Numbers

0   the number of artists living in the South Island who have won the Walters Prize

1   the number of current advertisements by Te Papa for a Head of Audience Insights #anditsgoodnighttoyoucurators

1   the number of shout outs The Minister of Arts, Culture & Heritage Maggie Barry gave to Simon Rees and the Govett-Brewster/LLC in her speech at the Walters Prize

2   the number of sculptures by British artist Antony Gormley now on permanent public display in Christchurch

2   the number of dealer galleries that got funding to attend art fairs in the last Creative NZ funding round

7   the average number in cents that the Govett-Brewster/LLC received from each of its 151,000 visitors in its previous financial year

11  the number of comments made on the last 20 EyeContact reviews

13  the number of themed permanent collection hangs currently on show as ‘exhibitions’ at Te Papa

50  the amount in thousands of dollars that Shannon Te Ao received for winning the Walters Prize

66  the average number in cents that the Govett-Brewster/LLC needs to get from each of its visitors this year (assuming that there are again 151,000 of them)

75  the percentage of Wellington’s City Gallery’s core staff that are women

Move, move, move

It’s spring and thoughts turn to renewal and change. It’s been a while since we looked at the directors of the major public art museums and you do feel there is movement in the air. Jenny Harper has been at the Christchurch Art Gallery for 10 years now and has seen it through some tough times but she must be thinking that now she has a Gold Card, enough is enough. So Christchurch could be up for grabs by the end of the year.

Then there’s the reverberations from the very juicy job that has opened up at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. With Deputy Director Suhanya Raffel off to direct M+ in Hong Kong, a job that will surely attract Rhana Devenport opens up. OK she has only been at the AAG for three years but would she turn down such a major opportunity back in her homeland? The AGNSW is undergoing a mega rebuild and now looks to be a stepping stone to Asia, a region Devenport has shown a strong liking for.

So in the world of supposition, who would fill the Auckland role? Cam McCracken currently at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery is obviously a starter. He’s only been in Dunedin for four years but Dunedin years are a bit longer than Auckland ones, so call it five. Anyway, by now we must be done with having to get Australians to run our country’s most important art museum (#surelytogod).

And let’s not forget smaller institutions with Artspace's director leaving in May next year.

So there’s a lot of potential fun right there especially when you add people like Zara Stanhope, Courtney Johnston, and Blair French into the mix.

OTN caps and large rewards of an indeterminate nature for early news.

Where’s Walters?

The Auckland Art Gallery was far from amused when, back in 2012, artist-based gallery Snake Pit announced its own Gordon's Walters Prize with Gordon’s Gin (first distilled 1763) as the prize. Unlike the Walters Prize itself, the Gordon’s version was a free-for-all and whoever won the prize probably finished it off that night. At the AAG the Walters was taken by Kate Newby that year so it was a good time all round.

This year of course the Walters Prize is a much more solemn affair which is maybe what prompted the re-emergence of the Gordon’s. In a blatant act of brand disloyalty, it has moved to the younger gin maker Seagers (first distilled 1856) and taken on the name The Seagers Walters Prize. As with the Walters Prize, four artists have been snatched from the herd: an OTN regular (if once is counts) Li-Ming Hu along with Jack Hadley, Aysha Green and Fu-On Chung. In fact they would have made a pretty good Walters Prize line up themselves. There is to be an announcement and an award ceremony for the Seagers Walters Prize, a case of Seagers gin, presumably handed over by Judge, Artspace's Misal Adnan Yidiz (take that AAG).
Image: Seagers Walters Prize announcement (click to enlarge)

Seeing double

We came across a familiar sight in San Francisco - George Rickey’s Double L Excentric Gyratory outside the SF Public Library.  This one, of the edition of three, was made in 1982, three years before the version outside the Auckland Art Gallery. Now that’s an unusual numbering system given that AAG has number one of three in the edition. The OTN research team (#google #wikipedia) went to work and found that it looks like the final copy in the edition, Double L Excentric Gyratory – Pond, dated 1988, is still available via Rickey’s dealer Maxwell Davidson. The inclusion of the word ‘pond’ in the title perhaps points to yet another editioned version of Double L Excentric Gyratory. It’s on the cards considering there’s also an edition of three Double L Excentric Gyratory II that is, to all intents and purposes, exactly the same as the other DLEGs. All the IIs have been placed in prestigious American collections but weirdly they are dated 1981, a year before the SF version. It reminds us of NZ sculptor/photographer Boyd Webb who would change out some minor detail, like the colour of a character’s socks, in a photograph and go on to produce a different edition of a popular work.

