 2007. Bottom, Peter Robinson Dirt cheap c.1994

Saving your plates of meat

For all the allure of the online world, there is still something perfect about a good old analogue book and, even more so, a good old analogue art book. 

Take the recently published Wayne Barrar: an expanding subterra with its 66 colour plates and 16 large black and white images. A number of these images have been in exhibitions before and often, from memory, at a larger scale than they are in the book, and yet the book carries a punch the prints we have seen so far did not achieve. We put a lot of this down to gallery fatigue; that ache in the back of the legs and the feet that hits about 12 minutes after you stop to look at anything (allow another couple of minutes for galleries without concrete floors). The effect is often the denial of detail in favour of the quick hit. 

But sitting at a table with a book is a different proposition altogether. In Barrar’s case that’s when you notice a beautiful tin cup perched up on a scruffy white cabinet, an aerial map almost merged with the rock face it hangs on and what appears to be a please smoke icon in a nine (count ‘em) urinal bathroom. That’s also when you can study all 82 images in a single sitting if you want, giving each one enough time to reveal itself. A large body of work like this takes time to look at and standing up is not the easiest way to do that thing.

Image: Wayne Barrar: an expanding subterra published by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery

Branded: p mule

The moment when artists becomes brands

Spot the difference

“Despite the dirt, what they both found was a painting in good condition ...”

Te Papa conservator Melanie Carlisle and European art curator Vicki Robson on the purchase of Poedua reported in The Dominion Post 10 July 2010

“The painting will need to undergo extensive conservation work and Te Papa conservators are confident it can be restored it to the artist’s intention.”

Te Papa media release 20 July 2010

“The purchase, one of Te Papa's largest, did not affect any other planned purchases or projects.”

Te Papa Manager Communications Jane Keig on the purchase of Poedua to TVNZ 10 July

“Spending so much was, however, a big decision when one or other of the other versions could have been borrowed for display here. Hippolite acknowledges that the cost "means other [unspecified Te Papa] programmes will be slowed down a bit".

Te Papa CEO Michelle Hippolite in the New Zealand Herald 17 July

Movies on Saturday

French and Saunders putting the boot into dealer galleries for your Saturday pleasure.

Thanks P (yet again)

Hold your horses

If you doubt that technology is changing much, check out this music video. Shot in just four days in a garage, it features Swedish band Hold your horses performing 70 Million while pimping 24 lookalike artworks. Produced by L’Orge, it was edited on a Mac (what else?) with Final Cut Pro.

You can catch the amazing video itself here. If you can’t i.d. all the recreated art works, there’s a complete list below (don't cheat). To give credit where it’s due, it was directed by David Freymond with photography by Eugenie Marcland.

Images: clockwise from top left. Velazquez – Las Meninas, Géricault – The Raft of the Medusa, David – The Death of Marat, Munch – The Scream, Otto Dix – La journaliste Sylvia von Harden and Rembrandt – The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp

Answers:

Industry ink: Number 2

Art world tats. All contributions welcome. Absolute privacy guaranteed where absolute privacy is requested. OTN painting horse badge for the best and the brightest.

Other ink here

Stunt double?

Architects aren’t famous for loving art. Some of them may collect it but, with a few famous exceptions, their buildings usually try to put art in its place rather than creating a great place for art. A neat indicator of the architect/art nexus are those squiggles architects put in their presentations to clients to indicate generic sculpture dotted round the promised building.

In a new twist on this theme, a drawing promoting a Wellington apartment block in the Dominion Post, collaged in a sculpture that looks for all the world like a Paul Dibble. 

Strangely the media release – sorry, article - that accompanies the image claims, “a high profile artist, yet to be named has designed a sculpture for the front of the new complex.” Has Paul Dibble just been used as a place marker, or is he high-profile-guy? We’ll keep an eye out and, if the ‘complex’ is ever built, answer that question.

The Impressionist

You put art, LEGO and tattooing together and what do you get, a tattoo on your thumb of LEGO impressions. At least that’s what LEGO artist Nathan Sawaya got anyway.

Dr Who does Arles

OTN movie lovers will be pleased to know that another actor has taken up the ginger beard to play Vincent van Gogh. This time VVG mixes it with the great Time Lord Dr Who in Richard Curtis’s episode Vincent and the Doctor. This time round movie-Vincent has traded the American twang he inherited via Kirk Douglas for the burr of actor Tony Curran. This Scot played the Invisible Man in The League of Gentlemen and is also Lieutenant Delcourt in the new version of The adventures of Tintin which is having its animated sequences created by Weta.

