….and statistics

The Frances Hodgkins Fellowship is fifty years old. The fiftieth Fellow was recently announced as Campbell Patterson from Auckland. Looking back, the list of artists over those fifty years is a mix of well-known names peppered with a fair number of who-the-hell-was-that? Still it stands as a good example of how representation has changed, well for women anyway. For the first twenty years there were only five women Frances Hodgkins Fellows (so many ironies in just three words) but over the next twenty years this changed dramatically with 45 percent of the ‘Fellows’ being women and over the last ten years, 50 percent. 

For people identifying as Maori the situation has been a little less encouraging: six out of the fifty spots. This certainly makes the media release announcing Campbell Patterson’s success somewhat ingenuous. It gives examples of past celebrated winners as ‘Ralph Hotere, Grahame Sydney, Marilynn Webb, Fiona Pardington, Shane Cotton and Heather Straka’. Ok, this selection represents the 50 percent women thing (although over the full 50 years it has only been 38 percent) but to have 67 percent of the list as Maori stars is a plain misrepresentation of who have been awarded the Fellowship. And once you note that Shane Cotton was the last Maori to be awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship and that was back 18 years ago, you have to wonder what’s going on. And then, boom! it comes to you. Marketing, got to love it.

Image: Campbell Patterson, 2017 Frances Hodgkins Fellow

Outstanding

The discipline of marketing has found a welcoming home in the art museum world. Relentlessly positive and unabashedly promotional, museum communications sometimes feel as though the clock has been turned back to the excitable 1990s. Take a recent announcement for an upcoming exhibition by Christchurch’s CoCA. For what's basically another local show (it's titled Contemporary Christchurch) the 148-word announcement has managed to squeeze in 10 superlatives to remind us how to respond:

excited
celebration
innovative
vibrancy
stimulating
creative
lively
inspiring
innovative
amazing

How incredible is that?

One day in the art museum director’s office

Director: We need new ways of making money…I mean attracting more visitors.

Curator: I’ve had a few thoughts.

D: So what do marketing have to say?

Marketing Manager: It’s a two ‘I’s situation. We need to pull our audience from Independent to Dependent.

D: Don’t you mean to Interdependent?

MM: Exactly, the two Is. We also need to move from demand to participate.

C: I have a few ideas.

D: So how do we do this participation thing?

MM: Living art. It's the way to go. It’s the two ‘P’s - Placing the punters in the picture.

D: Isn’t that three Ps?

C: I have a couple of ideas.

D: I suppose 'Placing' doesn’t really count …so yes I get it…two Ps…clever. Now how do we do it?

MM: We build a famous painting in three dimensions and let people live in it.

C: That’s a completely stupid idea.

D: I hear what you say but we’re trying to be positive here…. Blue skies ....

MM: No, no it’s OK. ‘In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm’. Cookie Lyon said that. Empire, season one.

C: (sarcastically) So did Goethe. Late eighteenth century.

D: Sure, sure… but what painting do we build?

MM: Van Gogh’s bedroom.

D: Incredible. Awesome.

C: (even more sarcastically) Yeah, awesome… why don’t you put it on Airbnb?

And that is what they did.

Shape shifting

So what do you get if you put the new Govett-Brewster | Len Lye Centre logo into Google and search for similar shapes? This, that's what, so in good company there with Nike and QANTAS. The closest to the G-B brand turns out to be Bare Valley Bikes. Make of that what you will.
Image: Govett-Brewster logo left hand side, second from the top

Face off

Auckland Art Gallery’s marketing for its Light show is kind of strange. For some reason the Gallery has abandoned the brand image it set out with when the new building was opened and now comes up with a new graphic style for each show. The current Light show campaign pulls out what's become known as The Spielberg Face to draw the crowds. 

The Face is the signature of Stephen Spielberg as a movie director - a human face suffused with wonder as it confronts an amazing sight. Pop culture commentator Matt Patches describes it best: “When a character looks up and catches something unexpected, that's the face. When a character watches something otherworldly take place in front of their eyes, that's the face. When a character stares outward, mouth slightly agape and has a revelation that will change them forever, that's the face.” You can see the Spielberg face in action here in a video essay by Kevin B Lee. 

The Auckland Art Gallery are hoping that The Spielberg Face (rather than a pic of one of the light sculptures and rave reviews from the UK media) will be what attract a rush of visitors to the show, their lips parted and their bright eyes shining wide in anticipation.

Images: top, the Auckland Art Gallery poster for Light Show and bottom, the Spielberg Face

Photo opportunity

Last year 'selfie' was the Oxford Dictionaries international word of the year and it looks as though Te Papa has taken the hint and finally dropped its no photography of art works policy.  Speaking directly to the people on the street the change has been announced via a poster for a new rehang of the collection. Rita Angus in her Cleopatra self-portrait has been served up to illustrate the snappy taglines: ‘Get in the picture,’ ‘Strike a pose and take a selfie,’ and ‘Share your selfie’.

