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.

.

Shorts
 
Upgrade: The Monica Brewster Trust deed has stood the Govett-Brewster in very good stead since the 1970s keeping renegade councillors at bay and allowing the only sensible deaccessioning policy in NZ. So why, you might ask, would anyone fiddle with it when doing that requires going to the High Court? Word is that the G-B wants to change its brand and as a by-product its name. No, not as you might think to the Len Lyceum but, following the Dowse, it wants to cut out that gallery bit and call itself a museum.

Toot suite: A new gallery for Wellington! Ok,well a revamped old one as Suite leaves its attic premises above Peter McLeavey Gallery. The newcomer is in Upper Cuba Street and opens 19 February.

 

Covered:  You can see what Rohan Wealleans made of the Marilyn statue statue he’s been hoarding and that featured on OTNSTUDIO here on Instagram.

Fountainhead: In the sole funny moment in Adam Curtis’s latest documetary Bitter Lake, an art historian attempts to teach Afghanis about Marcel Duchamp’s influence on contemporary art. “When this art emerged it was partly political,” she tells her bemused audience. “It was designed to fight against the system.”

What artworks see

A while back there was a flurry as the meme ‘What art works see' rushed through the internet. It was simple enough. Take a photo from the point of view of  a sculpture or painting following its line of sight. It was a funny idea and some of the results certainly made you remember The Gaze Wars of the 1970s and 1980s. We of course did a few at the Auckland Art Gallery. You can see them here.

Trust me

The Monica Brewster Trust deed has stood the Govett-Brewster in very good stead since the 1970s keeping renegade councillors at bay and allowing the only sensible deaccessioning policy in NZ. So why, you might ask, would anyone fiddle with it when doing that requires going to the High Court? Word is that the G-B wants to change its brand and as a by-product its name. No, not as you might think to the Len Lyceum but, following the Dowse, it wants to cut out that gallery bit and call itself a museum. 

Pot shot
Sometimes when an exhibition has just shipped out, an artist’s studio can be just plain empty. That was not the case when we visited Daniel Malone's at the McCahon House residency studio after his exhibition had opened at Hopkinson Mossman. The drawings for the show were still there along with ideas for new work and a few relics.  
Image: Daniel Malone in the McCahon House Residency studio with a can of McCahon paint of choice, Solpah paving paint.

  Dicks
It’s been a while since the NZ Herald spent all those column inches on Michael Parekowhai’s proposed lighthouse sculpture. Now there’s a new kid in town to oh-and-ah over. Gregor Kregar's Grey Lynn work Transit Cloud prompted at least two shock-horror stories and this inspired summary on NZH online:
• Collaborative work meant to resemble clouds.
• Locals say it resembles a penis.
• Council says art is controversial and subjective.
 

I will need words
Here are 27 of the 340 words Webb’s used to describe the highlights from their last sale: captivate, catapulted, celebrated, competitive, excess, exceeded, ferocious, finest, flagship, formidable, galvanizes, high, highest, highlight, important (twice), major, masterpiece, productive, regard, rich, staggering, seminal, significant, strong (twice), surpassed.

Potty

You'd think that there are some things so iconic, so distinctive, so rich in historical flavour that a national or  city museum would just have to get their hands on them, wouldn't you? Milan Mrkusich’s house in Remuera  would have to be one of them, Colin McCahon’s library should have been another, and that easel Rita Angus always used. How could you pass up a draft of Wystan Curnow’s essay High culture in a small province, or Theo Schoon's notes and sketches on South Island cave drawings? Some of these have been protected while others have already slipped into private hands. What’s are the odds on anyone discussing with the Mrkusich family the long-term future of the house Mrkusich designed and lived in for so many decades? Low. 

This rant comes to you courtesy of us seeing one of these icons when we were in Auckland last week. The people we were with mentioned they had recently purchased something very cool at an Art + Object auction. Then they showed it to us. And, we kid you not, it was Len Castle’s Pottery notes sub-titled Len Castle's Mixtures. We're talking about the recipes he used to glaze his ceramics and drawings for constructing kilns. We're  no experts, so have no idea how much of his working life it covers, but even as a sample it is a truly wonderful thing. 

How is it even possible that this little notebook with its handwritten and hand-drawn contents is not part of an Auckland institution’s collection? The same couple also picked up (and at an very reasonable price) some of Castle’s library of books on ceramics as well as (maybe best of all) a couple of boxes of stones and mineral samples that had offered Castle inspiration and information. OK, the institutions can’t collect everything. But Len Castle’s Pottery notes? Surely some mistake.

