Reframing

The art auction season is gearing up to start again and Webb’s has just released its latest broadsheet to attract lots and tout the benefits of the art market. To read it you wouldn’t think it was possible to lose a dime investing in art. This of course goes against the long-held wisdom of the art world that believes (well says anyway) you should only buy art for love and not for profit. 'We'd never dream of selling” is a commonly heard statement from art collectors (until they do). Even great collections usually find themselves on the market in the end.  Take the stellar selection of work put together by the Gibbs. It's been well published, much shown and seemed set in history, until it wasn't. In that case of course the sales have been paralleled by very generous gifting to public institutions.

Can you make money out of art? Sure you can. Should you? Why the hell not?
Here are a couple of random examples from auction records:

Colin McCahon, Let be, Let be was held in private hands for 14 years and sold for a profit of $38,000 per year for each of those years.
 
Bill Hammond, Zoomorphic lounge was held for 12 years and sold for a profit of  $10,000 per year.
 
Tony Fomison Hilltop watcher  was held for 10 years and sold for a profit of  $7,500 per year.

Michael Smither’s Family in a van was held for 26 years returning about $7,500 per year.

And these are two-times-to-the-block resales. As the Les and Milly Paris auction showed, there is also a heap to be made on first-to-auction sales probably around $10,600 a year for the 37 years they owned Gordon Walter’s painting Mokoia.

So you want to make money collecting art? OK. Buy figurative paintings. Always buy the most typical and attractive-looking works of the top-ranked artists.  And remember, there are only ever a very small number of artists who sell for high prices. Forget sculpture and ignore anything unusual. Now fly my pretties.

Promoting Promoting prosperity

Around about this time last year we were raving about a book called Selling the dream. We finished by asking, “Will there ever be a better book than this one on New Zealand’s unsung commercial designers? “ Well, yes there will be and it’s about to be published. This time round it's called Promoting prosperity and it's a companion piece to the earlier book.

Again the volume of material that has been uncovered is extraordinary. There are literally hundreds of colour illustrations of ads, posters and preliminary sketches set in the context of contemporaneous photographs. Much of this material has come from private collections (and in particular that of one of the book’s authors Peter Alsop) but there is also some terrific material from public collections. Among others are the Alexander Turnbull Library, Archives New Zealand and a place we hadn’t come across before, the Ferrymead Printing Society based in Christchurch. The result is the story of advertising New Zealand style (yes, it was pretty much pinched from overseas but with some intriguing twists and turns) giving a dynamic insight to what was important at the time and what's changed in our cultural environment.

The richness of imagery in Promoting prosperity does raise a question though. What do we have of our more recent history as related through commercial artwork? From our odd jobs with advertising agencies, we suspect not a great deal. The philosophy with what to do with most of the original artwork of advertising is trash it rather than stash it. A quick look at National Library and Te Papa collections of contemporary advertising seems to confirm that life stops in the 1970s or so. Let's hope there are energetic private collectors out there working with the ad agencies and keeping safe the kind of imagery that makes this book of such value.

In the meantime Promoting prosperity as more than enough to keep you amused, entertained and informed about the past world of the hidden persuaders

Dream time

Now that the barriers between design and the visual arts are easing, this is the perfect time to take another look at what used to be called commercial art. Fortunately one of the most beautiful and comprehensive reviews of one area of such design has just been published and it's all about NZ. Selling the dream: the art of early New Zealand tourism comes from the publisher Craig Potton and has been conceptualised, assembled and designed and by Peter Alsop, Gary Stewart and Dave Bamford. That it's the result of dedicated collecting and researching over a very long time is evident on every gorgeous page. 

One thing you notice is how many of the images that feature in the book are by unknown artists. While there are the well-known visual art-crossover names like Leonard Mitchell, Marcus King Russell Clark and John Holmwood, most of the credits are for anonymous artists at work in places like the Tourist Department and the Railways Department. This makes it a real Wellington book as the government departments running NZ tourism were based in that city for so long. There's a lot of amazing new material to discover and some stunning images. One favourite is Leonard Mitchell’s classic man alone on a mountain top which we remember bowling American art historian Charles Eldredge for a six when he was curating the touring exhibition of New Zealand art Pacific Parallels.

Will there ever be a better book than this one on New Zealand’s unsung commercial designers? It’s hard to imagine looking at what a terrific job has been done here. 

Image: Left: Selling the dream. Right, an illustration titled The great Franz Joseph Glacier by Leonard Mitchell for Scenic playground of the Pacific published by the Tourist Department around 1935

Market forces

The words ‘transparent’ and ‘art market’ are not ones you usually put together in the same sentence so it was interesting to hear Hamish Coney from Art + Object at the New Dowse on Thursday. His topic was the New Zealand market but this was not one of your mumbling, blurry slide, can’t-quite-hear-what-you’re-saying affairs. Coney used PowerPoint with interesting images and (up to the last few slides) without acres of text. Even more unusually for this sort of thing, he was articulate, entertaining and had a point of view.

The main message was that the art market is like a giant revolving door. You’re in, you’re not quite so in, you’re drifting out, you’re out, you’re starting to come back in again. And so, in what Coney called the Fonterra Effect, Goldie is back (again), along with Pink and White Terraces and historic landscapes. If that been it the presentation wouldn’t have been so interesting, but Coney also discussed how each complete circle of the door brings its own subtle changes. This time it seems the landscapes need a historic connection. Hills and trees – yawn. Hills and trees with Von Tempsky having his lunch - bring it on. In 2008 the five top selling artists were Goldie, Hammond, Bloomfield (Bloomfield!), McCahon and Lindauer. Of these Goldie represented 15% of total sales at auction and Goldie, Bloomfield and Lindauer combined fetched 21%. Is this tough times creating a more conservative market or, as Coney hinted, rich farmers spending up (again)?

As to the size of the art market in New Zealand, Coney reckons around $65 to $75 million. This sounds low to us. It’s that transparency thing again. The public record covers auctions but not dealer sales on the secondary market or indeed commissioned works. Many private sales and resales regularly hit numbers way above anything the auction houses can dream about.
It would be good to have online access to the Coney calculations, and it would be great if he would put them up on the Art + Auction site. While they all come from the public domain, Coney has spent a lot of time working them into a coherent form. Information is power, especially when you share it around.
Image: The snazzy plasticised ticket that got you into the Hamish Coney’s presentation