Praise be

OTN is beyond thrilled to announce the exhibition of its acclaimed website and outstanding publication Tiny Furniture. This remarkable once in a lifetime opportunity to be immersed in the thrilling spectacle of John Parker’s exquisite theatrical set models has been made possible by the partnership of a master ceramicist and theatrical wizard, the renowned art museum Te Uru and the award winning blog OTN. No one will be left unmoved by this extraordinary experience which has been described by leading commentators as ‘outstanding’, ‘unforgettable’, heart-stopping’ …ok that’ll do it.

Image: two extraordinarily evocative views of the hauntingly powerful exhibition

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

Line up

Anyone in the museum business will tell you making money out of blockbuster touring shows is almost impossible. The real trick is not to lose too much as Te Papa’s Mike Houlihan discovered. Rodney Wilson must have missed the meeting and made a killing with his Claude Monet painter of light show in the mid-eighties. His recipe was a mix of heady sponsorship and excellent timing. With that in mind, here’s a bunch of exhibition ideas (budgets not included) that we reckon could get queues around the block.

Reverse Te Maori: 30 of the greatest Maori objects borrowed from collections outside New Zealand and brought home to tour the main cities.

The clock: Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film of snippets from world cinema history. A fascinating crowd pleaser. All the museum pros may have seen it but most NZers will not have had the pleasure.

Spectacle! How the spectacular and the extreme are shaping art. Kara Walker's Sugar sphinx could be the touchstone.

Pierre Huyghe: There's a big show now in LA but any selection would stun NZ audiences. Leave it to an artist to feature animals, insects, fish and other creatures in a strange and unique system. 

Sex and Death: An exhibition selected by David Walsh and the staff of MONA in Hobart. They're our neighbours and this is their specialist topic.

50 works of art to see before you die: This is pure packaging so pick a new title for a start. Then get a Louise Bourgeois Spider, Douglas Gordon's 24 hour Psycho and maybe Andres Serrano's Piss Christ. Let NZ audiences catch up.

Treasures from the Australian National Gallery: It's just waiting to be done. They're neighbours and they've got a lot of great stuff. From Tiepolo via Monet to Jackson Pollock, Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Andy Warhol.

Killing you would be too easy, Mr. Bond

Who was the bright spark that added ‘Saving the planet’ to Te Papa’s key strategies? Headlining “Te Papa’s environmental impact” probably sounded good at the time but it’s a tough one to deliver on in the jump-on-a-plane world of today’s global museum culture. 

Take the James Bond exhibition Designing 007 that Te Papa has its eyes on. It opened at the Barbican in 2012 and since then has been whizzing round the globe (London-Toronto-Shanghai-Melbourne-Moscow) and recently (after 50,000 kilometres in the air) touched down in Rotterdam where it is currently on view. If Te Papa gives it the tick that means bringing the whole shebang back to the other side of the world again. Is the environmental impact even put on the table when programming decisions like this are made? Probably not or the Bond show would have been picked up after its stint in Melbourne.

At the moment Designing 007 is only being tested as an idea via an internet survey but why doesn't Te Papa take its saving the planet thing more public? The museum's carbon footprint is already measured to benchmark and understand its energy use but how about giving all touring shows an energy rating? That way when the public is consulted about whether an exhibition like Designing 007 appeals or not, we can factor in the real environmental cost for ourselves.

Image: Odd Job's hat, recently sold at auction for $99,000

Te Papa plays the blame game

What a difference a couple of months can make. Start of May it was all you-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about and reassurance.

Te Papa spokeswoman said the national museum was in a “comfortable” financial position. – Dominion Post 2 May 2014

Te Papa chair Evan Williams said speculation over financial problems at Te Papa was untrue.  - Stuff.co.nz 1 May 2014
 
But six weeks later and it’s the poor old Aztecs getting it in the neck.
 
“The first half of the year was awful. It was caused by losses on the Aztecs exhibition … and another exhibition called Colour & Light … and by the fact that Te Papa wasn’t operating within its budgets.” –Te Papa chairman Evan Williams, Dominion Post 21 June 2014 

Right. Te Papa is in financial straits (down $4 million more than expected even with major operating cuts of $4million) This fact was only revealed after the media forced the museum out into the open.

Like many other museums in the world Te Papa has taken itself into the entertainment business and has had huge success when it comes to whales and hobbits. Getting it right for the visual arts, not so easy. And not so surprising either given that all too often Te Papa's technique for drawing big crowds for art is to drop in second level packaged international exhibitions.

You didn't need specialist knowledge to figure that the 2013 Warhol exhibition didn't have the quality of work needed to attract acclaim and crowds. As for the impressionist potboiler Colour & Light exhibition, dull and esoteric, it never had a chance. The thought that either of them might have been potential blockbusters is risible. And (for the record) Colour & Light was a 2013 disaster (13 July 2013-12 Jan 2014) not one of this year’s.