Images: top to bottom left to right, George Rickey’s Double L Excentric Gyratory (produced in 1985) at the Auckland Art Gallery; outside the San Francisco Library and Double L Excentric Gyratory - pond in the stock of his dealer gallery. Double L Excentric Gyratory II at Pepsi Cola’s Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens and the Williams College Museum of Art. And in Sacramento.

Judgment day

The judge for the Walters Prize 2016 has been announced. He is Doryun Chong, chief curator of M+ in Hong Kong since 2013. A collections-focused curator with a career of working in North American institutions, including the Walker Art Centre and MoMA, he’s certainly in the hot seat at M+.  This ambitious institution of visual culture has been ‘troubled by delays and the departures of high-level staff members’. Of special interest to NZ is that its curator of Visual Arts was for some time Tobias Berger, ex -director of Auckland’s Artspace. He left to run the also troubled Central Police Station (CPS) in Hong Kong.  M+ is slated to open in four years but already there is growing nervousness that the contemporary nature of the museum will provoke China.

While Doryun Chong is no stranger to making politically complex decisions he’s understandably careful with his words, making it difficult to get much of a fix on his curatorial position. Still, we’ve dug up some statements from interviews and links to a lengthy interview in Ocular part I and part II that might be helpful to Walters Prize entrails searching.

‘I am interested in cultural anthropology of our own times.’

‘I transitioned from academia to the museum world and I became more of a generalist–this identity has always been very important to me as curator’

‘Some people groan about how contemporary art has become too ubiquitous. But art was a rather elitist discipline that belonged to high culture, and it has broken itself down in a positive way to interface with, and be inspired by, other disciplines.’

A contemporary museum ‘… should look back on the history but should also be reflective of the time we live in, while also anticipating the future and being open to what is going to happen.’

‘...as a museum curator I have been very context responsive’

“sometimes life tells better stories than art can’ 

Who will he pick? 

Kind of obvious isn’t it?  (just kidding)

By the numbers

0  the number of jobs currently being advertised by Te Papa to fill vacancies at Te Papa Press

0  the number of media releases by the Minister for Culture and Heritage on visual art-related topics so far in 2016

3.022 the difference in millions of dollars between what was applied for and what was granted in the latest Creative NZ Arts round

9 the number of media releases by the Minister for Culture and Heritage on war-related topics so far in 2016

12.9 the amount in cents per every rated dollar that goes toward arts and culture in Christchurch.

20 the number of art works purchased by The Chartwell Collection so far this year

26 the number of days before Jamie Hanton takes up his position as the new Director of The Physics Room

365 the number of days Te Papa is open ‘Te Papa is open 365 days a year (that’s every day!)’

366 the number of days in 2016

943 the number of ‘ideas’ thrown up by the Auckland Art Gallery’s website when you click on the ideas category in the ‘Art & Ideas’ section

Pointing the finger

What is it about art that sends marketing into such a spin? You can’t say that the Auckland Art Gallery hasn’t done its bit recently to present some new ideas about painting with riffs on what a sophisticated medium it is etc. But when it comes to representing a painter on an ad for Auckland's 'Autumn of the Arts' the AAG got itself associated with an artist in bullfighter pose hard at some sort of finger painting. And that’s ignoring the resulting artwork-on-an-easel that was probably knocked up by one of the art director’s kids. ‘We need to do a poster on brain surgery, anyone got a good image?' ‘I’ve got one of a guy wielding an axe, would that do?’ ‘Perfect.’

The Millar’s Tale

The artist -themed dinner is definitely a thing. For those who haven't been to one of these sit-downs, it's an event with food by a celebrity chef themed by an artists and it has reached Auckland. Hot(ish) on the tail of LACMA’s table heads (via Marina Abramovic) and the Christchurch Art Gallery patrons (via Michael Parekowhai and Martin Creed) Auckland Art Gallery is getting ready to front with food. Looks as though the evening is inspired by a Dada / Futurist mélange.  The name of the event - The Holy Palate - evokes the raging Futurists and their Holy Palate Restaurant where museum hater Filippo Marinetti ('We will destroy the museums, the libraries ....') held sway. Presumably the AAG affair will be a little more restrained and supportive of the institutional context than your average Futurist debauch. The invite image of black squid ink dripping off pasta certainly feels like it is sticking one of its blue-gloved fingers to Marinetti who in the 1930s appalled Italy by calling for the abolition of pasta.

