Free stuff

Here at the OTN Educational Foundation we are always on the search for innovative ways to advance the science of art. Over the years the OTNEF has achieved remarkable results through its research programmes. We are now delighted to announce the latest topic in our PhD4U® scheme.  The lucky MA student who chooses to take it up will find the award to be absolutely free, with any financial profits subject to the usual commissions.

The 2016 PhD4U® Award topic: Have you ever noticed how cartoonists portray art? It’s kind of cool. For paintings they often just used squiggly lines but sculptures nearly always have holes in them. Looking at our database of 15 examples (many of them illustrated above) it appears the key artist drivers are Picasso, Kandinsky and Hepworth. As with most brilliant observations, however, there is probably more to it. This PhD-ready-idea is now on offer to the first lucky student to apply. Go get 'em.

Images: top. Paintings. Bottom, sculptures

Why can’t Wellington City Council get it up?

What’s going on in Wellington?  A year ago Neil Dawson’s suspended sculpture Ferns was taken down for repair after almost 20 years hanging above Civic Square. It now needs to be replaced at a cost of $210,000. Not a surprising outcome given Wellington’s infamously challenging environment for outdoor sculpture. Ferns was basically a gift to the city via the Wellington Sculpture Trust and a wide range of other sponsors.  The Council’s job was to to keep it in the air. 

So having relentlessly used Ferns as a City Icon and PR tool since day one why is the City Council sitting back as a $55,000 begging bowl approach via Boosted is deployed to help with the replacement? The public, the corps and the philanthropists did the fund raising the first time. This time it’s the Council’s turn. They are the ones who have converted this artwork into a symbol for the city and blatantly used it as a city logo. Had they asked an ad agency to come up with a campaign to do a similar job $210,000 would be getting off cheap (Te Papa’s thumbprint cost around that 20 years ago). Budget line? Marketing.

Truckin’

For New Zealand’s size there have been some pretty substantial philanthropic contributions made to contemporary art. Some obvious starters: Charles Brasch, Jenny Gibbs, Alan Gibbs, Robin and Erika Congreve, Denis and Verna Adam, James Wallace and, top of mind today, Fiona Campbell. Later today A+O will auction most of the works Campbell and her team toured to schools over the last ten years. 

Who’d have thought that Trade Me would have ended up sending contemporary art to school kids around the country. Thanks to a windfall from the sale of the online market place, and after asking herself ‘what the hell am I going to do with all this wealth?',  Fiona Campbell decided to deck out two trucks, fill them with contemporary NZ art and drive them round the country.

It wasn’t cheap. The total enterprise cost around $7.2 million. That represents an investment of $33 a head for each of the 216,611 students who got to look inside the trucks on the 708 school journey. The art was a mixed bag. Campbell has had two constant advisors - artist Rob McLeod, ‘who pretty much hates everything’, and curator Gerald Barnett, ‘who pretty much loves everything’. Presumably Fiona Campbell herself worked with these two extremes to assemble the collection.

Apparently the work the kids loved most was Andrew McLeod’s A Cautious Paralysis and this is one that has been held back from auction. Perhaps it was a favourite of Fiona Campbell's too along with a few other works not for sale including Fiona Pardington’s Solitary Female Huia and Michael Illingworth’s Girl In The Blue Hat (After Matisse).

Sources: A+O catalogue, rnz interview (Kim Hill and Fiona Campbell) 2011

Money for nothing

The Arts Foundation’s crowd funding site Boosted sent out an email recently pushing philanthropy as a way to offset funding cuts from Government agencies. It made us wonder just how much Boosted and the Foundation raise each year. While published numbers are hard to find we can make some educated guesstimates.

Starting with the Foundation itself, there are the grants it makes to artists of around $350,000 a year. And then there's Boosted. While the numbers are of course variable last week, for instance, there were 16 Boosted projects online waiting to have money thrown at them. If they all got funded we'd be talking $58,000 raised across the 16 projects. Now for the close-your-eyes-and-guess part. Let’s be generous and say that once a month Boosted projects raise around $60,000. Add them all together and you get say $700,000 a year. (NOTE on 19 April 2016 Boosted announced it raised $1 million in the years 2013-15 and $1 million in the last 12 months to April 2016. Se also the note below)  Add the Foundation's grants noted above and we get to say just over a million a year. and that could be generous. 
 