.

Paper tiger    Is Wellington really the Cultural Capital of NZ? Not if its local paper the Dominion Post has anything to judge by. Its 150-year anniversary history, Paul Elenio’s The Dominion Post: 150 years of news, is defiantly arts averse. There's just one entry with art possibilities, “McDonald’s opening” but it turned out to be just that. Hamburgers. Te Papa gets a couple of pages but only about the building and how Te Papa’s critics were body-slammed into the dust by the first CE Cheryll Sotheran (insert hollow laughter here). Oddly, the line the DomPost has dished up to its readers over more recent years that “Te Papa is losing its gloss” didn’t make it into history.
 

Bambury cross    Like Dickens' interminable legal fest Jarndyce v Jarndyce the Bambury v Jensen court case won't leave the spotlight. Back in March 2014 the two adversaries (it’s one of those who-sold-what-to-whom-and-when-and-what-happened thingos) were waiting for a slot in the High Court. It now looks like the days of reckoning are at hand so it's probably time for the boys to make up before the legal system really starts piling up the costs. Given the current legal firm charge out rates ($317 an hour for partners according to the Law Society #soundslow) vs dealer commissions and Bambury paintings (top price at auction $36,000, so let's estimate around $60,000 a pop) it’s hard to see how there can be much profit left in the case for anyone outside chambers.
 

A quick response    The latest round of Creative NZ's Quick response grants listed 20 named artists and one collective in the Visual Arts section. The boys did best (well there were more of them at 12 to 8) getting $68,600. That's an average of $5,716 a grant which was couple of hundred dollars above the total grant average. As for the women, they got $44,304 in total with an average of $5,538. Yes, it's below the men (again) and also below the average amount given over the whole round. #musttryharder. 
  

You have to strut before you can run   Dealers are experiencing a bit of an income freeze thanks to Te Papa’s mighty struggle to snag a million dollar plus painting by English artist William Strutt from a dealer in the UK. Strutt has been a big thing in Australia for some years now with his epic history paintings so we can expect some NZ content for our dollars. Efforts to get the Strutt into the collection along with a review of the buy-at-any-cost policy that has been operating at Te Papa since it was invented has meant a hold on contemporary purchases. What's causing the trouble is that in the last five years the best price Strutt has managed at auction is around $15,000 (you have to go back to 1998 to find one that got over $100,000 and then just over). Te Papa is no doubt struggling to get independent valuations anywhere close to what the vendors are asking and ends up making offers that don't cut it.  
    

MC DCNZ    has made some productive connections with curators over the years and one of them is now director of the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. Melissa Chiu was born in Darwin and helped found the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney. She was then snapped up by the Asia Society Museum in New York as its first contemporary curator. In 2004, the same year she was made director, she curated Paradise now? Contemporary art from the Pacific in 2004.

Reflecting on art games

If you follow Pippin Barr’s games (and we do) you’ll be interested in this post on his web site. Pippin had an exhibition of prints made from screen grabs of his games late last year. They looked pretty sharp when we saw them at Andrew Baker’s Gallery in Brisbane but for an artist who’d chosen interactivity as his platform, the static nature of the prints obviously left him uneasy. Pippin takes up the story -

“When I went to the exhibition in December 2014 I had the very odd experience of confronting a game (such as the Prometheus scene) remediated as a screenshot remediated as an artwork framed and behind glass on a wall. That was interesting to me because it’s such a strange direction for a game to go in: from movement to stillness, from interactivity to passivity, from jokey meme to official art-on-wall, etc. I actually had a bit of difficulty thinking about the exhibition and my relationship to it, frankly, because of that odd remediation going on. (Although of course the games themselves were on display too.)
 
So an obvious way to react to this, in my book at least, was to re-remediate the game-as-painting back into a game. I’d taken photographs of the various prints in the show and chose to turn the photo of the Prometheus scene back into the Prometheus scene game. Such that it goes from static photograph of framed print back over to playable game. To complete the strange feeling of standing in front of an “art” I slaved over getting a webcam “reflection” of the player in the “glass” covering the game. So you end up with an attempt to meld the two ideas – it’s still framed and on a wall and “art”, but it’s also a weird playable game.”
 
And so it is. You look at the image of the print and via the game you are reflected through your computer’s camera and are able to play the game in the print (this is where in the old days you would put a couple of exclamation marks). Read more here and if you want to try it out go here.

