Figure skating

Te Papa is pretty pleased with itself over the numbers for its dinosaur show. The new CE Rick Ellis was thrilled/relieved to announce that the 'hugely popular' exhibition had drawn 'massive crowds'.  Turns out that 120,000 people visited the exhibition over 130 days. Unfortunately there was no mention of the daily average that is usually part of Te Papa announcements of this kind but we can figure that out at around 923 a day. Tyrannosaurs Meet the Family had a long season (over a third of a year), including sucking up the entire summer holidays and probably owes about a third of its attendance to the ‘C’ word – cruise ships. For context here are the top Te Papa blockbuster shows in order of ticket sale matched attendances.

Lord of the Rings (2002-03) 219,539
Monet and the Impressionists (2009) 152,000
A Day in Pompeii (2009-10) 130,000
Egypt: Beyond the Tomb (2006-07) 120,358
Tyrannosaurs (2014-15) 120,000
Constable (2006) 98,328

And by average daily rates-

Lord of the Rings 1770 per day
Monet and the Impressionists 1652 per day
Constable 1035 per day
A Day in Pompeii 1023 per day
Tyrannosaurs 923 per day
Egypt: Beyond the tomb 918 per day

And talking daily averages, let's not forget the performance of a couple of homegrown, free attendance exhibitions: Rita Angus (2008) with 127,812 visitors at an average of 1,374 per day and Brian Brake (2010-11) at 190,000 with a daily average of just under 1,000. And, ok, the giant squid.

So what do these numbers show? Well, while Te Papa has had some solid blockbusters it's very tough to do year after year, and looking at the last five years it’s getting tougher. Audiences have more choices now and maybe the novelty has worn off. But one thing you can read loud and clear from the figures, if you want big audiences, don't even think outside the tourist season.
Sources: Te Papa Annual reports and media releases

Making a good impression

There’s nothing like old art from abroad to get foot traffic through the museum doors. Te Papa has stubbornly refused to exhibit international contemporary art since being bitten on the bum by a virgin in a condom on opening day and preferred to reach back into more comfortable times for their blockbusters. And so we’ve been bathed in the warm glow of Constable, Moore, Holbein to Hockney, The Queen’s Pictures (Sorry Jackson, we’ll get right back you Willem, they’re great Louise but have you done anything with some sort of UK connection?).

On Saturday Te Papa another exhibition in its old-art-from-Europe series, this time via the United States. Monet has drawn crowds in New Zealand before and you can understand why Te P, who dance across the headcount/funding continuum, figure that the Impressionists are ready for another outing.

Of course the interest museums show in the Impressionists is simply following the money, driven on by that darling of world economics, Market Forces. Usually Impressionist paintings come into public collections via rich collectors, and this is the case with all but a couple of the works in the Te P show. It has also been those same collectors who have raised both the profile and price of Impressionist paintings over the years. In the 1950s the price for Impressionist works jumped as wealth accumulated in a post war boom. This surge of buying coincided with the rise and rise of the auction houses. In 1957 Margaret Thompson Biddle’s collection went under the hammer with Gauguin’s Still Life with Apples tripling its estimate at $297,142. The same year the William Weinberg collection with its five Van Goghs continued a round of record smashing prices that went on for the rest of the year. By 1958 the police were being called to control crowds trying to get into Sotheby’s salerooms.

Fifty years later Impressionism still fuels fires in the hearts of the rich and famous. In June last year Monet’s Le Bassin aux Nymphéas sold for $NZ115.5 million and Nymphéas for $NZ52 million. Who knows what the paintings in the Te P show are worth. Fortunately, as with our banks, the Government guarantees against loss.

Other OTN posts on this story here and here.
Image: Monet the collector with a selection of his Japanese prints.

I see dead people

Te Papa announced last weekend that it will be the only New Zealand venue late next year for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ package tour Monet and the Impressionists. The CEO of Te Papa described scoring this exhibition as "a major coup" but in reality exhibitions like these are more a matter of getting a consortium together and stumping up with the fees required by the lending institution. The director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Malcolm Rogers, has been flogging the Museum’s Monets around the world for many years now. They even made it to Las Vegas where they were shown at the Bellagio Casino Gallery in 2004. The fee? $US1 million. As Rogers said at the time, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts must “always be searching for new ways to make money.” For Te Papa Monet and the Impressionists is an attempt at both profile and profit. Te Papa’s CEO “expected it would have the same kind of appeal as Monet held at the Auckland City Gallery in 1985 which attracted more than 175,000 visitors in six weeks and grossed more than $1million from door sales, catalogues and merchandise.”

So do these exhibitions create fat profits for museums like Te Papa? It’s hard to get figures but it is reasonable to guess that most of them are lucky to break even. Fees, Freight, Marketing and Security most often conspire to make such shows high on impact and low on returns. For example Te Papa’s last annual report calculated the income from temporary exhibitions for 2006 to be $2,061,000 against costs of $4,124,000 and in 2007, $3,432,000 against costs of $3,725,000, a year that featured their “block buster” Constable show.

Still the lure of the Impressionists remains strong. Every decade or so one lucky museum can expect to roll the dice and go home with a success in the style of Dunedin’s Guggenheim show, Auckland’s Monet bonanza or the old National Art Gallery’s exhibition of the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. Waiting to hear what ex Auckland Art Gallery director Rodney Wilson, the current holder of the Monet Championship Belt, will have to say about Te Papa’s claim that this show is “the most significant collection of works by Monet that has ever come to New Zealand or Australia”, that is another thing altogether.
Image: Monet, a recent portrait