The art of giving

How generous are artists? Very generous indeed is the answer. Over the years artists have given countless works of art to auctions raising funds for this cause and that without a thought for recognition or making any complaint at the disproportionate amount they give. And it is a fact that artists give disproportionately. Can you imagine a young lawyer being asked to stump up with four or five thousand dollars to support a local cause? And yet this what happens to some artists two and three times a year, and two or three times a year they offer up an art work to raise money. Nowadays the amount is sometimes reduced to the commission on the work, but still it is usually a contribution way in excess of the usual $10, $20 or a particularly generous $50 of most donations.

A remarkable example of the generous gesture is that made collectively by British artist Sarah Lucas, a private patron and her dealers Two Rooms in Auckland and Sadie Coles in London. It starts with Sarah Lucas deciding to donate the proceedings from the sale of one of her works in her recent Two Rooms exhibition to the Christchurch Earthquake Fund. It continues with a collector purchasing a work from the show and then gifting it to the Christchurch Art Gallery. That meant the Earthquake Fund benefited from Sarah Lucas’s donation of the purchase price of $160,000 and the Christchurch Art Gallery was able to add a work of their choice from the exhibition (they chose NUD CYCLADIC 2 for the record) thanks to a very generous patron. Both dealer galleries waived commission and it is expected that the Christchurch Art Gallery will receive a further $160,000 as part of its dollar for dollar matching agreement with the City Council on all donations. An extraordinary act of generosity gained momentum rippled out on a huge scale.

When you put the Lucas example together with gestures like that made by Dick Scott and Webb’s, and the many other artists, collectors, dealers and auction houses, you are talking about significant amounts coming out of the visual arts cultural sector each year.

Image: A Sarah Lucas NUD CYCLADIC work from the same series as the one donated to Christchurch NUD CYCLADIC © The Artist. Image via Sadie Coles HQ, London and Two Rooms, Auckland. photograph: Julian Simmons

Signs on Saturday

Thanks P, thanks and thanks again

Warning to models

"We can put an end to a centuries-old dispute and also understand Leonardo's relations to his models."

The guy who wants to dig up the bones of the woman who modeled for the Mona Lisa. Story here.

 Image: Mona Lisa's leg bone (reconstruction only)

A good bad snake

At the opening of Michael Stevenson's exhibition at Sydney’s MCA on Tuesday night there was a large group of young suited men in front of one of the works deep in animated conversation. Necks were craning, fingers pointing and comments passing back and forth from one MCA young businessman patron to another. It turned out they were discussing the finer points of the Michael Stevenson print Gold vs Oil (2009) which showed how the prices and the relationships of these two key commodities fluctuated over time. 

Also on show was a 1987 drawing of a snake painted in a dynamic thick blue line. When Stevenson first showed it to his dealer of the time Gregory Flint, Flint told him how much he liked the work and remarked, "Save it for your retrospective." Still in the possession of the artist, he did.

Image: display case in Michael Stevenson at the MCA with his work One bad snake far right

Dead reckoning

If you ever wondered why artists have an ambivalent attitude to the art market it is probably because that market believes the only good artist is a dead artist. The latest Artprice figures are out for the top 50 selling contemporary artists of the year. There are only six living artists on the list.

Whoa

When we said a while back that the Chair of Creative NZ didn’t have much to say for himself, we didn’t figure on him rising up to crush our call for more support for the arts in Christchurch. You can read his letter CNZ to the rescue in this week's Listener below. Somewhere in there though he did mention that CNZ's top three were in a meeting together “reviewing facilities and meetings with artists” when they read our 2 April piece, so that’s good.

Apart from intimating that we are a couple of Wellington rats (fair enough, we called them lambs), there’s not a whole lot of stuff about what CNZ is actually doing and, as you can probably imagine, we got a much more generous response from the folk down in Christchurch.

