Taste wars

As anyone who's been involved in the visual arts knows, there are many different art worlds. Even artists who go to art school together and share a view of their future often diverge as they are drawn to different kinds of dealers, collectors, enthusiasts, conversations and institutions. 

Usually these different groups ignore each other but every now and then - hold on to your hats - it's TASTE WARS.

Ok, it might not be all-out war, but the Auckland City-sponsored outing of the James Wallace collection at the Pah Homestead certainly looks like the beginnings of a skirmish with the Auckland Art Gallery. 

On one side you have Wallace whose collection is relentlessly shaped by his personal attraction to each individual item and an exhibition display style (very close together, often up near the ceiling, letting the visual clashes fall where they may) that goes against the very grain of museum display aesthetics. The Wallace style is not about showing art to its best advantage so much as showing art. On the other side, well most of you know how the AAG does exhibitions. The selection of works considered worth showing also comes from two very different world views, although there are of course some overlaps.

How did James Wallace end up with his own Public Art Gallery dedicated to his taste and his standards? It seems that when Mayor Banks wanted to put a new theatre into Auckland on Queen Street, the space he badly wanted was already owned by, you got it, James Wallace. He was showing parts of his collection there, so a swap was brokered including a big cash input from Wallace. The location of his collection is now in the newly renovated Pah Homestead, and it was the Mayor himself who opened the first exhibition. Well the Banks factor drove off the cliff on Saturday but you can bet the Wallace people still feel they are on course to become stiff opposition to the AAG, the Auckland City Council web site describes it as, “one of the country’s finest collections of contemporary New Zealand art”. With parking, free entry and without the AAG's public obligations and large staff, it is certainly a very attractive proposition for some of Auckland’s art audiences. 

Will one man’s passion win over institutional convention? The two galleries will no doubt say in public that there is room for both of them, but you can feel it in the air - TASTE WARS.

Image: Peter Madden gets the Wallace treatment

Winning the Walters

Vicente Todolí, the judge of the Walters Prize has just announced in Auckland that this year's winner is  Dan Arps.

LATER: Todoli praised each of the finalists as capable of being the winner and gave a smart summary of each one's work. In awarding the prize to Dan he said his work was like seeing 80 worlds in one day. Arps' acceptance speech started with an understandable, "Holy shit!" You can still catch the Arps/Budd Estate exhibition at Michael Lett and Arps has another outing coming up soon at Artspace.

You can read Vincente Toldi's comments on Dan Arps and the others work here on the Auckland Art Gallery blog Outpost.

A rose is a rose is a rose

 Vodafone TV ad snatches the signature style of Australian artist Rose Nolan a regular exhibitor in New Zealand

Prize fight

One of the results for the artist who wins the Walters Prize tonight is a fair chance of getting a decent sized work into the Auckland Art Gallery’s collection. That makes sense, as until this year anyway, most of the artists in the final were pretty well established in their careers. This time it has fallen on younger artists to crowd the podium and the potential for an under 30 year old to go away with the cash and trip to the US. Still it is hard to imagine the AAG or any other public art gallery in NZ feeling equivocal over introducing any of the four Walters Prize finalists into their collections. 

It wasn’t always so. Exactly 50 years ago Colin McCahon was announced joint winner of the first Hays Prize in Christchurch. Peter Tomory, Director of the Auckland City Art Gallery along with John Simpson and Russell Clark, lecturers at the Ilam Art School, were the judges (a mistake only made once, given the consequent fuss - the following year, like the Walters Prize, Hays roped in an overseas judge who promptly gave the prize to Peter McIntyre and Stewart Maclennan – which caused its own upset in its own way) In 1960, in a massive compromise the judges split the prize three ways - one for each judge? (It certainly doesn’t take a giant leap of the imagination to put Tomory to McCahon, Simpson to Francis Jones’s lame painting of a gold dredge and Clark with Julia Royd’s Englishified Composition). 

The following year, the Christchurch City Council declined the offered donation of all three paintings by Hays, the prize sponsors, to the Robert McDougal Art Gallery. McCahon’s painting, Painting, eventually ended up in the Fletcher Trust Collection in Auckland.

SOME ADDITIONAL HORSE'S MOUTH STUFF: We will be at the Walters Prize dinner tonight and will post the winner's name here on OTN as soon as it is announced. It starts at  7pm so let's say, at a guess, around 9pm-ish.

NZNYOK

We tend to have rather a Guinness Book of Records mentality when it comes to New York - Len Lye first to have work collected by MoMA, Billy Apple first to show with Andy Warhol, Max Gimblett first to have a painting shown in the Guggenheim. Having said that, as firsts go, Peter Stichbury being featured in the New Yorker’s 20 September issue is right up there. His exhibition at the Tracy Williams gallery is trumpeted in a large (two columns by 13.5 centimetre) editorial pic of his painting Estelle 5 in the middle of the gallery listings and reviews section and review here on their web page.

