Leading the charge

By their surveys shall you know them. The New Plymouth City Council is currently on a fishing expedition to see if it can get away with charging an entry fee for the new combined Len Lye/Govett-Brewster hybrid.

Acting General Manager Community Services Kelvin Day says the Gallery is gathering valuable feedback on key topics, including the combined institution's new cinema, free or paid entry, and public programmes. The questions start with how much you'd be prepared to pay for entry and whether or not an entry fee would change your visiting patterns. And then inevitably, focus on the real question, “Would you be happy for your out-of-town guests to pay an entry fee if you were able to enter for free?” This one's well down the list so no doubt the survey team is hoping that even the most ardent supporter of a free institution will have no-fees fatigue and let this one go with a 'Yes'.

But hang on. The people of New Plymouth spent a lot of energy making sure that ‘not a single cent of rates money' was spent on constructing the new building. That funding came from the government, gambling and petrochemical whitewashing. Surely that major contribution deserves some kind of benefit.

And New Plymouth needs more than wishful thinking on this one. The city is not a tourist hot spot like Rotorua (where all out-of-towners are charged $20) so how much the Govett-Brewster would in fact earn from entry fees is a big question. You can look to the MTG Hawkes Bay debacle for how easy it is to get the sums wrong and the Len Lye Center is hoping to get 90,000 visitors a year (bet that wasn't based on a fee paying audience). All entry charges usually do is alienate your national audience, only pick up a few paying international tourists and lose the energy that attracts the local audience. Lose lose.

How about going back to the petrochemical guys and asking them to sponsor free entry for everyone, the gift that keeps on giving.

Anyone who wants to help keep the Govett-Brewster free can do the survey here. You know what to do.

It'll all come out in the white wash

“Sponsors want exhibits that are popular. I am not saying that popular artists are bad artists but the choice is not as independent as it is when the money is there already. Most sponsors think very carefully about what they want to connect their names and logos to.”
Julia Friedrich, a curator at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne

Guarded

Although many saw it as biting the hand that feeds you the artist protest at the last Biennale of Sydney that saw main sponsors Transfield retire was in line with a growing reluctance of artists to be associated with bad brands. Now at this year's São Paulo Biennial 61 artists and the curators of the event have asked to be 'disassociated' from funding that came to the Biennial from Israel. The result was what will no doubt become an emblematic picture of two security guys being employed to block out the Israeli branding at the Biennial's opening.

Don’t follow the money

The relationships between institutions, funding bodies, artists and money are now so seamless and so comfortable it’s not often that the surface is ever cracked. But that’s certainly what happened when it was revealed that the main sponsor of the Biennale of Sydney is connected to the construction and management of off shore refugee camps. Nine artists withdrew which in turn lead to The Chairman of the Sydney Biennale and Transfield Holdings, Luca Belgiorno-Nettis resigning to allow it to distance itself from Transfield’s funding. The response from the Australian Minister of the Arts Queensland’s senator Brandis was predictably brutal pulling out "disgraceful" and "shabby" and Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull dredged up ''vicious ingratitude.''
 
More compelling was Brandis’ threat to withdraw Government funding to punish their ungrateful response and any other arts bodies that thought they could question commercial largess in the form of sponsorship.

In fact it looks like the Biennale has kept the Transfield money for this year anyway, so much for their public announcement to “end our partnership with Transfield effective immediately.” Given that the Transfield contribution only represents just over six percent of the Biennale budget (around $634,000 a year) it is pretty hard to see the Biennale falling over through a parting of company. 

But in the end there's no clean cash to be had (it is after all the main sponsors of the Biennale the Australian Government who are responsible for the camps). As one of those early Greek guys said, “There is nothing in the world so demoralizing as money.”

Images: Left Biennale sponsor Transfield's logo and right camp construction and services company Transfield Services logo

Fag ends

Back in the late 1970s the Dowse Art Gallery as it was then was offered the opportunity to organise and open the Benson & Hedges Art Award. The Award was well established and had already been won by artists like Richard Killeen and Don Driver so the question “would we be interested?” was responded to with a hearty "would we hell." 