The Holy Palate's art director is to be Auckland/Berlin based artist Judy Millar. Her work is also the center of attention as one of the purposes of the festivities is to kick off an appeal to buy one of her site specific installations. And about time. This is an artist who has represented New Zealand at Venice, lived in Auckland most of her life, and has only one  work purchased by the Auckland Art Gallery in the 33 years since she left art school. Chartwell has one painting and two works on paper, Te Papa three paintings and the large Venice installation Giraffe, bottle, gun. So, in the spirit of better-late-than-never, a long overdue and serious commitment by the AAG  to one of Auckland’s most sophisticated artists.

The more things change

You think things change? In 1956 the Auckland Art Gallery came under siege when it opened an exhibition by the English artist Henry Moore (you can download the AAG catalogue here). The Mayor popped in to describe the exhibition as ‘a nauseating sight' and for two weeks the newspapers gave themselves over to mocking attacks and general outrage. One wit melted some plastic in an oven and the press was only too pleased to feature the resulting blob as equal to anything Moore could come up with.  Now exactly 60 years later in New York City at Columbia University (seriously) students are protesting against what they call an ‘ugly hunk of metal’ that is due to arrive on campus (Strangely enough we have posted before on this Henry Moore sculpture back in 2008 when one of the edition was stolen from the Henry Moore Foundation.) Over 1,000 students have signed a petition for the installation of Henry Moore’s Reclining figure to be cancelled. It would probably be best though in this current case that the complaining students don’t bother to hold their breath. A substantial base has already been constructed and the sculpture will be placed on it later this week.
Images: top a copy of the Henry Moore Reclining figure that will be installed at Colombia, middle the NZ Press in full flight and bottom the 1956 Auckland Art Gallery catalogue cover

Here comes the judge

Who guessed the four selected for the Walters Prize? We got two right but even that was pure luck. We're assuming that Simon Denny was selected but decided not to come all this way just to miss out again (not selecting Michael Parekowhai for his Brisbane show was pretty insulting but to not tick Denny would have bordered on incompetence at this particular time). Looking at the list of four you certainly wouldn’t have bet the house on a Denny win had he been a finalist. 

Over the years the selection criteria for the Prize have changed a few times and this year quite radically. At the outset the Prize was for 'the most outstanding contribution made to contemporary art in New Zealand'. Later that shifted to ‘an outstanding work of contemporary New Zealand art produced and exhibited during the past two years’. This year it's ‘exceptional artworks that pushed the boundaries of art making in 2014 and 2015.’ No not you painters, sit down.

The elephant in the room is of course the director of the Auckland Art Gallery Rhana Devenport. Her relationship with one of the finalists is extremely close. In fact this is the second time a Reihana project curated by Devenport has been a finalist for the Walters Prize. In 2008 Devenport, as director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, was on the panel that selected her Digital Marae for the 2008 Walters Prize. For the 2016 Prize, Devenport has not only curated and promoted a selected project, she has also been involved in the selection of the panel of four that chose it as a finalist and she will also be involved in selecting the judge who will make the final decision. No doubt many, many Chinese walls are being built within the AAG but there will be intense interest in how these obvious conflicts are going to be handled.

Past Walters Prizes have delighted with unexpected wins and left field choices but no mistake, the selection of the judge is a critical decision in the whole process. Anyone who listened to Charles Esche talk before the prize giving evening last time knew that Denny was dog tucker. As we've posted before, one reader claims to have picked most Walters Prize winners just by checking out the judge’s previous form. There will be much searching through the entrails when that announcement is made.

Distraction

It’s not often one of NZ's public art museums goes …um…public with a point of view on contemporary art but Natasha Conland has given it a good go. She has stepped out with a 20-strong selection of painters in her exhibition Necessary Distraction. It's designed to explore the question, ‘What can painting offer that other art forms cannot?’ There's been some critical writing on the exhibition (The Pantograph Punch and EyeContact) but we were also particularly interested in what this very large contemporary show might say about Chartwell and the Auckland Art Gallery as collectors. Of course as the Chartwell collection is on long-term loan to Auckland Art Gallery but how this relationship plays out is of special interest to the representation of contemporary art.

