Why can’t Wellington City Council get it up?

What’s going on in Wellington?  A year ago Neil Dawson’s suspended sculpture Ferns was taken down for repair after almost 20 years hanging above Civic Square. It now needs to be replaced at a cost of $210,000. Not a surprising outcome given Wellington’s infamously challenging environment for outdoor sculpture. Ferns was basically a gift to the city via the Wellington Sculpture Trust and a wide range of other sponsors.  The Council’s job was to to keep it in the air. 

So having relentlessly used Ferns as a City Icon and PR tool since day one why is the City Council sitting back as a $55,000 begging bowl approach via Boosted is deployed to help with the replacement? The public, the corps and the philanthropists did the fund raising the first time. This time it’s the Council’s turn. They are the ones who have converted this artwork into a symbol for the city and blatantly used it as a city logo. Had they asked an ad agency to come up with a campaign to do a similar job $210,000 would be getting off cheap (Te Papa’s thumbprint cost around that 20 years ago). Budget line? Marketing.

Putting the fun back into funding

You may recall that back in April Creative NZ went into a spiral of despair. Lotto, one of its major funders, had announced that ‘due to the lower level of jackpots on offer it is estimated there will be $25 million less to dole out to community groups such as Sport New Zealand, Creative New Zealand and the Film Commission.’ Even worse, ‘Peter Dunne, who chairs the Lottery Grants Board, told CNZ he would not confirm exactly how much less there will be until July’. Creative NZ did some sums and figured this would mean it would ‘receive $11 million less this financial year than it did two years ago.’

After a bit of stick for being so dependent on gambling money, everyone went to ground until June. It was then that the Minister for Arts, Culture & Heritage, Maggie Barry, somewhat embarrassed Creative NZ by stating that it ‘had "jumped the gun" by predicting a funding fall, and the Government expected a small rise in Creative NZ funds.’

Since then things have been kind of quiet in the media, so what happened funding-wise?

From CNZ's website it turns out that at the end July at one of its two monthly meetings, Creative NZ’s Arts Council updated its we-are-doomed budget to reflect ‘a significantly better funding forecast from the New Zealand Lottery Grants Board.’ This is the same Lottery Board that was predicting major cuts only three months previously so who knows what pressure was put on whom. This new generosity couldn’t have been caused by a huge upswing in NZers gambling, could it?

You might think that the volatility of Lotto and its dependence on hopeless dreams might still give Creative NZ pause (#oncebitten). But no, it has a secret weapon. Creative NZ’s Arts Council in its post meeting summary goes on to say that, ‘An important feature of the approved budget is the new “double buffer” approach that will allow reasonable shifts in NZLGB funding to be better managed.’ Double buffer eh. ‘Reasonable’ shifts. Yes, that should work.

Pay to play

In this age of free, can you even charge a fee? That’s the question the New Plymouth City Council is going to decide tonight. Should the addition of the Len Lye Centre push the combined LLC/Govett-Brewster into pay-to-play? Realistically it would be a dumb move. Globally museums have faltered as they move from free-for-all to paid entrance with attendances (the metric so loved by councils and trustees) plummeting. In the United States a review by the American Association of Museums found that charging at the door has not only reduced attendances but also helped ensure minorities and those on low incomes only make up 9 percent of visitors. So what’s a regional art gallery director to do?

Simon Rees, the director of the LLC/G-B, came up with an idea. What if, instead of charging an entry fee, they encouraged donations beyond just putting a perspex box with a slit in the top at the entrance?  An Active Donations Strategy (ADS) in fact, using Paywave. OK, it’s only one of five options - and some of those include charging too - but it’s hard to see how reasonably minded (#suckup) Councillors could not at least give it a go.
If you want to read everything the Councillors will have to wade through to make a decision like this (26 pages and five options including option 4 that would charge adult visitors $10, seniors, beneficiaries and Unwaged $7 and kids at school $5) you can download it here. Scroll down to page 62 and you’ll find the numbers that show that introducing an entrance fee would only raise revenue by 10 percent. Go figure why the Council has even  got to debating this in the first place. Anyway, tonight’s the night. Hold onto your hats. (the New Plymouth District Council has since voted to trial of an electronic donation system, which members hope could net $100,000 over 12 months)

Image: a hat.

Hide and seek

What is it that Creative NZ is trying to hide away in its announcements of funding round results? We’ve posted before about how it has removed comparative charts and the ability to easily access results in different categories like the Visual Arts. While these were both useful tools in supporting informed advocacy and any debate around Creative NZ’s performance, we’re another step along. Now the total amount funded has been taken off the introductory information for the latest Quick Response grants. While we all do have calculators and can do the sums, it’s not a helpful or user-friendly development. Even more problematically though, the total number of applicants has been removed something we flagged earlier this year. For tax payers near enough is good enough. It’s been replaced with the comment that ‘typically one in four or five applications gets funded.’