It’s the marketing department encouraging one and all to up their level of engagement, get into Te Papa, and start snapping. The Metropolitan Museum in NY ran the same campaign back in 2009 with the tag "It's time we met." But even given that pedigree you can bet no one from Te papa would have had the nerve to suggest the idea to Angus were she were still alive.

Of course in its purest form the selfie encourages people to not look at art - after all the works they photograph are behind them. To paraphrase Barnett Newman (thanks B), ‘art is what you bump into as you back up to take a photo.’ Even Angus might have got a laugh out of that and, if she were in a mood for payback, she could enjoy the fact that the old Te Papa photography policy “You are not allowed to directly photograph, film, video, or otherwise copy any works on display in the Museum”… including painting” is still firmly in place on their web site. 

HOLD ON A SECOND: An OTN reader was in Te Papa a couple of days ago and saw someone get their head bitten off by a guard for talking a selfie in the new hang exhib. Is it possible that the selfie opportunity is only with the poster? Now that would taking confusing the public with marketing to new levels.

Good to know

"New Zealand has been blazing a trail with Creative New Zealand’s Optimise online marketing capability building programme and the Optimiser online benchmarking project, led by The Audience Connection."

Presentation at the CNZ conference The Big Conversation (download report here)

See what?

Fake buildings are a thing in Europe. Mostly it's cosmetic with graphics of what the building is going to look like concealing the work site but sometimes it goes somewhere else. Now we know a collage when we see one but how about a 3D architectural collage? This cut and paste effort twists one of Paris’s Belle Époque buildings into a classical Roman facade for the exhibition Augustus Emperor of Rome. Mind bending to see in place but weirdly as a photograph you lose much of its giddy impossibility. Classically inclined museum buildings in NZ like the Auckland Museum or the Sarjeant or even the City Gallery could carry off this effect but saying that makes you realise how much of that style has been superceded. (and the opportunity for this sort of 3D marketing mash-up lost). The old National Art Gallery, the pre-revamp Auckland Art Gallery, the McDougall in Christchurch, the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in the park have all moved to buildings with see-through glass facades. Still maybe one day someone will find it amusing to get out the scaffolding and see what happens when you play 3D-façade-cover-up on such obvious metaphors for transparency.

And off to marketing we go

Is there a groundswell against regional museums? Feels like it. With art institutions trapped between trying to offer a satisfying experience and entertaining the hell out of everybody there're going to be some victims. One of the first has been the Hawke's Bay Museum and Art Gallery now relabeled MTG Hawke's Bay. Ostensibly annoyed by 'performance issues' (i.e. that the number of visitors hasn't gone up despite a major redevelopment) the City Council reached for consultants McDermott Miller Strategies. Oh, oh.

McDermott etc. have savaged the place. Has any local museum ever been kicked so hard? Could the politicians of the region have seriously invested $18 million in the project and had no idea about what was being planned? And then when it won awards but wasn't a raging success at the ticket office they've felt free to throw up their hands and unleash the dogs. Everything about the place is subject to snarky commentary and you really get the sense that the consultants were encouraged to hit hard. Maybe it's payback for the embarrassing miscalculation of how much storage space would be required.

And it gets amazingly personal - there's non of that old school loyalty and 'stand by your man' stuff here. The senior staff it turns out are out of touch by virtue of their expertise. "We understand the MTG Hawke's Bay director [Douglas Lloyd Jenkins] is from an academic background and his deputy, [public programmes team leader Eloise Wallace], has a postgraduate museology diploma plus five years' experience in the exhibitions department of a London museum," Oh, oh again.

But thank God McDermott M. have the solution to all this pointy-headedness. Marketing. How do they think of this stuff? According to McDM it’s marketers who best understand how to pick the best shows, placate snubbed audiences, build numbers, bring in the locals and make up for the limitations of connoisseurship. And they have a plan. Focus on on World War 1. That should do it.

If you wonder how much worse things can get for art museums and other cultural institutions you can read the whole report (well given that it’s 139 pages long you might want to skip a few of them) here.

Sniff competition

They’ve done the finger puppet thing and been down the apron, hat, umbrella road but now the art museums have come up with a new product line: the signature scent. This is a brand rush that went through consumer markets around ten years ago – there was even talk of  Harley Davidson bringing out a line of scented male products. Now, at last, the art institutions are climbing onboard with London’s Serpentine Gallery hanging out with Comme des Garçons and Tracey Emin to produce (wait for it) Serpentine. So in the spirit of art museums being on the scent here’s some suggestions for NZ.

d. paganini
A bracing astringent for the Southern man.