Some numbers around Necessary Distraction:

Gender
55 percent of the artists are women

Age
The average age of all the artists is 42 with 25 percent of them over the age of 50
The average age of the women is 46 and of the men 41
4 of the women are over 50 years old, 2 are over 50 and one is over 70
2 of the men are over 50
Of the artists under 40, 5 of them are women and 4 of them are men

Representation
25 percent are represented by Hopkinson Mossman
15 percent by Ivan Anthony
10 percent by Michael Lett
10 percent by Anna Miles
10 percent by Gow Langsford 
30 percent by six different dealers.

Collections
Chartwell has bought work by 50 percent of the artists in the exhibition and has 47 paintings by them

The Auckland Art Gallery has works by 20 percent of the artists in Necessary Distraction with 15 paintings by them in its collection

40 percent of the artists in Necessary Distraction have no works in the collections of either the Auckland Art Gallery or Chartwell

The painter in Necessary Distraction with the most works in the two collections is Simon Ingram with 12 in Chartwell but none in the Auckland Art Gallery collection. Next is Dan Arps with 8 works in Chartwell and again none in the Auckland Art Gallery collection

Two artists (Barbara Tuck and Saskia Leek) are represented in the Auckland Art Gallery Collection but not in Chartwell. Eight artists are represented in the Chartwell collection but have not been collected by the Auckland Art Gallery collection (Dan Arps, Andrew Barber, Stella Corkery, Simon Ingram, Patrick Lundberg, Oliver Perkins, Kim Pieters and Jeena Shin).

Quiz

It’s OTN Quiz time with a big prize for the winner (aka one of the last OTN painting horse badges). This week you have to match the painter in the Auckland Art Gallery’s exhibition Necessary Distraction with the curatorial statement about their work. Step up, step up, join the fun. And please, no pushing, there’s plenty of room for everyone.

Which comment matches which artist:

‘a document of an unwitnessed performance’

‘belong to a tradition of ideas’

‘like representations of objects and ideas’

‘an investigation into the ethics of well-being’

‘captured and encased a long-held interest in ideologies'

'act as comments on communications in the digital age'

‘invites viewers in, not to offer continuity’

‘combines intelligences with sympathy for the material and its history’

‘asks us to question our relationship with our natural surroundings’

‘forces us to contend with the work across time’

‘compresses the differences between the thing that is not of the room and the room itself’

‘adopts the characteristics of formal masks’

‘fool us into thinking there is more structure than what is evident’

‘the pattern of an anorak as a compositional template’

‘reverting the digital images of painting back into a painted form’

‘is contingent on the space and the artist’s decision making now, but future potential remains’

‘the idea that images and gestures have been decoded and fragmented resulting in a reduction of authenticity’

‘a metaphor for painting's oldest provision – the window in the room’

‘give the impression of an evolved microclimate’

‘call occasionally on a line or a form to mark out real possibilities’

The artists: Anoushka Akel, Dan Arps, Nick Austin, Andrew Barber, Kirstin Carlin, Stella Corkery, James Cousins, Nicola Farquhar, Emma Fitts, Julian Hooper, Simon Ingram, Milli Jannides, Saskia Leek, Patrick Lundberg, Oliver Perkins, Kim Pieters, Jeena Shin, Ngatai Taepa, Barbara Tuck, Adrienne Vaughan

Image: Painted Bronze by Jasper Johns 1960, collection MoMA

Reflections

We’ve always been great Géricault fans, largely thanks to J L Steele and C F Goldie’s steal The arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand at the Auckland Art Gallery. Over the years we've chased down parodies, copies and versions of the Géricault original that you can visit (or revisit) from the list below. This post was prompted by seeing the latest Jeff Koons painting show at Gagosian Gallery in New York. Koons has placed his well known, blown glass blue gazing balls in front of an art history top of the pops including Géricault ‘s The raft of the Medusa. The balls sit on small shelves attached to what look like silkscreened images of the paintings. Koons being Koons though, they were in fact painstakingly painted by studio assistants to very different scales from their originals. For example Koons' Medusa work is a mini-version of the 5 x 7 meter monster in the Louvre. Wandering around the vast spaces you can think about originality and the historical nature of painting as a medium and how he chose his masters, or you calculate how many hours it took how many assistants to paint them. According to Koons the tiny image of us reflected in the blue ball as in the photograph above shows our 'desires…interests… participation and relationship with this image'. Treat them gently, it’s nearly Christmas.
Image: Koons does Géricault at Gagosian

Previously on OTN:
Copy that
Flotsam or jetsam?
A raft too far
All at sea
Raft of references
Copycats

Panel work

The Hiroshima panels by Iri and Toshi Maruki were shown at the Auckland City Art Gallery in September 1958. The show was hugely popular, one of the best attended ever at that time, although the media gave it no coverage, much to the annoyance of Peter Tomory, the Director. Also on staff was Colin McCahon who four years later made his own set of panels protesting against nuclear war. This was The second gate series. There are also echoes of the Hiroshima panels in his 16-panel work The Wake.