For the record then, and in the same near-enough spirit: around 360 to 450 applications were received and just over $470,000 was allocated to between 20 and 25 percent of them.

So how did the visual arts make out? They received just under $82,000 representing around 17.5 percent of the total. Of these, a whopping 77 percent went to projects outside New Zealand.

Image: OTN’s Statistics Unit working its way through Creative NZ figures

Your pokie machine dollars at work

The latest round of Creative NZ grants has been announced. This time $1.8 million has been allocated, a nine percent reduction on the same round last year. The result is an average grant of $21,565 compared to last year's average of $24,478.

How did the visual arts make out? Well, thanks to Creative NZ becoming increasingly opaque since the departure of Alastair Carruthers, it takes a bit effort to work it all out. The charts that used to show percentage allocations have gone and so too has the ability to sort grants to the visual arts from the rest. This is the second year that some (but for some reason not all) Maori and Pacific grants have been included, it's a good idea but conveniently complicates efforts to make historical comparisons at the same time. The addition of Maori and Polynesian grants takes the visual arts component to a healthy sounding 26 percent of the total round. If you take them out the visual arts come in at around the usual 17 percent of the total allocation. Pacific Island grants were on average $15,626, Maori grants $25,000 and the rest of the visual arts grants averaged out at $18,449.

Here’s how the visual arts funding was divvied up with the Maori and Pacific Island grants included:

Publishing: $23,750 or 5.6 percent of the total

To NZ Institutions: $136,544 (32.15 percent)

Direct to named artist: $121,970 (28.7 percent)

Study overseas: $30,777 (7.25 percent)

Participation in overseas exhibitions and events: $111,702 (26.3 percent)

If you add in a couple of the named artists who have been funded to make exhibitions overseas, the total funding for off-shore projects is 39 percent.

And so it goes.

Time lords

The amount of cash Creative NZ has to fund artists may decline, but the number of artists applying for it is headed in the opposite direction. In the last five years, for instance, the number of applications for the round of Quick Response grants held each March has increased from 52 applications to 86. That’s around a forty percent increase. This is not a big surprise given the number of artists being churned out by the 18+ art schools operating in NZ currently and it isn’t going to do anything but increase year by year.

So here's an idea. Creative NZ might like to investigate an application process that is working for the National Science Foundation (for Earth Processes to be precise) in the United States. It found that by getting rid of deadlines for submitting grant proposals the number of submissions dropped of its own accord by 59 percent. A pilot of the process that resulted in a 50 percent drop has remained at that level for the last five years. What seems to happen is that people put more time and effort into their proposals and the ones that are hasty or ill-considered simply never get submitted. The hope is ‘that the change will filter for the most highly motivated people and the ideas for which you feel the most passion.’ Research has also shown that the reduction in numbers in an ‘anytime submission’ process had no effect on the demographic mix of people submitting. So there you go.

Money for nothing

The Arts Foundation’s crowd funding site Boosted sent out an email recently pushing philanthropy as a way to offset funding cuts from Government agencies. It made us wonder just how much Boosted and the Foundation raise each year. While published numbers are hard to find we can make some educated guesstimates.

Starting with the Foundation itself, there are the grants it makes to artists of around $350,000 a year. And then there's Boosted. While the numbers are of course variable last week, for instance, there were 16 Boosted projects online waiting to have money thrown at them. If they all got funded we'd be talking $58,000 raised across the 16 projects. Now for the close-your-eyes-and-guess part. Let’s be generous and say that once a month Boosted projects raise around $60,000. Add them all together and you get say $700,000 a year. (NOTE on 19 April 2016 Boosted announced it raised $1 million in the years 2013-15 and $1 million in the last 12 months to April 2016. Se also the note below)  Add the Foundation's grants noted above and we get to say just over a million a year. and that could be generous. 
 
And also we need to remember that on Boosted, like most crowd funding sites, there a cost to getting support and it's borne by the artists. Most of the Boosted projects require ‘gifts’ from the projects to supporters. This does point out a critical feature of this version of philanthropy; even though the gifts are often small it still operates, like most philanthropy, on the ‘nothing’s for nothing’ principle. So while the million (plus?) annual input from the Arts Foundation (now an essential part of the funding scene) is much better than nothing, it's still not enough to even deal to Creative NZ’s shortfall far less bring in additional support. That shortfall in fact was nearly three times what the Foundation raised last year. In spite of the Foundations best efforts we're still running hard to even go backwards more slowly.

For philanthropy to make a difference the government will have to come up with an infrastructure that works both for the people being funded and the people giving the money. Them just saying in a stern voice that we have to move to a philanthropic model is not going to do the trick.

We received an email from Simon Bowden on Boosted that included the following correction to our post. 