From here it is spoilers all the way down.

Curtis has a lot of fun with VVG. Seems he is the only one who can see an alien who it turns out is a limping impala (not literally) left behind by its mates. It also turns out that the Doctor was on hand when Michelangelo painted that ceiling. In the end VVG is taken in the Tardis to visit the Musée d'Orsay in 2010 where he gets some well-deserved and tear-forming affirmation from Bill Nighy who plays the part of a high-end curator.

Richard Curtis (who wrote Black Adder, Mr Bean, Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral and many other TV shows and feature films) was born in Wellington where his family lived for a number of years.

Unfortunately the NZ showing of Vincent and the Doctor was last week, as all Dr W fans will know, but you can catch snippets of it here and pre-order the DVD. You can see snippets on YouTube (type ‘Dr Who and Vincent’ into the search box) or here at the BBC home page for info and more pics from the VGV episode.  

Images: Top, the Doctor and Vincent. Bottom left Vincent sees his work at the d'Orsay and right, tears up. Thanks for the heads-up A. 

For more OTN stories like this type 'Art in the movies' in the search box

Notable

When it comes to New Zealand heroes we tend to go for ones from science, politics, sport and history so it was nice to pay our way in Switzerland with a couple of artists and an architect (Le Corbusier, Sophie Taeuber-Arpand, Alberto Giacometti) featured on the ten, fifty and one hundred Swiss Franc notes.

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 T is for Tape measure

“Gather near the fire, my children. The darkness closes in and it grows cold.”

“Tell us a story great-grandfather, a story from the way back.” 

“Very well… back then, long, long ago …before the times of much money, our people would take their art and hang it on their walls by themselves.”

“Straight, great-grandfather…. They would hang it straight?”

“That is so. Every painting, every print, every bas-relief we would hang on the wall absolutely parallel to the ground. It was always so in my family and in all the families of our village. Until, one day, that knowledge was lost.”

“How great-grandfather, how did it go?”

“The Straightening Man. He came from nowhere with his measure tape and his laser beam. Before long the Straightening Man hung all our pictures and all our prints, for by that time we had stopped buying bas-reliefs. Carefree we forgot the old ways until one day no one could remember how to hang a painting. 

“The knowledge had vanished from our family, our tribe and, I fear, from all the world.”

Advice for collectors

Put a bit aside for upkeep.

Court documents from the divorce proceeding of American collector Peter Brant reveal that maintenance of the Jeff Koon’s sculpture Puppy between $NZ105,000 and $141,000 a year to cover ten men working for twelve days each spring to groom the 13 meter high sculpture which includes 25 tons of soil, an internal irrigation system and over 70,000 flowering plants.

Te Papa buys version of painting already owned by the Australian National Library

Why has Te Papa spent over two million dollars on a painting when another copy is available for loan just across the Tasman? The purchase of one of three versions of John Webber’s painting Poedua (Poetua) was made using ‘cash reserves for capital purchases and projects, a mixture of funding from government and the museum's commercial activities.’ It seems a strange purchase when an virtually identical version of this work is only 3.5 hours away by plane in Canberra in the National Gallery of Australia, on loan from the Australian National Library. 

You might wonder whether or not Te Papa had any conversation with the Australians about the possibility of borrowing the work on a regular basis. None of these art works stay on permanent display. If the Australian National Library was willing to lend its work to the ANG, couldn’t Te Papa also become a loan partner?

If Te Papa is to remain a sustainable collecting institution entering into cooperative arrangements with other institutions will surely have to be seriously considered. This is already happening between institutions like the Tate in London, the Whitney in New York and the Pompidou in Paris. They share the cost of expensive art works rather than each going to the huge expense of owning their own examples. The borrowing option could be even cheaper and easier.

You can read more about institutions sharing art works here.

Image: the three versions of Poedua. Left to right, National Maritime Museum in London, Australian National Library and Te Papa

Snort

In an art-is-where-you-find-it moment, a not-very-competent replica of the World Cup trophy turned up at Colombia's Bogotà airport on its way to an address in Madrid. Turned out the ‘trophy’ was made of a paste of cocaine powder and acetone which put its value at around $2.2 million, on the street that is.