Collecting dust

We posted a while back on Michael Stevenson's mission to find the location of the gallery where Tony Shafrazi based himself in Teheran back in the 1970s. Shafrazi's plan was to sell high-end US art to the Shah of Iran and it worked, but only briefly as it was hidden away in Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art’s stores after the Shah’s fall from grace. 

Last year a catalogue of the collection was finally published. It is an unusual slice through twentieth century art. Most of the works were purchased under the patronage of the Shah and his wife Empress Farah between 1977 and 1979 and it turned out this was a good time (recession) for picking up cheapish international art. The collection includes some impressive works and their inaccessibility for 25 or so years has made for interesting gaps in the story of the exhibiting and publishing of contemporary US art.

As you will see from the image with our first post, unusual among the Warhols in the Shah's collection are eight large portraits of Mao. Takes one to know one.

Image: The catalogue and the Shah. Thanks R

Branded: Jeffrey Harris

The moment when artists become brands

Paparazzi

Before you start throwing your weight around you need to have a realistic understanding of how much people care. That’s what Tate Modern in London discovered when it tried to get photographers to sign an agreement that any images they took of the Turner Prize installations would not be used to illustrate negative stories about the gallery or the award. You know the kind of thing: Tracey Emin’s unmade bed installation next to a pic and story offering some punter’s equally disheveled kip with an offer to sell at half the price. The problem the Tate ran up against was that quite of few of the photographers said, ok, fine they wouldn’t bother to photograph the exhibition at all. Whoops. Tate Modern backed down. Not much chance of the Auckland Art Gallery being that high handed. It’s hard enough to get any media interest at all without putting up obstacles. If you want to know how high the New Zealand media put our own Turner Prize on their agenda, try putting ‘Walters Prize Auckland’ into Google News. One hit.

Advice to collectors

"Something that’s pretty and beautiful is probably the worst thing that you could say today in contemporary art about something, unless it’s so pretty it’s nauseating."

American film director and art collector John Waters. You can watch him spin out more of his contentious ideas on art here.

There were two in the bed and the little one said…

Ireland’s decision to appoint a commercial art gallery dealer as its commissioner for the Venice Biennale followed by his decision to chose an artist from his own gallery, highlights again the ethical challenges of close relationships between commercially driven art dealers and publicly funded institutions. Jenny Harper, director of the Christchurch Art Gallery, is perfectly clear where the chips fall. As she told The Art Newspaper in its September issue, “It is expensive and, as we know in New Zealand, often difficult for smaller countries to present at Venice. Clearly many parties – public, private and commercial – need to support a given artist, but such a blurring of the lines in this government-to-government invitation is disappointing. I believe the commissioner should be independent of all funding parties and am unimpressed with Ireland’s decision in this case.” 

Other commentators do not draw such a hard line suggesting that the blurring of boundaries between dealers and public art museums is well advanced and we should just get used to it. That seams to be the way we are going here in New Zealand where such blurring can be seen in close, long-term relationships between public institutions and commercial dealers, to the benefit of both.

Queuet

The organisers of Massey University's One Day Sculpture event will be pleased to see Roman Ondak's performance Good feeling in good times illustrated in the latest of the Phaidon Cream series, Creamier. Let's hope the Wellington City Council is also pleased to see its classically Stalinist building featured.

Billy for Mayor

How do people find this stuff? A reader sent us another droll excerpt from British TV comedy Absolutely Fabulous. This time Eddy is heading off to a London dealer gallery to buy art. “I’m a serious collector. I’m not interested in artistic value, I just want to know how much this is going to be worth in twenty years time.” And she has some clues. She even asks for a work by Nam June Paik to be added to her basket. If the name of gallery used for the scene sounds familiar, it probably is. The Mayor Gallery is the venue for Billy Apple’s current London exhibition, his first since his outing at the Serpentine back in 1975. The exhibition runs until 30 October.

Style section

Hey, it’s Saturday, why not get yourself made up like a Roy Lichtenstein painting and go out and scare the neighbourhood kids.

Image: Halloween make-up session by M.A.C artist Karin Stone

Nine months on

In september we tried to unravel the private from the public at the city gallery • offered up ways to save money at te papa • cleverly made x stand for don’t touch in our alphabet • announced auckland the queen city of roadside art • worried about friends in christchurch • moaned about cnz giving all the ding to institutions (again – us moaning that is) • said goodbye to greg flint • welcomed the return of flares • appealed to the auckland art gallery to give michael stevenson a break • named an art precinct and reported on the return of selwyn muru’s gate

It’s a wrap

It’s Aotea Centre Day again on OTN and while it’s a cheap shot to claim every wrapped-up sculpture to be a Christo look-a-like, it certainly works for Toby Twiss’s tiny sculpture of Auckland's former mayor Sir Dove-Meyer Robinson. The little leader has returned to stand guard over the new bleak, and, on the day we saw it, windswept Aotea Square. BW (Before Wrapping) Sir Dove-Meyer stood on the sort of riser you get at trade fairs covered in what might be a blanket. But the big question is whether the longest-serving Mayor was really as small as portrayed. Who knows, maybe it was just a bronze/dollar ratio.