Then there’s shows like Aztecs: conquest and glory the current whipping boy. While the chair blames it for the latest losses there's a lot more here for Te Papa's Board to think about. There's no doubt that Aztecs contained some outstanding objects but why did Te Papa choose to invest so heavily in this particular exhibition? Its never shown any interest in the Aztecs since its blockbuster (and that one really was a blockbuster) back in 1983. It has no related work in its collections and no expertise on its staff or even in the region. With Aztecs in 2014 we were in cargo cult territory - and we didn't even get to have a belief system at the end.

So what's the answer? The first part of it is having smart curators with great connections and experience in collecting and research and programming. The second part is that you have to give them the time and the budgets to make solid shows, and lots of them. These have to range beyond the institution's own collections so that the visual arts programme of Te Papa can build audiences - people who keep coming back for more. Then there’s getting a new CE. When it comes to getting people through the door and great programmes everyone looks to Tate Modern. It is run by a curator.

Te party

It’s been four years since Te Papa last had an Impressionist exhibition from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. That was Monet and the Impressionists an exhibition that stumped up 140,000 visits according to the 2009 annual report or around 1,500 a day for its three month run. 

The new show slated to open on Friday hasn’t got quite the same sting in its title. Colour & Light: Impressionism from France & America sounds a bit like one of those lectures you skipped in Art History (well we did anyway) but Te Papa will have high hopes for it. A crowd pleaser could give a significant kick start to the next financial year‘s attendance figures and this time they're playing the long game: 183 days (it’s more of a long-term loan) as opposed to 92 days for the last Boston effort. 

As we have mentioned before, the Boston Museum of Fine Art uses extensive loans from its collection as a major revenue stream. In an odd mirroring of Te Papa the Bellagio Gallery, located in the eponymous casino in Las Vegas, has just closed Claude Monet: Impressions of Light on loan from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and opened Warhol out West from the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Busted

Spare a thought for Te Papa as it prepares for not one but two blockbuster exhibitions this year (Andy Warhol and Treasures of the Aztecs). Both are crucial to ensuring attendances do not fall below the 1.3 million Te Papa has settled into over recent years. The trouble is that blockbusters tend to be expensive to mount and it's hard to predict the big winners. It certainly can be a complete crapshoot when it comes to making money or even breaking even.

Insight into what is involved in an Aztec Treasures type show has been revealed by the Australian Museum in Sydney with some numbers around its Alexander the Great: 2000 Years of Treasures from St Petersburg. Alexander pulled in a modest 161,145 visitors and according to the museum will ‘hopefully’ break even.  For context Te Papa's Monet and the Impressionists attracted 152,000 visitors in 2009

We did some estimates on what break even might mean for Alexander. Ticket prices were $28 Adult; $72 Family (2 adults + 2 children); $21 Concession; $14 Child and we figured of the 161,145 visitors 55 percent were adult, 25 percent kids, 5 percent families and 10 percent concessions. Then we threw in 5 percent for free admissions. In terms of ticket revenue this all adds up to around $4 million and yet Alexander still only broke even (hopefully). And the costs can be huge, Alexander required 29 curators to accompany it across the world. Still, the Australian Museum remains game; it's one of the Australian venues taking Te Papa's Aztec show.

The investment into these blockbusters is more about marketing the museum and attracting attention than it is about making a return. That’s why although museums can allow some blockbusters to fall on the red side of the ledger, they really do have to get those numbers through the door.
Images: Back in the day queuing for Tutankhamun at the British Museum in 1971

That’s the spirit

In our continuing quest to track art museum tie-ins designed by marketers to attract audiences, how about this effort from the Denver Museum? The exhibition coming up was BecomingVan Gogh. What do you think the team came up with to get more cash in the till?

Who guessed a specially brewed beer along with a name-the-beer competition offering a prize of free tickets, a Van Gogh t-shirt and discount voucher? Very Vincent.

Still could have been worse, they might have teamed up with Mademan.com and had their absinthe-based cocktail Van Gogh’s ear (fill a Collins glass with ice and dribble two oz. of absinthe slowly into the glass. Add a slice of lemon and pour grapefruit juice into the glass. Swirl in an oz. of grenadine) on offer at the door.

Blockbusting

The Auckland Art Gallery will be hoping that its current exhibition Degas to Dali will be a blockbuster on the scale of its legendary 1983 Monet exhibition. These big imported exhibitions are a gamble for art institutions and the risks are even higher when they are packaged on a strictly one venue per country basis. 

The term blockbuster was first used to describe the destruction caused by large single bombs during the Second World War. Even when it made it into the entertainment business it was still more about busting the revenues of theatrical competitors on the block than about long queues winding their way around it. The first New Zealand blockbuster is generally agreed to be the 1974 John Constable exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery. It was organised by Peter Webb - later New Zealand's auction guru - who followed up with the hugely successful Van Gogh exhibition the next year.

As the value of art increased dramatically in the art market’s wonder years (late 70s and 80s), the ability of New Zealand museums to insure it was stretched to the limit. As is common international practice, the Government agreed to step in and take on the insurance risk in a process termed indemnification. Amusingly, when this process was used for the first time in 1980 for the Thyssen-Bornemisza exhibition, the Government also took on traditional insurance, just in case!