On the road

On the road is an ongoing series celebrating the Ministry of Land Transport and Local Body support of New Zealand artists. Thanks P 

Image: Peter Peryer (whoops, that gives it away)

Battman

Looking through some old slides the other day, we came across this sequence of Giovanni Intra installing Pink Batts. Writer, artist, gallery director, but insulation installer? In fact he was creating his peep-hole work Golden Evenings for the 1994 exhibition Art Now. Displayed in the old National Art Gallery building in Buckle Street and curated by Christina Barton, it was billed as the Museum of New Zealand’s first ‘Biennial of Contemporary Art’.

As we have seen many times, it is one thing to tout the future and another to make it real. As you have probably guessed, the Art Now Biennial was the only one of its kind and pretty much the last time the Museum of New Zealand (Te Papa) claimed it would serve up contemporary art on a regular basis.

At the time Chief Executive Cheryll Sotheran did say, “Creativity and invention are crucial to an organisation aiming to change public perception of what museums can do and be for the communities they serve.”

Nice one Cheryll.

COMMENTS:  Robert Leonard has suggested that 'Giovanni would have been installing the Batts not for Art Now at MONZ,  but for his work in a 1994 group show at Artspace called n+1 cultures (on art and science). It had Batts as a visible element.' Given our track record, he is probably right, although our slide was marked Art Now. As for the rest, as they say - we stand by our story.

Spamette

the minister for the arts has announced the addition of two lawyers and a professor of classics onto the creative new zealand board • sue crockford is said to be showing interest in the soon to be vacated space used by gambia castle on k-road • the re-opening of the auckland art gallery in 2011 looks like it will clash with the opening of the venice biennale • the city gallery has just started checking out crown lynn collections so no cl show this year

The artist will be present

When New York art critics make up their top ten lists at the end of this year, chances are that all of them will include Marina Abramović’s exhibition of performances at MoMA at or near the top. The performance that created the most attention was Abramović’s title piece The artist is present which entailed exactly that; Abramović sitting in the museum for every hour the exhibition was open over the three months of its run. Throughout this time visitors to the exhibition were able to sit opposite the artist for as short or as long a time as they wished. Some visited a number of times, some once, some chose to sit for a few minutes, some for up to an hour and at least one for a whole day (you can see portraits of all the sitters here). 

Intimate and touching the performance drew out all kinds of emotions from the sitters, some leaving with tears streaming down their faces. But, as the days went on it became more than just two people making one-on-one connections, the exhibition also developed into a major event that attracted stories of celebrity queue-jumping, outrage at people hogging the artist’s time and breathless commentary around the artist’s diva-style gowns. And imagine the shock, for those of us (nearly everyone in the world) who weren’t present, to find that the performance, like most performances, was done under the glare of lights and the jostling and hubbub of museum visitors and staff.

This revelation reminded us of the famous and equally surprising photograph of Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis taken as the last shots of Some Like it Hot were put in the can. An intimacy somehow contrived in the heat of attention.

Images: Left Marina Abramovic performing The artist is present. Right Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis and crew filming Some Like it Hot

Art is where you find it

A carved wooden eagle with a broken beak, on the side of the road, high in the Swiss Alps.

More

Around this time last year the One Day Sculpture programme was in full flight. One of the more memorable ODSs was Billy Apple’s unsuccessful attempt to get the Wellington City Council to de wax and conserve Henry Moore’s sculpture Bronze form in the Botanic Garden. At the time we walked round the work with Billy tut-tutting over the many scratches and blemishes that have accrued over the years. Well Wellington, rest easy in the looking-after-Henry-Moore stakes if the work outside the Neue Nationalgallerie in Berlin is anything to go by. Botched and scarred it has had some horrible attempts at repair none of which have helped one little bit.

lookalike

et al.ism  at Aotea Square

On the map

Back in 1988 we worked with Charles Eldredge on an exhibition called Pacific Parallels: artists and the landscape in New Zealand that was to tour the United States. Charlie (no one ever called him Charles) had just left the directorship of the National Museum of American Art in Washington for a personal chair in art history at the University of Kansas. As an historian he was intrigued by the connections he saw, particularly in the nineteenth century, between the art of New Zealand and the United States as well as with other nations with colonial histories such as Canada and Australia. In Pacific parallels New Zealand art is seen through knowledgeable American eyes. 