And also we need to remember that on Boosted, like most crowd funding sites, there a cost to getting support and it's borne by the artists. Most of the Boosted projects require ‘gifts’ from the projects to supporters. This does point out a critical feature of this version of philanthropy; even though the gifts are often small it still operates, like most philanthropy, on the ‘nothing’s for nothing’ principle. So while the million (plus?) annual input from the Arts Foundation (now an essential part of the funding scene) is much better than nothing, it's still not enough to even deal to Creative NZ’s shortfall far less bring in additional support. That shortfall in fact was nearly three times what the Foundation raised last year. In spite of the Foundations best efforts we're still running hard to even go backwards more slowly.

For philanthropy to make a difference the government will have to come up with an infrastructure that works both for the people being funded and the people giving the money. Them just saying in a stern voice that we have to move to a philanthropic model is not going to do the trick.

We received an email from Simon Bowden on Boosted that included the following correction to our post. 

'There is an element in your post that is not right. While most crowdfunding websites do require projects to list "rewards" (items given to pledges in return for their money at different levels), Boosted does not have this facility. The reason for this is that all donations made to projects on Boosted are made to the Arts Foundation and qualify for a 33% tax credit. If artists offered "rewards" then the gifts would not qualify as donations. When a project hits its target and closes the Arts Foundation makes a grant to the project. Our announcement of $2 million raised for the arts on Boosted is the amount that we have granted to artists (in some cases plus GST). This amount is net of transaction costs and the small amount Boosted retains to fund our support programme for artists using the site. '

The Money Train on platform one has been delayed, passengers should seek alternative transport

For a few years now the government has been signaling that it's expecting the private sector to stump up with more of the cash and services needed to run the arts in NZ. This follows the UK example where severe cuts to arts organisations and grants have been made to try and shock the private sector to put its money where the government’s mouth was.
Last year the main source of Creative NZ funding, the Lotteries Commission via its Lottery Grants Board, suffered an unexpected 17 percent cut (from $37.379 million in 2013-14 to $31.074 million in 2014-15). It caught Creative NZ by surprise but by digging into its reserves it managed a successful 2014-15 financial year. For the coming year the cuts in Lotteries funding will be even harsher and Creative NZ is expecting funding that will be ‘materially lower’ for the forseable future. So we could be talking 25 percent down, even 30 percent. That's not good. 

Creative NZ's strategy to counter the sharp drop in funding is to build fund-raising capability. That is, by teaching institutions (and we presume artists) how to increase the funding they receive from individual donors, businesses, trusts and foundations. They call it Creative Giving. And it would need to be creative as there isn’t much on offer to make philanthropy/sponsorship attractive or worthwhile for the givers. Unlike most countries NZ only accepting cash contributions to registered charities for tax breaks cutting out a lot of services, and gifting of course. 

One organisation that is already off into the über commercial world is Te Papa. It looks to be in the process of converting itself into a production house with private sector wunderkinds WETA to build and flog exhibitions (no, Jennifer they won’t be art exhibitions, now go to bed) to the museums (read Asian) of the world.

Now arts organisations can make do and cut back but the real worry about this growing reduction of government investment is more insidious. In the UK art institutions are already talking about the ‘freedom’ they will achieve by being supported via the private sector rather than by government. This is deeply deluded as anyone who has worked in a corporate communications office will know. Even in the arts, nothing is for nothing.

So you might ask why doesn’t Creative NZ rally the troops, go public and push the government to increase its spend? Hang on, rather than ask CNZ it's probably better to email your local MP and copy the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage (it’s Maggie Barry).

Horsing around

Usually when you think about horse art you have in your mind the image of a horse, paintbrush in mouth, knocking up something abstract on a canvas. Not in Hamilton. Another city obsessed with celebrating the shambles that was New Zealand’s inclusion in WWI, Hamilton has reached out to the horse to side-step the not-another-dead-man option. 

And there is some reason to do this.  Of the combined 25 million deaths in that war it was horses that represented over 30 percent. So, Hamilton was on the money when The Warhorse Charitable Trust invited art consultant Paula Savage to go global. Savage homed in on Mimmo Paladino known internationally as the go-to horse guy. He even has a horse sculpture 'at the entrance to the New Town Plaza in Hong Kong' according to Savage. So with one lot of horses safely in the funding pipeline, what about all the people in Hamilton who like ‘horses that look like horses’? 