City Gal
A serious scent in a no nonsense atomiser

A’ Agee
A traditional perfume with a contemporary twist

Suitor
Promise her anything but giver her Suitor

Dowsé
The full on fragrance for all the family

Love it BRUISER
Fighting above its weight to bring the now to your nose

Chi Chi Gal
Available next year

Totally outstanding

As it’s Saturday here’s an unbelievably astonishing OTN Saturday quiz. This one is incredibly clever  asking you to match the description with the artist. All quotes from the latest superbly lavish Webb’s catalogue.

Who creates “Masterly executed work”?
Which artist is a “Chromatic master”?
Who was a “powerful influence on a generation of painters”?
Who had an “unbridled passion for the female form”?
Which artist created “A monumental masterpiece”
Who painted a “key work” in a “Ground-breaking exhibition”?
Which artist was described as our “Most daring and cerebral”?
Who had a “Seminal 2005 exhibition”?
Who’s painting was “A gem”?
Which artist painted with “Majestic poise”?
Who created “Unforgettable paintings”?

The artists: Judy, Millar, C F Goldie, Tony Fomison, Robin White, Lillian Budd, W D Hammond, Francis Upritchard and Garth Tapper

ANSWERS HERE

The ghosts in the machine

With only 13 days before university students get back to work you'd think that Unitec could at least have come up with a list of who'll be teaching this year. It was quick enough to strip its arts school's ‘core teaching team’ from 50 to 17.6 late last year but the follow-up is non-existent from the public point of view. Look up staff and it’s ‘Please check back for the latest staff information.’

Even worse is the way the institution is coasting on the reputations of ex-staffers. It's got to be galling for them (whether they saw the approaching steam roller and got out of the way by taking redundancy or attempted and failed to get one of the new jobs) to still be used by Unitec’s PR machine. Take just two of them: ex Associate Dean of Research Marcus Williams and Susan Jowsey who used to be a ‘Senior Academic Staff Member.’ They are still trumpeted on the Unitec website as king hit successes for the institution.

Who knows how students will react. As this student video demonstrates they were certainly unimpressed by losing their big-name art teachers partway through their courses. They may be equally fed up to find that the ghosts of staff past are still being served up as exemplars of the Unitec brand.

Talking the talk

When was it that artist talks first became an entertainment category for art museums? There was a time when artists were expected to be um…visual... rather than verbal and if they could articulate their work through talk too that was just fine but not essential. Well that’s all been changed thanks to the tertiary education system. 

Artists who have been through the system are expected to be able to present a convincing articulation of what they are up to on the wall or on the floor and the art museums have taken note. Now the artist talk has become a staple of institutional programming and those who can't or won't join the talkfest are punished as et al. discovered when they presented a zipped lip at Venice.
 
But yesterday we went to an artist talk (four artists talking in fact) that was a mix of awkward silences, meandering sidelines, complicated inner monologues and generic presentation skills. It was annoying and refreshing and riveting. The photos sum it up best as Nick Austin grabs for words while he struggles to ‘explain’ one of his works. 

When describing another painting (a shark’s fin seen through the window of an envelope) Austin told us:
 
“I think it’s about worry.
I think it’s about bad news.
I think it’s about worrying about bad news.
Bad news, circling around.”

All this was hard-won with long pauses and fill-in gestures of the hand and body. Thanks Nick... and the rest of you too.

Images: Nick Austin at the City Gallery one of the four artists talking about their works in the exhibition New Revised Edition: Nick Austin, Andrew Barber, Nicola Farquhar, John Ward Knox

Record prices

Earlier this month fans of The Chills were able to pick up a copy of the live album Somewhere Beautiful for $6,000. Ok, it’s three double-sided vinyl disks but still, that’s $1,000 a side, even if it is at 45 rpm. The real reason for the real money is not music but art, in this case art by Shane Cotton who has supplied hand-modified prints along with input into the package design. You can get a list of the most valuable records on vinyl here.

Artists have had a long association with the music industry though not usually leveraging the price quite as high as the Cotton Chills - you can get an original Warhol cover for the Rolling Stones for around $190 here on eBay.

Images: Top, Shane Cotton’s work for The Chills already separated from the music and on sale as visual art. Next row and following left to right, top to bottom, Urs Fischer for Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ It’s Blitz!, Raymond Pettibon for Sonic Youth, Ronnie van Hout’s cover for the Pin Group's Ambivalence, Japanese photographer Araki’s image for Björk’s 1996 album Telegram, Andy Warhol’s famous ready-to-peel cover for the Velvet Underground, the Red Hot Chili Peppers reach for Damien Hirst, Patti Smith uses Robert Mapplethorpe portrait of her for Horses, and the Beatles' White Album as designed by British Pop artist Richard Hamilton.