The exhibition started with John Kinder and went on through the decades with artists like Edward Fristrom, Eugene von Guerard, George O’Brien through to Doris Lusk, Ralph Hotere and Colin McCahon and on to Peter Peryer and Anne Noble. To cap it off Charlie wanted to include very recent works and what he had his heart set on was Ruth Watson’s four-part Mappa Mundi (now in the collection of Te Papa). After some reservations Ruth (who was the youngest artist in the show by about ten years) agreed to let it tour and it became something of a centrepiece to the exhibition.

After that sort of recognition, other artists might have moved on from maps and mapping (which like most subject matter drift in and out of fashion), but Ruth has stuck with the fascinations and metaphors of cartography. So, after the 100 artists see God experience, it was good to pick up The map as art: contemporary artists explore cartography by Katharine Harmon. This book on artists internationally working with cartography includes three works by Ruth Watson. John Hurrell is also included with one of his street map works.

Image: Ruth Watson's work Mappa Mundi (partial view) next to McCahon's Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is and, far right, The days and nights in the wilderness in the exhibition Pacific Parallels when it was shown at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas in November 1991.

Art is where you find it

This time in the Swiss town of Chur. And no all you OTN word-play lovers, that is not as in wheel chur.

By the numbers

2    The number of contemporary art curator jobs available in Wellington

4    The number of years since Shane Cotton last had a solo exhibition in Auckland

5    The number of times the word ‘great’ is used in the one page press release for the John Pule exhibition at the City Gallery

23   The percentage of funds allocated compared to that requested in the last Creative New Zealand round

27   The percentage of applicants to get funding in the last Creative New Zealand round

34   The average age in years of The Walters Prize finalists this time 

41   The average age in years of The Walters Prize finalists last time

73   The percentage of male teachers at the Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch

79,000   The price in dollars per square meter paid for Bill Hammond’s Lullaby of birdland at Webb’s contemporary art auction

Enjoyable 2

We don’t usually post on Sunday but today, ten years ago, marks the birth of Enjoy, the art space across the hall from Peter McLeavey in Wellington. Another reason for our celebrating Enjoy’s longevity is that our first post back in November 2006 was about an Enjoy exhibition. 

Happy Birthday, Enjoy.

Copycat

On July 7, Ringo Starr's 70th birthday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will inaugurate a special display of his gold-plated snare drum that will remain on view to the public through December 2010 in the Museum's second-floor Musical Instruments Galleries.

Metropolitan Museum of Art Press Release

Images: Top Julian’s drums at the Adam. Bottom Ringo’s drum for the Met

Bird watching

In our continuing series of sightings of New Zealand native birds in international contemporary artworks (let’s not forget the snub beaked quail spotted in Yang Maoyuan’s carpet back in June 2008), here is the kiwi half-slugged in Neo Rauch’s 2004 painting Suche featured in this month’s Art in America.

Spot the difference

“The Walters Prize seeks … the most outstanding contribution made to contemporary visual art in New Zealand in the two-year period preceding its award... “

– Walters Prize rules

“The …Walters Prize is awarded for an outstanding work of contemporary New Zealand art produced and exhibited during the past two years.”

– On Show the exhibitions and events booklet published by the Auckland Art Gallery

Three bees in the Atrium

In the world of foyer art global smack downs, no-one does it better than the Marriott in downtown LA. Shamelessly reaching for the 3Bs – Big, Brassy and Baffling – their winning entry In the absence of paradise is a bizarre mash-up of Vermeer’s Portrait of a girl and Frederic Church’s Heart of the Andes. Many, many feet high (lots and lots of meters) it is reflected off every glittering surface of the Marriott vestibule. Well done that painting.

Forever Gary

The Auckland Herald has always been keen on rich people and rich Garys are no exception. So when they herd about the lavish renovation and über styling of the Herne Bay house formally owned by the Sultan of Brunei and now owned by very rich Gary Lane they obviously needed pictures. The trouble started when they sent the celeb-pic team down to the morgue to get a ‘great Gary image’ (something with him and a champagne glass would be nice). Somehow they ended up with the wrong Gary - ArtGary, Gary Langsford - and not the RichListGary, Gary Lane, hoping no doubt that one suave Gary holding a champagne glass would look pretty much like another.

Image: Left, the wrong Gary. You can see the NZH story (with ArtGary eliminated) here