Enter the Waikato Equestrian Memorial Board. It has come up with a drawing of a horse that fills the h-t-l-l-h requirements and offers a few irresistible add ons that can prove a challenge for much contemporary art - ‘child-friendly, able to be climbed over and sat upon.’ Now it too is out there raising money. It's horse of course will be easier to source (sorry) with lots of sculpture businesses up and down the country poised to knock up a full sized bronze one for anyone with cash. Exhauted? We’ll leave you with prescient Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock who was ahead of us all: 'without thinking' Leacock wrote, 'he flung himself upon his horse and rode off madly in all directions.'

Images: top left, exploring sitting-on possibilities, top right, on the big side for a horse that looks like a horse but could be dramatic in the right place at the right time. Middle, the sort of bronze horse you can order from China at http://sculpture.en.alibaba.com if you want more than one. Bottom left, not realistic enough to fool the kid on the left and bottom right, the more abstract approach

The gift that keeps on giving

Christchurch leading the field. Who knew? Just as private collectors building their own museums is starting to be a big thing (see the media frenzy over the opening of the Broad in Los Angeles), Christchurch is going to have its own private collection based art museum. It's thanks to collectors Jim and Susan Wakefield via their Ravenscar Trust. The house that once held their collection was wiped out by the quake and they decided to use the insurance money plus some to create their own museum in the Christchurch Arts precinct. It's to be called the Ravenscar House Museum. The collection headlines with Colin McCahon (five), Rita Angus and Frances Hodgkins (ten) but we can assume there are probably other less known names in there as well. A professional appraiser rather carefully described the collection that has been assembled over ten or so years as ‘far greater than the sum of its parts’. Also, rather curiously, the art is to be displayed chronologically in a series of period rooms. Given the Wakefields have been prominent supporters and the fact that the collection includes 110 paintings it’s more than likely it was first offered to the Christchurch Art Gallery and declined (the period room thing would be enough do it). The out-moded approach didn’t hold back the Canterbury Museum though which has announced plans for the new $13 million building to be designed by Len Lye Centre architect Andrew Patterson. It will display what it describes as a collection of art, sculpture (that’s art too folks), modernist furniture and classical antiquities. The Canterbury Museum plans to support the operation of the house museum from its existing staff and resources and expects it to be self-funding via ticket sales (at the moment they’re thinking $20 a pop), car parks and ‘other income’. Well, good luck to everyone with that.

Images: two works from the Ravenscar collection, left Colin McCahon’s 1943 painting Taylor’s mistake and right Frances Hodgkin’s Still life self portrait. You can download the Christchurch Council's pdf with background on the new museum here.

A gift economy

The Government (from the Minister for Culture and Heritage down) has been strangely silent on one big issue: Auckland’s bizarre late-in-the-day public consultation process on the Michael Parekowhai's Queens wharf sculpture. Strangely silent because if there's one thing this Government (which seems to import all its cultural policy ideas direct from the UK) has been pushing over the last few years, it's shifting arts funding from the public sector over to private patronage. And yes it's exactly the kind of patronage demonstrated by the real estate company Barfoot and Thompson with the Parekowhai project. By now they must be wondering why they even bothered to make their million-dollar offer to the city. 

A million is a fair whack in the visual arts world. It’s about a quarter of what Creative NZ distributes to the visual arts sector every year and over three times what the Auckland Art Gallery gets annually for ‘collection development’ from the Auckland Council ($292,000 last year). 

We’ve mentioned before the lack of support for the Parekowhai project by the Auckland Art Gallery and art professionals in general, but why nothing from the Government? Even given the usual easy out for Ministers ‘we can’t be seen to interfere in local affairs' (until they do that is), the Parekowhai gift is surely something of a test case or, at the very least, an indicator of how their philanthropy thing is going to work out. Potential philanthropists can hardly fail to notice that Barfoot and Thompson have been hung out to dry. So will the rich quietly line up to twist-in-the-wind while the public takes pot-shots at their pet projects? Yeah, that sounds like fun.