The icing on the cake was that James Mollison director of the Australian National Gallery and purchaser of Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles was to be the judge. To seal the deal tobacco company W.D and H.O Wills who made the B&H brand (known in the Valley as Rothmans after the cigarette made in the Hutt) invited the staff (all two of us) for a tour of the factory and lunch in the management dining room. Somewhere in there they mentioned they were targeting their marketing to get young women smoking. “Really, how interesting.” (Different times, but still the shame of it looking back). There was also a bid to have young women (girls in the Rothmans speak of the day) in short skirts handing out packs of fags at the opening. That we did stand up to.

About 500 paintings turned up to the Rothmans factory in Lower Hutt and they were trucked round to the Dowse where Mollison gallantly looked at them all and gave the award to Ian Scott. It was on this same NZ trip that he visited Peter McLeavey’s gallery and purchased four Colin McCahon works on paper for the Australian National collection (you can see them here 1-2-3-4).

And all this to show you a 1969 Harald Szeemann drawing poking a stick at one of the great cultural sponsor of the time, although incredibly Philip Morris was still giving grants totaling $9.3 million to 295 arts and cultural organizations as late as 2003.
Image: Harald Szeeman drawing done in preparation for the When attitudes become form exhibition in 1969

Pony up

So shoot us for getting it wrong. There we were suggesting that foregrounding Wellington-based artists on Te Papa’s fifth floor might sweeten the passage of the Wellington City Council’s annual allocation of $2.25 million to the museum. Well that didn't happen. The WCC decided to give the sum a haircut and reduced the allocation to Te Papa to $1 million. Te Papa’s startling response was to tell the DomPost that the WCC's $2.25 million made up more than half its total annual cash sponsorship of $3.81 million. So Wellington ratepayers were stumping up over 59 percent of Te Papa’s total cash sponsorship. Who knew? 

By that accounting, even with the cut, WCC is still a major sponsor with a contribution of over 25 percent of the annual amount Te Papa attracts in sponsorship. As it stands. Te Papa has eight sponsors. Four are government agencies (including WCC) and four are commercial concerns. So the other seven sponsors are putting up an average of $222,000 each making even a reduced WCC contribution of $1 million kind of significant.

NOTE: In June 2012 the Wellington City Council reviewed its decision to cut Te Papa's annual funding and agreed to continue funding as per its original allocation of $2.25 million per year.

Image: Dr. Evil: ONE MILLION DOLLARS! Number Two: Don't you think we should ask for more than a million dollars? A million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days.

Cementing the deal

Raising money at the moment is about as easy as raising the Titanic – and a lot less interesting – but if you’re a young artist and you want to take up a shared residency at SOMA in Mexico City, art-for-cash is the way to go. In what turned out to be a very generous gesture, artists Fiona Connor, Louise Menzies, Sanné Mestrom and Kate Newby offered one of an edition they’d each make in exchange for a contribution to their trip. On their return the four made up the editions and the lucky funders each got a print based on a Mexican map from Menzies, a bronze bottle opener from Mestrom and a hand-painted ceramic cup from Newby. 

And then there was Fiona Connor. Throwing a small sack of cement into a bag along with a wooden frame, some trowels and a large stamp, Connor fronted up to each funder and offered to install a concrete print in a location to be agreed. These slabs are now in the corners of backyards, on the floors of studios and a Wellington street. It was pouring with rain when she mixed the cement and laid ours down but it didn’t seem to worry Conner at all. 

She finished the work at 3.30, caught a plane to Auckland at 4 and was on a flight back to LA by 9.

Images: Fiona Connor Concrete situations on a Wellington street.

Pillow talk

Although not decimated like their US counterparts, art sponsors will almost certainly be more difficult to attract in New Zealand than they were in the wonder years. Compared to the United States and Europe, New Zealand art sponsorship is comparatively recent. As late as the early 1980s you could still hear a discussion about the evil likely to result from snuggling up to large, or even small, businesses. All that changed in 1984 with Te Maori when Mobil used hungry cultural enzymes to help clean up environmental stains. Mobil called it “affinity-of-purpose-marketing”.

Of course Te Maori was luckier than architect Frank Gehry whose Guggenheim Museum exhibition sponsor wrote the following in its introduction to the catalogue.

“Enron shares Mr Gehry’s ongoing search for the moment of truth, the moment when the functional approach to a problem becomes infused with artistry that provides a truly innovative solution. This is the search that Enron embarks on every day, by questioning the conventional to change business paradigms and create new markets that will shape the new economy.”

And so to bed.

Source: Enron quote from The Edifice Complex by Deyan Sudjic