The taste test

When they set up shop Art+Object ratcheted the look and feel of the art auction up a few notches. New look catalogues, stylish display of the lots and professional marketing generated fresh excitement pre hammer time. Now they've gone and done it again. Check it out for yourself if the latest Art+Object catalogue comes your way (provocatively published days before the first big Webb’s auction of the year last night).

First up, it's big. It sure won't fit into your post box coming in at 34 x  24 cm. Second, it's ... well, what is it exactly? Part magazine, part coffee table book, part auction catalogue, it's A+O’s idea about how to get differentiated from the competition. The fact is if its just information you’re after this print publication wont have been your first port of call, all that’s been available for a week online at A+O's web site. But, if you pop over to Webb’s site, their online catalogue looks much the same with much the same detail.

And you have to figure that’s why A+O have gone big and gone glamorous. If online equals information, this jumbo-cat is to wallow in. Big images including a mega fold-out of Peter Robinson’s two by five meter loose canvas Painting, a dabble into the studio assistant as personality (a young guy with paint splattered shorts and unlaced trainers staring at lot number 5) and a fistful of plush ads for wine, fashion and cars. It’s a gutsy move and a big assertion of the A+O brand. Who'd be surprised now if they decided to stamp it on some other forms of art selling. 

Images: Top cover with 50 cent piece thoughtfully added by OTN's photographic team for scale. Middle, Peter Robinson gets the fold out treatment and bottom the strange double spread for Paul Dibble's sculpture The bushman's hop.

Limited

Much has changed in the six years OTN has been publishing. Back in 2006 the idea of a serious artist who wasn’t Andy Warhol putting his or her name on a product was unusual whereas now artist brands fill every corner of the what-will-we-buy-someone-who-has-everything (i.e. super-rich) market. 

Still, we couldn't let this one pass without mention. Yes, a limited edition Tequila with Gabriel Orozco’s signature and signature patterned skull going for $2,250 a bottle. If you think half a dozen or so of these will help fill your Christmas gift needs you'd better get going. Orozco's tequila is in the inevitable ‘limited edition’, this one of 400 signed bottles.

Ad break

Someone at Pataka, Porirua's art museum, has a long memory and a wicked sense of humour. The marketing campaign for their exhibition Wild at Heart includes a poster under a mock Porirua Standard masthead with the arresting headline “Oxen charge patrons…” 

Anyone who was in Wellington in the late seventies and early eighties will fondly recall The Double Standard. To the delight and horror of the morning’s commuters these mock newspaper posters were put up around the city late at night by an anonymous feminist group. The most famous took a poke at then-Prime Minister Robert Muldoon (known to his enemies as Piggy Muldoon). 

As was its want The Double Standard mashed up two events: one real and one rumoured. This time it was the reported shooting of a wild pig in the bush in Ngaio mixed with rumours that the PM had a mistress who lived in the suburb. The Double Standard gleefully announced, “Rooting pig shot in Ngaio. PM safe.”

That’s the spirit

In our continuing quest to track art museum tie-ins designed by marketers to attract audiences, how about this effort from the Denver Museum? The exhibition coming up was BecomingVan Gogh. What do you think the team came up with to get more cash in the till?

Who guessed a specially brewed beer along with a name-the-beer competition offering a prize of free tickets, a Van Gogh t-shirt and discount voucher? Very Vincent.

Still could have been worse, they might have teamed up with Mademan.com and had their absinthe-based cocktail Van Gogh’s ear (fill a Collins glass with ice and dribble two oz. of absinthe slowly into the glass. Add a slice of lemon and pour grapefruit juice into the glass. Swirl in an oz. of grenadine) on offer at the door.

… and change

Those of you who were as surprised as we were by Te Papa’s intention to monetise the curatorial functions of the museum and use the collection’s artefacts to turn a bob can rest easy. The job description for the new Associate Director Enterprise has been severely modified to dial back these commercial expectations. 

Some time between our post on Wednesday morning and that afternoon the editors were hard at work cutting and pasting. The most startling bits in the job description (the stuff about having Te Papa operate "commercially when curating exhibitions” and having responsibility for "commercialising artefacts”) are gone. They've been replaced by more conventional expectations to "ensure commercial opportunities are generated around our collections…”

There's nothing to indicate these changes have been made but any marketing thrusters who were looking forward to cash in on curation will be disappointed. For the rest of us it's a matter of remembering that somewhere in that building someone pretty senior thought it was a good idea.

Mightier than the sword

At the C|O museum in Berlin we saw a survey exhibition of American photographer and film maker Larry Clark. As you might expect the show was a hymn to the male penis and the syringe but the large banner promoting the show? Not quite so much. Obviously not wanting the sex thing to stand out and cause a fuss they chickened out and went for a shot of his partner's pubic hair with Larry's named tattooed above it.