Giving

News the other day that Te Papa is thinking of joining in on the scramble by NZ's museums and art galleries to cobble together foundations and friends groups. They're all hoping, of course, to get fresh meat to cough up for exhibition costs, public programmes, and acquisitions. This sudden interest in rich-people-who-like-art is driven by the current government’s insistence on philanthropy as the new driver for cultural funding. Te Papa sees itself as something of an expert in this field publishing guidelines for others, but this expertise is resolutely focused on Government funds via the public sector. Corporate and private sponsorship get exactly 40 words in the 3200 word document. It feels like an absurd end game all these public servants making applications to each other for public funding but, moving on, Te Papa's longstanding indifference to expertise and collectors, could make finding passion partners with open wallets a stretch. Add in the growing disinterest of the corporate sector (just check out the scale of some of the enterprises trumpeted as major funders today) and the task feels even more epic.

Of course there have been some successes. Since it was set up in 1987, The Patrons of the Auckland Art Gallery has been responsible for some stunning acquisitions (it has given more than a million dollars according to the Gallery). Amongst others the Chartwell Trust and the Walters Prize have also both been spectacular partnering achievements, as was the gift of the New Gallery to the AAG in 1995 by Jenny and Alan Gibbs. When you observe how well connected the AAG is to these partners, it makes sense. Philanthropy is built on close association and respect between the institution and the givers as much as it is on a call to civic responsibility. There are always ups and downs in such relationships, but for most philanthropists it's not just about passively dishing out the dosh. They see it as a form of activism, of being engaged, having input, making a difference etc. And dealing with that sort of approach is going to demand a very different mindset for institutions.

Some of the folding to help straighten things out

Last year’s Sydney Biennale had a bad run with its principal sponsor pulling out after artist protested their relationship with detention centers on Nauru Island. Now a new sponsor has come forward with $A600,000 plus for the 2016 Biennale. Keir Neilson set up the Platinum fund and his wife Judith started the White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney. The total budget for the Biennale of Sydney is around $A10 million. You can read the full story here.

Water world

What would it take to make someone who has been Commissioner, lead patron and key sponsor for New Zealand’s presence at the Venice Biennale spit the dummy? In the case of Jenny Gibbs it sounds like it was a return airfare to Venice. Oh, did we mention it was for Nicky Hager who is also an advisor for the Simon Denny project. Gibbs along with the Friedlanders has left the patrons group only months before the Denny project launches in Venice. Ironically this odd gesture comes at the same time as Charles Esche has been lecturing the Auckland art scene on the perils of mixing patronage and the public purse in art’s name. All this is hardly likely to worry Simon Denny who has just had a survey exhibition confirmed with MoMA PS1 for next year. Creative NZ seems to be taking things in its stride and the rest of the other patrons seem to be staunch. The fact is over the years the Venice boat has been rocked too many times for it to be swamped by a couple of the crew jumping overboard.
COMMENT 02:10:14 CNZ has emailed to let us know "Dame Jenny Gibbs is supporting the Assistant Curator role (Alex Davidson) for the NZ at Venice 2015 project."

Why is the Fletcher Trust Collection off-loading?

The Fletcher Trust is about to put 77 works from its corporate collection up on the block. It's ironic that, although the collection was started in 1962 via some pressure by Peter Webb of the eponymous auction house, it will be sold through the International Art Centre. With around 600 items this is the largest corporate collection of New Zealand paintings. While only 12 percent is being dumped in this first tranche it's still a surprise and is sure to disappoint a number of artists when it happens on 10 September.

And there's something else. Given that Fletchers aren’t exactly broke and that they're citizens of Auckland it’s hard to understand why these works haven’t simply been gifted to the Auckland Art Gallery. After all, the framing of the collection has always been in terms of its value to New Zealanders and the public interest. “The Fletcher Trust’s intention is that these paintings that constitute a unique record of the whole history of New Zealand art should be seen by as many New Zealanders as possible.”

So who's being culled? It’s hard to say at the level of specific paintings but a few names have been mentioned. Gretchen Albrecht is one. She has eight works in the FT collection including a classic 1985 Hemisphere and the beautiful Snake Charmer from 1976 but there's also a work on paper in the same territory as a large painting so selling it might be understandable in a tough curatorial purge. Ralph Hotere is also mentioned but deciding what to bump is not so easy. He has just six works in the collection and each has been carefully selected from an important period including a very interesting early Sangro painting. Then there's Michael Smither. OK one of the five paintings included (Red Chair from 1979) might get the nod if selling were critical but the other four are outstanding. As for Milan Mrkusich, picking even one of the nine in the collection as not worth keeping would be very hard to justify. The challenge with sales of course is that usually it's the best works that get the best prices.  It would be counter-intuitive to venture into the sales arena with works that that won't get great prices unless you are simply housekeeping. And that would be insulting for the artists.

