Copy cats

This picture shows a facsimile painting competition in full swing in Dafen, a village in South China. Over 100 contestants painting to the clock. As we have already posted, China is the place to go to for mass-produced works of art. Some villages claim to create five million copies of masterpieces every year. A good “artist” can create around 30 paintings a day. Around 60 percent of all the cheap oil paintings in the world are made there the business being worth somewhere in the vicinity of $56 million a year.

According to Spiegel online “A reasonably skilful copy of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" sells for €40 ($51). Buy 100 and the price goes down to €26 ($33), the gallery workers points out. The 100 paintings, guaranteed to have been produced by art academy graduates, ship within three weeks.”

Art is where you find it 10

This site allows prospective buyers of apartments at 650 Sixth Ave at 20th in New York to check out how art will look on the whiter than white walls. The developers have joined with an art gallery to let prospective buyers “curate” their own rooms, and presumably purchase the art to have it ready when they move, thus aligning this virtual world with reality. Possibly worth 10 to 15 seconds of your time, but be warned, the art comes under rubrics like “Branded consciousness”, Found objects and forgotten stories” and “Abstract expressions.” To get “curating”, click on the Chinese food containers when you reach the home page.

Guide to collectors 14

The sixth thing you should know about Manzoni’s shit.
His father owned a canning factory.

Your tax dollars at work

This link takes you to at a page where you can download Creative New Zealand’s annual recurrent funding for 2008. You will remember that when we looked at the composition of the Board of CNZ we found that of the seven members, three had a specific interest in music, two in theatre, three in dance and…oh that’s right...none in the fine arts. So how did music, dance and theatre go? This is broad-brush, but you’ll get the picture.

Of the total $15 million distributed:

• 31.5 per cent went to theatre
• 39 percent went to music
• 8 percent to dance
• 1.3 percent to craft

The fine arts received the following:

• Artists Alliance $130,000
• Artspace $320,000
• Moving Image Centre $300,000
• The Physics Room Trust $166,720

That’s around 6 percent.

Image: The first picture that comes up when you Google “Your tax dollars at work.” (Image reversed to suit New Zealand road conditions). And yes, we don’t include Arts Access Aotearoa in the fine arts figure, but if we had it would have been bumped up 2 percent. The Artist Alliance is included to be nice.

Five times invitation

Over at stimulusresponse is a response to five gallery invitations received in the mail a couple of days ago. The response takes the form of ten photos.

The catalogue (and the gallery) with the hole in the middle

This catalogue from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery can be added to the growing pile of work produced by Justin Paton. This time he is alongside the Hocken’s Linda Tyler. With an elegantly cut-out cover in signature purple, a hole that burrows through the first twelve pages, and another 60 full colour pages behind that, this is an impressive publication and another nifty design job by Karina McLeod. If Rohan contributed nothing else to New Zealand culture (he has and will), "Horrorgami" will do just fine. Justin is about to leave the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and head a little north to Christchurch. Since arriving in Dunedin he has whipped up a storm of catalogues, shows and essays including major efforts on Jeffrey Harris, Laurence Aberhart, Julia Morison, Don Peebles, Ronnie van Hout, Ricky Swallow, Daniel von Sturmer, Anne Noble – you get the picture. Priscilla Pitts and Justin Paton both leaving the gallery at the same time is a big challenge. We assume Tim Walker will be filling both positions.

Warning to collectors

“What I love to do is put people in front of art and make them feel it, make them stop everything else they are doing and experience it, deeply. That's how I make art expensive. And that's my job.”
Tobias Meyer, chief auctioneer and worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby's, in The New Yorker

Up the down staircase

We’ve dabbled in fringe Escher art before. This time it’s a video game creating 3d world’s from Escher drawings. Planned for release on PlayStation later this year Echochrome will let you direct small marionette-like figures through Escher’s impossible structures. And this is not the only video game that features art. You can also look for Oblivion a game where you try to save a painter known as Rythe who has fallen into one of his own paintings. To find out more about Echochrome go here.