Over 50 years later these NZ cultural touchstones are on exhibition at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, New York. So we went to see them. As it turned out just three of the sets of panels shown in Auckland were in the NY set. The work has grown. The entire suite now comprises 15 large screens of which five were painted after the tour to New Zealand. It serves as a reminder of how bold Tomory was in introducing art that dealt with contentious politics, ethics and memory into Auckland at that time. The trauma of the Second World War would have still felt close in 1958 and the reported high attendances show he got it right. With the Hiroshima panels he helped lift our sights to the rest of the world.

Painting up a storm

It’s always fun when art curators put themselves on the line and make a list of who they think are the most important in their field. It’s an old tradition. MoMA’s Dorothy Miller famously did it with her contemporary Americans series (mainly painters) although, as we once posted, these best-of-the-bunch picks are usually only good for around a decade, and sometimes less.

This year the Auckland Art Gallery has decided that 'painting has arguably never been stronger in our contemporary cultural environment’. Now that might sound pretty contentious but the Gallery is launching with rather a lot of fanfare later in November Necessary distraction: a painting show. What sort of mix has curator Natasha Conland come up with? Encouragingly, over 50 percent of the artists included are women. Interestingly, the majority of the exhibitors were born in the 1970s. Unsurprisingly, the majority make abstract paintings. And predictably, most of them studied at Elam and nearly all of them live in Auckland. For some reason the Auckland Art Gallery is describing current painting as a ‘static form’ which will come as something of a surprise to at least one of the artists, painting machine guy Simon Ingram.

Some more numbers:

20 painters are included in the show
9 are male
65 percent studied at Elam
5 were born before 1970
13 were born in the seventies (9 after 1975)
2 were born after 1980
25 percent show with Hopkinson Mossman
3 are represented by Ivan Anthony
11 are represented in the Auckland Art Gallery’s collection
2 were in Natasha Conland’s Freedom Farmers exhibition in 2013
72 is the age of the oldest artist and 29 the youngest

Image: cyclone Josh hits land

Sannd man

New Zealand’s most incompetent art thief, Ricardo Romanov (aka Ricardo Genovese aka Anthony Ricardo Sannd), has just been served up seven years for pinching a limited edition Ducati Desmosedici motor bike. This is the same man who stole James Tissot’s painting Still on Top from the Auckland Art Gallery back in 1998. Although the crime certainly turned serious, it began comically enough with Romanov (known as Sannd at the time) reconnoitering the Gallery decked out in a false wig, fake beard and dark glasses. The following month he entered the Auckland Art Gallery wearing a motorcycle crash helmet and holding two firearms including a double barreled shotgun. After knocking a security guard to the floor he took Tissot’s painting from the wall, removed it from its frame, rolled it up and left. He made his escape on a motorbike of course but not before firing the shotgun into the air when approached outside the Gallery. It only took the Auckland police eight days to find Sannd along with the ‘dramatically damaged’ painting that had been rolled up in an old sack. And all this before he could sell it to a supposed Hong Kong business man who he claimed had ordered up the robbery offering $800,000 in $100 notes for the painting. Sannd got 16 years and nine months for his efforts and was released in March 2012.
You can see a video here on the theft and restoration work required on the Tissot

Infectious

The selection of Lisa Reihana’s In Pursuit of Venus [infected] to represent New Zealand at the 2017 Venice Biennale will come as no surprise to its curator Auckland Art Gallery Director Rhana Devenport. The Auckland Art Gallery already had a lot invested  in the Reihana work and never has anyone put so much energy and lobbying power into an NZ Venice project. There must be a huge sense of satisfaction for Devenport who made it clear she thought the Reihana work was a slam dunk from the word go. Despite all that confidence, In Pursuit of Venus [infected] did have to climb over a few hurdles but as Creative NZ has already shown its rules and regulations when it comes to Venice are, to say the least, malleable. For all the talk of tweaking it into a new work, In Pursuit of Venus [infected] has been around for a long time in various iterations. To put it simply, it's unlikely that anyone who has seen the Reihana work in Auckland, Brisbane, Melbourne or Singapore will not recognise it in its Venice outing. So CNZ 'commissioning' an additional suite of photographs as 'new accompanying work' to try and take the heat off the 'new' issue feels kind of unnecessary.