Finally there's the Alfred Sharpe question. With only four in the FT collection it’s hard to see why any of them would have to go and the idea of gifting back to the nation comes up again. For instance, the national collection held by Te Papa has just four examples of Alfred Sharpe’s work in its entire collection. That's a huge historical gap that could be brilliantly filled by Fletchers.

And so it goes. You can name search the Fletcher collection here and have a go at picking the limping impalas in the herd.

Image: Billy Apple’s painting From the Fletcher Challenge Art Collection in the Fletcher Trust Collection the Fletcher

Eat the rich

“I can see absolutely no reason why every arts organisation in this country cannot raise philanthropic funds. I think that too many arts organisations think, ‘well, we live in an area where rich people don’t live, so they’re not going to back the arts’. I think that is pathetic, frankly.”
UK’s Culture Minister Ed Vaizey on being asked whether it was realistic for all arts organisations to raise private funds.

By the numbers

0         the number of speeches the Minister of Culture and Heritage has made so far this election year

1.6      the percentage of dealer galleries from New Zealand in the total number at Art Basel Hong Kong

3.5      the number of years since Te Papa last had a senior curator of art

6         the number in thousands of dollars of the average Boosted grant over the programme's first year

10       the number in millions of dollars the Government wants spent on new public art on the banks of the Avon River ,while simultaneously announcing it won't pay for it

15       the amount in dollars charged as the entry fee for adults visiting the MTG Hawkes Bay (formerly the Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery)

17       the number in millions of dollars that the Ministry of Culture and Heritage is spending on the celebration of World War One

21       the number of reviews John Hurrell has written for EyeContact in the last two months

47.43   the number in thousands of dollars being spent by the new director of the Govett-Brewster Simon Rees on his first submission of contemporary art acquisitions to the City Council

130      the average number of dollars donated by individual contributors to Boosted in its first year 

213      the number of days community leaders, museum and art experts and iwi and cultural representatives have left to prepare a business case for Te Papa North

Found: Greg Burke

An OTN reader sent in Greg Burke’s name for the 'Lost’ column. Seemed a bit harsh (thanks anyway L) but for those who don’t know Burke is now executive director and CEO of a rehoused art museum in Saskatoon, Canada. The project is huge. Over $75 million dollars of hard-earned Saskatoon cash is building a four-storey museum of 11,582 square metres. For comparison, the Auckland Art Gallery has 7,200 square meters of public space and is also four floors, so probably a similar sized building.

The name of Burke’s new institution is the Remai Art Gallery of Saskatoon. The Remai bit is the name of the major donor Ellen Remai.  No doubt having come from the land of DAG (Dowse Art Gallery), NAG (National Art Gallery and G-BAG ( Govett-Brewster) Burke was wary of the RAGS acronym and has branded the new museum Remai Modern. 

A couple of years back Remai donated over 400 Picasso linocut prints instantly doubling the value of the collection and weighting its direction. So the 'new' museum will probably be more ‘Modern’ than ‘Contemporary’ or as Burke put it recently, “[Having the word 'Modern' in the gallery's title] doesn’t mean we’re going to be focusing on the most bleeding edge form of contemporary art. Not so.”

Burke is hoping to have a physical museum building to direct in June 2016.

Images: Top left the new building and right Greg Burke standing next to what has been built so far. Bottom a modern vision for the future

Cash offer

We can all agree on one thing, the NZ at Venice Patrons know how to raise money. They can usually anything up to $400,000 to the $650,000 that the Government puts into Venice via Creative NZ. While there are a few very generous patrons most of the 63 listed last year stumped up with $5,000. It’s a sweet deal. Patrons usually get a free signed limited edition print donated by the artist, a copy of the catalogue, a couple of free tickets to the hard-to-get-into Biennale opening days, access to other elite Venice events as well as glam lunches put on by the dealers and others trying to leverage their good favour. You can join up here.