Can you make money out of the blockbuster? With originating museum rental fees and rising freight and care costs it is a tough ask today but Rodney Wilson’s Monet made a sackful so it it is possible. Another complicating factor is the shift in audience expectations as potential visitors are much more likely to have travelled overseas and checked out some of the masterworks for themselves. 

If you want some context around the number of people needed to make a show a blockbuster, here’s a few attendance figures for blockbusters of the past. These will no doubt be the numbers dancing in the heads of the AAG’s senior staff as they toss and turn in their beds over the next couple of months.

Mixed artist exhibitions:

67,000 A century of modern masterpieces from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection (Auckland) 1980

72,000 Masterpieces of the Guggenheim (Dunedin) 1991

84,000 Exhibition of the century - modern masterpieces from the collection of the Stedelijk Museum (City Gallery) 1998

152,000 Monet and the Impressionists (Te Papa) 2009

73,170 European masters (Te Papa) 2011

Single artist exhibitions:

36,738 Henry Moore (Auckland) 1956

52,000 John Constable: the natural painter (Auckland) 1973

174,769 Claude Monet painter of light (Auckland) 1985

88,155 Yoyoi Kusama: mirrored years (City Gallery) 2011

135,000 Ron Mueck (Christchurch) 2011

Image: Crowds line up for the 1937 exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art). The three million plus visitors made it what is generally considered to be the first blockbuster art exhibition.

“I think the only way of arguing that the blockbuster show is a good way of viewing art is to say that the crowd is part of the experience. If you can convince people that they're paying a lot of money in order to see art alongside a lot of other people – and that's part of the joy of the experience – then you're OK. But I don't think that is what ticket buyers are led to believe. I think they're hoping that they will be able to have an intimate, individual experience of the art on show. And, too often, they're disappointed.” 

Miranda Sawyer in the Observer

Alexander the great

You can expect more frock shows in our art galleries and museums. Te Papa has already been in this particular game and is aiming for even bigger crowds in December with Unveiled, a survey of 200 years worth of wedding dresses, pimped with celebrity examples, from around the world. As Te Papa admits, the exhibition 'shows the huge media and public appetite for celebrity weddings' (in Australia it was shown exclusively at the Bendigo Art Gallery) but it comes from the V&A so there you go.

What is exciting museums obsessed by bums through the door is the huge success of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty that has just wrapped up at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The huge attendances (it is the eighth most popular show the Met has ever mounted) are up there with names that gave the word 'blockbuster' its allure: Mona Lisa, Picasso, Tutankhamen.

As for the McQueen numbers, they're enough to make any museum marketer salivate. Attendances topped 650,000, over half a million more than the Met's most popular fashion show to date. Over 23,000 people paid for museum membership so they could jump the queue. 17,000 paid $61 to visit on Monday when the museum is usually closed. The catalogue alone grossed $1.5 million.
Source Artinfo

Queue and hay

The outstanding success of the Yayoi Kusama exhibition certainly puts the pressure on Wellington’s City Gallery. Already the City Council has suggested that the long queues of fee-paying patrons outside this show should be a benchmark for future exhibitions. How to replicate this unusual mix of high art and popular appeal is no doubt the subject of intense discussion in the Gallery’s inner sanctum.

When it comes to popular appeal art exhibitions usually fall into one of four types.

• Unusual or spectacular visual effects
• Controversy
• High value works from overseas / Masterpieces
• Extreme rarity

The City Gallery has had successes in at least three of these categories - Kusama and Picinnini (visual effects), Mapplethorp (controversy) and Exhibition of the Century (Masterpieces). So where to next?

Some of the City Gallery’s audience-grabber exhibitions come via the MCA whose director Liz-Anne Macgregor is also hot on the heels of mega-audiences. Both must be kicking themselves that they didn’t sign up for Ron Mueck’s OMG show presently on at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Unfortunately for them Christchurch, under the directorship of Jenny Harper, is also muscling into the bread and circuses game and it will be that city that astonishes its own and other city’s publics with Dead Dad and the other Mueck lookalikes (30 September – 23 January 2011).

What other contemporary artists have Kusama-like crowd pulling appeal? Olafur Eliasson is probably one but his works are large and expensive to install. Damien Hirst might still grab the popular imagination and Jeff Koons, well selected, certainly would but both would come with a sky high entry fee. Artists like Kusama who thrive on creating OMG effects are not thick on the ground. So who knows, if the numbers pressure grows, we may even have a resort to curating provocative group shows.

A post without a Monet pun in its heading

Te Papa may well have to go back to government with a reassessment of what the bill will be if their upcoming Monet exhibition goes up in flames or walks out the door. Last night at Christie’s Monet’s 1873 work The Railroad Bridge at Arenteuil sold at a record price for the artist of $US41.4 ($NZ52.9) million, SUS2.4 million above estimate. The painting last came up for sale in 1988 when the ticket price was $12.6 million. The price jump on Monets is comparatively recent, a previous record price of $US19.8 million set in 1998, held until mid last year.
Image: Monet mechandise