Inside out

OTNSTUDIO has only been possible because artists have not only allowed us to photograph in one of their most private places but also make those images free to anyone who wants to use them. A few have not been happy with the idea and have either asked for us not to release photos or not to take them in the first place. We initially thought this would be the default position as the process is pretty intrusive and some of the information (what people are reading, what’s lying around on desks) can be unintentionally revealing. But the cumulative result is incredible as you can see from the 10 photographs taken in various studios Peter Robinson has worked in over the last 21 years (On OTNSTUFF there are some larger versions of these images). You can see more images from these visits to Peter Robinson on OTNSTUDIO along with a new set we are putting up today from 2006. This latest batch of studio shots includes a new artist to OTNSTUDIO the Wellington painter Simon Morris who we visited a few weeks ago in his spectacular Lyall Bay studio. New to the site are shots taken in Lillian Budd's’s studio in 2003, Michael Smither in 1983 and our great friend the ceramic artist John Parker at work in 2011.

Images: left to right, top to bottom, Peter Robinson’s studio 1993, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014

.

Follow the letters    Is the way museums are managed a matter of degree? The qualifications of the four who have so far taken on Te Papa certainly gave an intriguing guide as to what to expect.
Cheryll Sotheran: MA English and Art History
Seddon Bennington : PhD zoology
Michael Houlihan: BA History
Rick Ellis: BCom Econometrics
 

Teaching aids    The artist Tim Wright is the guy who sent two years teaching actor Timothy Spall to paint like JMW Turner. The results as you can see here were not encouraging. Wright’s teaching technique was to “include a study of the 'basics', before moving on to Turner's style”. Makes sense. You can see examples of Wright’s work here including his portrait of Spall.
 

Fruit and Flowers    This time next year Artsdiary will be five years old but why wait until then to heap on some anniversary praise? Aucklanders living more than 20K from K Road probably see only as many of the dealer gallery exhibitions as we do coming up now and then from Wellington. But thanks to Artsdiary (and EyeContact) the what-the-hell’s-going-on problem has all but vanished. And what’s not to like about the Been There section? The hats, the shoes, the weird way other people look at art.
 

Eagle shoot    How's this for feedback on an art work. “If one was given to a class of small children to copy they would in ten minutes produce a much more vital version of your feeble wishy washy colourless and formless mess.”
CherylBerstein tweets a letter sent to Allie Eagle in 1978.

 

Art in the age of etc. etc.    Hard to believe that Auckland’s Jar Space on New North Road has served as a drive-by art installation for eight years. Now on view is a painting machine and its product by Simon Ingram called Radio Painting Station. Check out this recent article on three art machines from the Globe and Mail. Oh, and the Three Laws of Robotics, in case things get out of hand.

Auckland Museum and the vanishing of Michael Parekowhai

You'd think, wouldn’t you, that a museum by its nature would be kind of committed to the keeping of history thing. So what’s going on with the Auckland Museum and Michael Parekowhai? And why is the Museum trying to remove all traces of the exhibition Pare Kawakawa by Parekowhai from its website?

Let’s back up a bit. Early December last year the Auckland Museum announced 'a new exhibition from renowned New Zealand artist Michael Parekowhai.' It was to open this year on 17 April in the Sainsbury Horrocks Gallery as part of the much touted First World War Centenary Programme. According to the media release Parekowhai had already been working with the museum for about a year so the project was well advanced. Auckland University was behind it and Creative NZ had put in $174,000 into the project via the WW100 co-commissioning fund [link 3 December]. Pare Kawakawa by Parekowhai was also lined up for an international tour.

So why has the Auckland Museum suddenly decided to make this exhibition disappear? A quick search for it on the Museum's site brings up a series of ‘Page not found’. Page not found is like telling someone you can’t find the cat when you’ve just drowned it in a sack. What they really mean is ‘Page removed' which is quite a different thing. More disturbingly the media release circulated on 11 December 2014 has been removed from the Auckland Museum media archive (aka the historical record). But welcome to the internet - you can read it here or here.

For a century New Zealanders have struggled to deal with the trauma of our involvement in WWI. It has been distorted, idealized and manipulated. Ironic then that the same history-bending games are now being played out via the commemoration of that very event. In one final twist, the Auckland Museum theme for the year’s programme that included the proposed Parekowhai exhibition is ‘Death of Innocence’.
 
Images: top, now you see him. Bottom, now you don’t

.

In passing.    Francis Upritchard is currently showing at the Hammer Museum in LA while her frequent co-exhibitor Martino Gamper has just completed some very superior window dressing for Prada in Milan. And in the better-late-than-never section good news for Sarah Farrar who has finally been officially acknowledged on the Te Papa website as Senior Curator Art (strangely she is at the bottom of the art section staff list, but that's what happens when you order things alphabetically by first name #weird). 