Potential patrons are traditionally wooed at functions held around the country with drinks and nibbles in a palatial residence and the artist and curator in tow to sweet talk the crowd. There not being so many rich people in Dunedin the usual thing has been to hold functions in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland but this year in preparation for Venice 2015 word is that Wellington will be given the swerve. You can see the logic when you look at the patron list. It’s pretty much an Auckland club with a few heavy hitters from Christchurch. Wellington’s contribution has tended to be in the less sexy area of administration and intangibles of influence on the Government's $600,000 although this year both the commissioner (Heather Galbraith) and the curator (Robert Leonard) are based in Wellington. In earlier times patronage used to include a wide range of support for a project along with the financial but for Venice you get the feeling cash is clearly king.

Give and take

The Kickstarter inspired crowdfunding site Boosted has just been launched by the New Zealand ArtsFoundation. Although it fronts up like Kickstarter (feisty attitude, snappy graphics and push) it isn’t really. Critically it lacks the personalised rewards and relationship building that are now the signature of crowd sourcing. As one savvy digital guy Nat Torkington points out, Boosted tends to see giving as its own reward - plus tax deductions.

This is very different from the many (and you’d have to say often trivial and annoying) ‘gifts’ and ‘opportunities’ offered by most crowdfunding sites. It's kind of ironic that in a ‘everything-should-be-free-for-everybody’  digital society, when it comes to giving, you need to give something back and preferably something more personal than filling out an IR526 form.

So how far should Boosted go in rewarding contributors with either tangibles (postcards through to dinner with the performers/creators to art works) or intangibles (copious thanks, gold stars, names on boards)? Well it's hard to see how Boosted can grow without being at least a little more engaged with its gifters. The reciprocity principle demands it although we know the major downside for artists - being dragged to functions to meet or perform in front of sponsors, making works as thank-you gifts etc.

Still the visual arts at least are used to it, balancing with one foot in the world of commerce (dealers, art fairs and auctions) and the other in the world of 'support' (sponsorships, grants, fellowships and handouts).

Still, that’s not to say there is anything wrong with a world where sometimes, like cigars, a gift is just a gift.

NOTE: As Boosted explain on their site providing reciprocal gifts like postcards etc will preclude a donation from being a charitable one.  In order to be “charitable” (and in order to qualify for that tax deduction) donations must be “unconditional”.

Shock of The New

Returning to our car as we were about to leave Auckland, we came across the SOLD sign on the building that once housed both Auckland Art Gallery's NEW Gallery and Parsons Bookshop. This building was one of the most generous offers ever made to the visual arts in New Zealand (made by Jenny and Alan Gibbs with some cash from Chartwell) and it can't shuffle off with just a whimper.

There was talk at one stage that the building could be used by arts organisations or maybe as another contemporary art space but the energy to match the Gibbs’s generosity never eventuated. And along with the NEW went Parsons Bookshop, the only art bookshop in Auckland. On the weekend we asked at Unity Books on High Street if they stocked art books to be told, ”we don't have the room”.

Well thanks for that Unity.

So here's to some of the great stuff we saw at the NEW. Those incredible Henry Darger Vivian Girls drawings in Robert Leonard's Mixed-up Childhood, Natasha Conland’s stylish Chartwell collection presentation in which every object seemed to glow white, Richard Killeen’s survey The stories we tell ourselves, William McAloon’s Chartwell exhibition Home and away, et al's. Voice of silence installation as well as the installation that won the 2004 Walters Prize, the Urewera Mural in the McCahon Room, Robert Leonard's 2003 Chartwell exhibition Nine lives with its tribute to Giovanni Intra, With Spirit the Don Driver’s retrospective and the survey of Flying Nun Records.

And thanks for that, in a very different way, to Allan and Jenny Gibbs

Images: Left, sold and right the space formally known as Parsons

The fundraising guy

This post is all about the header. OK, there is this master class being held today by the Ministry of Heritage and Culture. A master class for what you ask. The viola, voice projection, glazing? Not at all. It’s for raising money by Guy (that’s the pay-off) Mallabone from Global Philanthropic Inc. in Canada. It will be a “practical opportunity to develop strategies and maximise income from major gifts.” One grim note in the blurb claims that “Depending on the size of an organisation, a major gift could be anything from $500 to $5,000 or more.” This does seem to be setting the barrier a little low when the entry fee for the master class is $389 per person i.e. only $111 shy of one of those small gifts you’d no doubt learn to land. You can check out the GPI site here.