CNZ to the rescue
Jim and Mary Barr, like many non-Christchurch residents, have no shortage of opinion about what’s needed to fix a broken city (Listener 2 April or a shorter version on OTN here). They also remain conveniently ignorant about what has been on Cantabrians' minds and what Creative New Zealand has been doing to assist the arts community.
   I agree it’s vital to help Christchurch rebuild and reconnect with the arts and their redemptive nature. But it’s easy to be a megaphone advocate from a distance when your toilets flush and your precious collections, indeed your lives remain unshattered.
   To spend time in Christchurch, as Creative New Zealand (CNZ) staff have done since the first earthquake on September 4, is to understand first-hand what resilience and compassion mean among Cantabrians. Our Chief Executive, Arts Board Chairman and I were reviewing facilities and meetings with artists when I read the Barr piece.
   We have already provided cashflow to companies and established an emergency response fund to help CNZ-funded artists affected by the earthquake. We will continue to help as Christchurch citizens pick up the pieces and start focusing beyond their essential human needs.
   These are delicate and heartbreaking times and the people of Canterbury need to help rebuild their homes, their schools and their businesses - as well as their arts and their sports. Patience, partnership, compassion and resolve will be more helpful than complaint from afar.
Alastair Carruthers
Chair, Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa

Image: Angry lamb

Looks like art

Looking like art at the  Dowse Art Museum.

Stevenson's rocket

Last night Michael Stevenson’s survey exhibition opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. It was quite an event. Michael has been based in Berlin for some time now, but he has remained a major presence back home. He was New Zealand’s representative to the 2003 Venice Biennale and has been included in some key touring exhibitions including Toi Toi Toi. 

The retrospective exhibition at the MCA runs over two floors and is an extraordinary gathering together of Stevenson’s work from the late eighties through to the present. A MONIAC is there, along with early paintings and drawings, films, assemblages of objects, installations and of course The Gift, a replica of Australian artist Ian Fairweather’s raft owned by the Queensland Art Gallery. The spaces the exhibition has been displayed in are about to be renovated so Stevenson and MCA curator Glenn Barkley been given an unusual amount of latitude in how they could break down and recreate experiences around this major selection of work. You can travel from floor to floor via an immense goods lift, step in behind the walls and have your understanding of the chronology of Stevenson’s work truly turned upside down. This is an exceptional reinvention of how to mount survey exhibitions of single artist’s work. 

So why you might ask will we not see this major exhibition of a New Zealand artist in New Zealand? Earth to Te Papa, um…Planet Auckland Art Gallery, are you there? It is beyond comprehension how such a huge effort could have been made to bring all this work together by the MCA and not one of the public art institutions in New Zealand has negotiated to show it. The usual excuses - “We’re at the end of a building programme,” or “We don’t have any spaces to show it in” or “we don’t have the budget” – simply don’t cut it. 

This is a major failure for NZ art professionals collectively. Maybe it is not too late for something to be sorted out with Michael Stevenson, the MCA and the lenders. But in the end, as usual, it will all be about will, will and the conviction that artists with major international reputations like Michael Stevenson remain an important part of New Zealand’s culture. One item of good news in this debacle has been financial support for the MCA exhibition from both Creative New Zealand and the Chartwell Trust.

So it’s an airfare to Sydney if you who want to see one of the best New Zealand exhibitions in years. You’ve got until 19 June.
Image: detail from one of Stevenson's works on show at the MCA

On the road

#48 in OTN's ongoing series celebrating Ministry of Land Transport and Local Body support of New Zealand artists.

For others in the series hit the 'on the road' label tag below.

That’s what I want

Can you make money from art? Well, yes you can, although if you read the perennial can-you-make-money-on-art features in mags and newspapers, you’ll find most commentators prefer to front foot with don’t-buy-it-unless-you-love-it. 

Forgetting the all-you-need-is-love line for a moment, how much money can you make? Over the last twenty years, to use a technical term, lots. Quick resales of works by Bill Hammond and Shane Cotton in particular have reaped some very large rewards for people who didn’t want to live with their art for more than 10 to 15 years and, in many cases, as few as three or four.

Of course you have to sell at the right time as art is not very liquid (another technical term), but when you consider the amount made on Don Binney’s Kotare over the Ratana Church, Te Kao ($270,000 over 47 years from a purchase price of around $125), there is money, good money, delivered from the right works (i.e. best looking typical work - preferably figurative - of the highest reputation artists).

