As promised we emailed each of the Walters Prize Jurors: David Cross, Aaron Kreisler, Kate Montgomery and Gwyn Porter with the who-saw-what? question. They were pretty bold to select four exhibitions from outside New Zealand and we were keen to find out more about what point it was they were making.
Unfortunately we’ve not even managed an acknowledgement of our email from any of them. We can only assume this is a combined effort to limit the discussion to the rather vague remarks in the media release.
A week ago we emailed the Auckland Art Gallery (Louise Pether) and it doesn't look too promising from that direction either, although we did get a response from her on Monday agreeing to get in touch with the jury members. Since then we have heard that the Fearless Four have had a (further?) discussion about whether or not to release the who-saw-what info. Seriously, what do they think is going to happen?
Just to put it through the wash for the final time we'll ask the Auckland Art Gallery Director Chris Saines (stats that keep the juror's names out of it are fine...'two jurors saw one of the exhibitions, one juror saw non' etc.). If all that fails we’ll fall back on information sent in by readers, dates gleaned from Facebook, Home pages and Twitter to give you a best guess which (blush) we are pretty good at.
In yet another weird twist the Auckland Art Gallery has scheduled the opening of the Walters Prize exhibition for 3 August which falls in the middle of the Melbourne Art Fair (1 – 5 August). This surely means the dealers representing the four selected artists will risk missing out on the Walters opening. They all have stands in Melbourne. Still time to change what presumably is a marketing glitch.