Courtyard

News just in that the Environmental Court has upheld the Resource Consent for Auckland Art Gallery’s extensions. The court which had seen the plans, and we presume the model pictured above, thought that apart from needing a bit of work on the roof, it sounded fine.

For the record

Overthenet is nearly one year old, so we are gathering together disks for our annual DJ party. Any other suggestions welcome.

Lights. Camera. Auction!

On Sunday night we caught the second part of the doco on the launch of Art+Object. It certainly looked different to the auctions we've been to in the past. For a start there was smartly displayed work, that didn’t look like it had come out of a regional museum’s study collection. TVNZ got into the spirit with a Reservoir Dogs-like graphic and the Art + Object team had a great whew-thank-god-it-worked moment on camera at the end. Ben Plumbly captured the mood when he declared, “We’ve broken the mould.” So, clever timing to find the latest Art+Object catalogue for the Gow Collection in the mail yesterday. Nothing wrong with the collection of objects either, in fact it’s a pretty interesting read. Bev and Murray Gow have put together a wide range of stuff and it’s good to have a chance to ruffle through it. And yet, with its A4 format, a number of works that would have been better discretely sold off line, and illustrations that seem more arranged than designed, this auctiosure seems a long way off brand from Art+Object as the “The 21st Century Auction House”.
Images: Middle, the Gow Collection catalogue from Art+Object. Outer, scenes from the TVNZ documentary on Art+Object's first auction.

Let's put up a statue of...um.. I know ... Me!

What is it about despots and sculpture? Memories of four years ago and the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue by US marines in central Baghdad square sent us scurrying for other examples of this fringe activity. Now that there is talk of removing the giant cross-swords monument erected 18 years ago at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the search, and recognition of these great works, feels even more urgent. Here then, with some help from the Guardian, is the best of the best, as it were. We’ve already mentioned The Hands of Victory in Baghdad as a leader in its field, but a close second for the metaphor prize is Fist Crushing U.S. Fighter Plane out of Col. Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Libya. A special mention in this class goes to the Monument to the Founding of the North Korean Workers' Party. Best sculpture of a despotic leader pointing his finger in the air, is tied between the Monument to President Laurent Kabila Kinshasa of the Democratic Republic of Congo and President Kim Il Sung of Korea. And the specialty gold-leaf award was carried away by the Monument to President Saparmurat Niyazov in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan.
Images: Clockwise from top left, Fist Crushing U.S. Fighter Plane, Monument to President Saparmurat Niyazov, Monument to President Laurent Kabila Kinshasa, President Kim Il Sung of Korea, Monument to the Founding of the North Korean Workers' Party and The Hands of Victory.

Stephen Birch

Stephen Birch died yesterday and, although he has been ill for some time now, it is still a shock. Stephen exhibited with Hamish McKay and Michael Lett here in New Zealand and we have a couple of great works of his. The last time we talked with Stephen he was walking into his survey show, Looking out my back door at the MCA in Sydney. We weren’t able to get over and had rung to wish him well. As was usual whenever we spoke, he was much more interested in how we were and how we felt about lending to the show, than his own big moment of recognition. His work was curious, courageous and presented with a wonderful mix of whimsy and challenge. You can tell from the catalogue of the MCA show that Stephen was on a roll. It is incredibly sad that his time has been cut so short.
Image: Detail from Stephen Birch's Civic Minded 1999

August

This month we: were amazed that the City Gallery had been at its current location with its current director for 14 years • followed it up with a chart of time served by art gallery directors • made many, many unsuccessful attempts to get the Trip Of A Lifetime Tour reports from CNZ • spent too much time searching for images of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa • realised you could start a good art collection cheap with available New Zealand multiples and editions • came up with a terrific idea for art dissertations • reported on art lifestyle choices and generally tried to brighten your day with facts, guesswork, insinuation and invention.
Image: August Sander

It's art Jim, but not as we know it