Take, for example, Colin McCahon’s He calls for Elias up in the next Art + Object sale. The painting was offered up for £12.12 (aka 12 guineas) at its first outing in 1959 and it is still in its original frame. Now auctioneers Art + Object reckon it will sell for somewhere between $500,000 and $700,000. 

And what is £12.12 worth in today’s inflation adjusted dollars? $497.00 that’s what. So you definitely stand to make a fair bit over the under-the-mattress method, even if it sells under the lower reserve. 

If you put the £12.12 into the bank and went with compound interest at 6% over the 52 years (you’d be lucky), you’d only be rolling in 5,768 dollar bills. 

So could some smart investor parlay £12.12 into $600,000 over 52 years? Sure they could, but we’d all be super impressed. Art at auction. Gotta love it.

Image: the back of McCahon’s He calls for Elias illustrated in the Art + Object catalogue. You can download the fully illustrated catalogue here

Roll out the banner

Something you don't see every day. New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson gets the full survey treatment from Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. As things stand the exhibition is not scheduled to show in New Zealand.

When the K in Koons stands for Kill

In the world of computer game shoot-em-ups there are two main types: ones in which you have an avatar who stands (or rolls or fights or kicks) for you and first-person shooters where you are in control of a gun that sticks into the screen and blasts away everything that comes at you. Now, if we were making a game to blast away at the art world, we'd go for a first-person shooter and that’s just what Florida-based new media artist Hunter (great name) Jonakin has done in his game Jeff Koons Must Die!!!

JKMD!!! Takes place in a Jeff Koons retrospective exhibition. As you get down to business you also get to see most of the key items in the JK oeuvre and the business is to destroy as many JK works as you can with your rocket launcher (it’s a boy’s game). If you choose not to shoot any of the artworks the game comes to an end, but obliterate a bunny, blow up a Balloon Dog or frag an Equilibrium Tank and JK comes out to reason with you (not for very long), and if that fails, dispatches a guard to kill you. Blast your way through that problem and you find yourself attacked by waves of curators (oooooh, I’m so scared), lawyers and gallery assistants who eventually kill you whatever you do. As in so many gallery situations, it really doesn’t pay to rile the staff.

All you potential Koons Killers out there can read more here and see a video of the game in action.

Mini meme

We’ve mentioned Michael Leavitt previously, he’s the guy who makes artist Action Figures. Unfortunately they are one-offs -unlike New Zealand's own Action Figure maker Ronnie van Hout who back in 2007 made himself cheaper by the dozen - but Leavitt's army of handmade mini-artists (some of them have up to 30 moving parts) is growing. A few of the recent additions are Jeff Koons, Matthew Barney, Takashi Murakami and Julian Schnabel. We’re figuring most of you will know who’s who but for those who don’t, here’s Leavitt's master chart.

Bags one

If you want one of these Fendy bags designed by Damien Hirst and Richard Prince you’re probably out of luck. These and some others are being auctioned for charity by Christies next week and are one of a kind ‘custom altered’. Still, if your hearts really on owning one you can pop over to Charity Buzz and get a bid in, the dot Hirst with an estimated value of $13,000 was sitting at $7,500 last time we looked.

Images: Bags by Prince and Hirst (spotted and spin)

If it’s Tuesday, it must be SFMoMA

Anyone who travels overseas in search of great art experiences knows the disappointment of arriving one day after the big survey show ends or finding the one art museum that closes on a Wednesday when everyone else in the world closes on Monday. But as bad as these occasional blips are, consider Colin and Anne McCahon and their famous 1958 visit to the United States. This trail of disappointment comes from Gordon Brown’s book Colin McCahon: artist. 

Arriving in San Francisco they were told that a fire at MoMA in New York meant that the museum would be all but closed when they visited, in Philadelphia they discovered that the Barnes collection would not admit them and, to top it off, the Art Institute of Chicago was rebuilding and most of its collection was in storage. Finally, a planned visit with Betty Parsons was stymied when the famous dealer took off to Europe days before the McCahons hit town. 

Despite of all these obstacles, the couple managed to visit 68 galleries in just over four months at an exhausting rate of nearly two museum visits a day every day of the trip. Lucky some of them were closed.