Unusually Reihana doesn’t have dealer representation at a time when dealers are expected to front up with cash and cashed-up connections, but with Devenport bringing the resources of the Auckland Art Gallery that's well taken care of. Still, if you pop your head out of the window in Auckland you'll probably catch a dealer or two racing by to offer their services.

This is the first time the director of a major metropolitan gallery has stepped up as sponsoring curator. It's the third time we have chosen women as both curator and artist and Lisa Reihana is the third artist of Maori descent to represent us. As for the Brian Butler list being so prescient, forget we ever mentioned it.

You tubes

The sight of design chipping away at art’s domain is a familiar feature of our world, but here's a major leap forward. Artists like Bruce Nauman, Claire Fontaine, Joseph Kosuth, Tracey Emin and Martin Creed (and there’s a lot more where that came from) who've kidnapped neon lettering from the commercial world may have to think about letting it go. Now there's an art/design neon kit available that you can use to construct your own words, letter by letter. Suggested are ‘Light’ (at $650), ‘Love’ (sorry Martin), ‘Home’, and, inevitably, ‘Art’ (the cheapest at $395). And where do you buy one of these art destabilising machines? The Auckland Art Gallery shop, Corner Kitchener and Wellesley Streets.

Image: left Martin Creed Work no. 374 and right the less attractive DIY version made by Seletti on display at the Auckland Art Gallery shop

By the numbers: links edition

0   the amount of significant change (pdf.) in attendance by 10-14 year olds at visual arts events or locations since 2011

0  the number of flag designs presented in the flag panels current top 40 that are worth pursuing

3   the number of comments generated by John Hurrell’s review of the new Len Lye Centre on eyecontact that included his opinion that “there is a strong sense that the Lye Centre has hijacked the Govett-Brewster, that the Govett is only a mere annex to the Lye project.”

4  the number of lectures on Len Lye you can find on Circuit

5  the number of people (ok men) on the 185 strong 2015 NBR Rich List who chose to be photographed with art in the background

5   the number of prints of the 21 published for Artspace’s twenty-first birthday that have sold out

11    the number of visual art works Te Papa currently has integrated into its non-art exhibitions.

27    the number of artist talks available as Auckland Art Gallery podcasts

704  the number of days that have passed since the Government announced Te Papa North

799  the number of art works registered as ‘by New Zealander’ in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales

News from the flaming rock

There have always been close links between New Zealand and the Queensland Art Gallery. The current director of the Christchurch Art Gallery, Jenny Harper, was a senior curator there and before her so too was Anne Kirker, once senior curator of NZ's National Art Gallery. And the QAG has sent its people in the other direction. Current Auckland Art Gallery Director Rhana Devenport, of course, and her predecessor Chris Saines who was exported back again to be the QAG's director.  Saines has now headed up what can only be described as a vision-thing-on-speed at the QAG for three years. During this time he has overseen the mega Michael Parekowhai survey The promised land although for some reason could not get the Auckland Art Gallery he once so tightly controlled to take the exhibition (word is the Auckland Art Gallery is working towards a smaller project exhibition). 

And Saines still has New Zealand in his sights. QAG's Foundation was tasked with finding $A150,000 for Lisa Reihana’s four-channel video In Pursuit of Venus [infected] that is currently on show at the Auckland Art Gallery (and also purchased by that institution). The Foundation did it in two months. There is talk  too of Saines enticing Auckland art patrons to turn their attention and support to Brisbane and become part of what he describes as 'more diversified ways of fundraising'. Saines is also giving shape to his ‘new economic model for the gallery’ as he promised back in 2013 when he took over as director.  'Just as we make considerable revenues from our food and beverage offer and our store, we can also look to touring exhibitions as another way of adding to the gallery’s net receipts.’ A major element of this plan? Touring exhibitions to NZ. Strangely, the first of these proposed cash cows is a Cindy Sherman exhibition that is headed to Wellington rather than Auckland. It will be the second time a large Sherman show has been to the city with the previous outing in 1989 at the National Art Gallery.