Ouch!     “A lot of New Zealand architecture is bland and oppressive, like Te Papa. Athfield's buildings were never like that. Think what could have happened if he and the genius Frank Gehry had been chosen to design the national museum instead of failing even to make the short list. We might have had a masterpiece; we would certainly have had a building that lived in controversy. Instead, we have a giant nonentity.” That was the Dom Post rather ungraciously using Ian Athfield’s death to stick one to Te Papa. At the other end of the spectrum the Dowse probably went an appreciation too far when it tweeted "The Dowse has grown in so many ways thanks to the genius of Ian Athfield & his team." Somewhat over the top given that Athfield's Dowse build was probably one of the most incoherent refits ever done on a NZ art museum. Wellington is holding a public memorial service for Athfield in Civic Square 3pm on Sunday 1 Feb and you can see a nice doco on the young experimental Athfield here.
 

Crowing.    Art writer and critic Thomas Crow famously declared, "A major contemporary of Rothko, Newman, Pollock, Twombly and Johns - an artist at their level of achievement - is in the midst of his first major touring exhibition. The artist is Colin McCahon, and, yes, he is that good." Word is that Crow is writing another book and, yes, it is on Colin McCahon.
 
China shop.    You can read how Giovanni Intra almost single-handedly invented cool in Chinatown. The second part of Joel Mesler’s drugs and drama account of the LA art scene and its general all round insanity is in the latest Art News. And soon a chance to see a great Intra Blue of moon at Michael Lett starting 28 Feb (OK, we confess, it's ours). 

Rick Ellis, note to self: “Check this guy out”.     Remember how long it took photography and video to be acknowledged as art? Make way - Virtual Reality coming through! Artist Ziv Schneider and his Museum of Stolen Art. More here.
Number graphics: Pippin Barr

His story

Te Papa Chief Executive Rick Ellis has been in the job for more than half of his first 100 days. But has there been anything in the mainstream media about how he's planning to fix (or in Te Papa Chair Evan Williams words 'transform') the troubled museum? Um ... no. Quick to have a go at the last CE when things went wrong, even the Dominion Post has been strangely silent. So if and when NZ's media does decide to put the new CE to the test, here’s 10 questions they might like to ask him. Not at all, it's our pleasure.

1. At each business you've led you've pushed through major organisational changes and you've done it fast. What more needs to change at Te Papa?

2. Your previous experience has been in growth sectors (TV, telecommunications, IT) with a lot of investment. What does that experience tell you about Te Papa's future with restricted growth and limited investment?

3. You've endorsed Te Papa's vision to change hearts, change minds and change lives. How do you think a museum can genuinely change lives?

4. The Chairman of Te Papa has also said said Te Papa needed 'a shift in the culture of the organisation.' Given that the organisation has just come out the other end of a radical restructure, what needs to change?

5.   The last CE was criticised for picking exhibitions people didn’t want to see. What kind of exhibitions do you have in mind that will be more successful?

6. You've talked about using digital to transform Te Papa. So far Te Papa's digital presence seems to be a standard museum website and traditional interactives. What are your priorities over 2015 to transform Te Papa with digital?

7.   You're known for insisting on expertise. Will the current curatorial staff be able to produce the sort of digital content you envisage or will you need to hire new specialist staff?

8.   When can we expect to see some effects of Te Papa's digital transformation?

9.   Can you name a couple of museums in the world that have adopted the kind of digital focus you are proposing for Te Papa?

10.   What percentage of Te Papa’s funding do you think should be raised by Te Papa? Currently it's 46 percent. Can you give some examples of projects that will increase Te Papa's non-government income?

OTN WTF?

Ok, here’s what we’re going to do. From now on need-to-know news items will be on OTN’s Twitter feed (it also runs down the right column of OTN). We may add some more background on Facebook and if it needs it even more on OTN. Every Monday (starting on Tuesday 20 January) there will be an OTN post and on Friday an aggregated post of interesting stuff called ‘5 Things: for Friday.’ And then random things will happen depending on the weather but not on public holidays or Sundays unless….

Back with you 20 January

Music to our ears

Game designer Pippin Barr has reached out to art again for his latest game Sound System I. You can play it here and if you find yourself wondering where the idea for this ready-made music came from read about it and see a vid clip of it at work here at Kill Screen

Art chart

Numbers of art works purchased by the Chartwell Trust and Te Papa over 12 months

In Wellington...

... thinking about OTN