'There is an element in your post that is not right. While most crowdfunding websites do require projects to list "rewards" (items given to pledges in return for their money at different levels), Boosted does not have this facility. The reason for this is that all donations made to projects on Boosted are made to the Arts Foundation and qualify for a 33% tax credit. If artists offered "rewards" then the gifts would not qualify as donations. When a project hits its target and closes the Arts Foundation makes a grant to the project. Our announcement of $2 million raised for the arts on Boosted is the amount that we have granted to artists (in some cases plus GST). This amount is net of transaction costs and the small amount Boosted retains to fund our support programme for artists using the site. '

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.

Double or quits

Creative NZ has pressed the emergency button. After 'signaling' (aka managing bad news) that more funding cuts are on the way now a letter has gone out to warn 'colleagues' that things could get worse.

As we have reported previously, for the year 2015-16 Creative CNZ covered its shortfall from Lotto from reserves. 
Lotto stumps up with around 64 percent of Creative NZ's funding. Government is good for around 31 percent and 5 percent comes from other sources. The problem is that Lottery funding to Creative NZ has fallen around 10 percent a year for the last two years. Lotto is now paying less than it did in 2008 ($27.4 million) and has indicated that there will be a further reduction for the coming year.

 Setting aside any ethical implications to the arts largely being funded by gambling (NZ Lotteries started in 1987) what's Creative NZ going to do? In his email Chief Executive Stephen Wainwright outlined CNZ’s plan.

1 Bury its head in the sand
'assumes our revenue from Lotto for 2016/17 is $30 million'
It's hard to see what this assumption is based on as Creative NZ has faced cuts in Lotto's contribution year after year: 2013/14 - $37.5 million; 2014/15 - $31.07 million; 2015/16 - $26.31 million. Surely based on this record of continuing 10 percent cuts it would be more realistic to expect around $22-24 million in the 2016/17 year rather than $30 million.

2 Whistle in the wind
'brief the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage on the consequences of the lower revenue'
None of this will be news to the Minister. The Government has barely increased its share of Creative NZ's funding for over eight years (2008 - $15.5 million; 2015 - $15.7 million). From the Minister's perspective Creative NZ's job is to manage the sector and protect its Minister when people send some angry emotions her way (like when their funding is cut). Job well done CNZ.

3 Pass the buck
'we would encourage you to run a series of  budget scenarios  including one that assumes up to 10 percent less financial support from Creative New Zealand.'
Let’s face it, if the reduction in Lotto’s funding for the coming year is only 10 percent on the 'budgeted' $30 mil it will be champagne all round.

4 Miss the point
'This shift in financial circumstances will be a major challenge for the Arts Council.'
... but not half the challenge it will be for a sector facing another round of cuts. Maybe this time Creative NZ itself will take some of the heat and reduce its 51-strong staff. Hmmmmm.....ok..... maybe not.

Winners and losers

Auckland is closed today (Anniversary Day) and of course Artspace is too but behind those closed doors there's a major reno going on. The sign on the door says Artspace will be open again tomorrow and it is certainly going to be a case of more-open-than-usual. The old Nga Taonga Sound & Vision space facing East Street has now become part of Artspace itself as an expansive open area for reading / resources / offices. No more wondering if you dare go through the glass door at the back of the gallery and venture past the toilets and into that office where everyone spins around as you come through the door. OK, some fashion stores do the intimidation thing better, but not many. We're told that Adnan Yildis, Artspace's newish director, figured out how to rejig Artspace a couple of hours after he first saw it. Now, thanks to Sue Gardiner acting as über fundraiser, his idea has been realised just a year after he took up the job. The only loser in the revamp was Oscar Enberg. Having taken on the Christmas Holidays slot, he might have expected his show to be on view for longer than usual, but when we got there it had been ‘Christoed’ to protect it while the builders and painters were doing their thing. Unfortunately it is squeezed at the other end by the opening of Fiona Clarke’s THE BILL to mark the 30th anniversary of Homosexual Law Reform in NZ. No one would suggest mucking around with that important anniversary but maybe the same energies that are galvanising Artspace will find a temporary venue so Enberg’s exhibition can get its full run.

Images: Looks like art, Oscar Enberg’s installation under wraps during the Artspace re-fit.

The Money Train on platform one has been delayed, passengers should seek alternative transport

For a few years now the government has been signaling that it's expecting the private sector to stump up with more of the cash and services needed to run the arts in NZ. This follows the UK example where severe cuts to arts organisations and grants have been made to try and shock the private sector to put its money where the government’s mouth was.
Last year the main source of Creative NZ funding, the Lotteries Commission via its Lottery Grants Board, suffered an unexpected 17 percent cut (from $37.379 million in 2013-14 to $31.074 million in 2014-15). It caught Creative NZ by surprise but by digging into its reserves it managed a successful 2014-15 financial year. For the coming year the cuts in Lotteries funding will be even harsher and Creative NZ is expecting funding that will be ‘materially lower’ for the forseable future. So we could be talking 25 percent down, even 30 percent. That's not good. 

Creative NZ's strategy to counter the sharp drop in funding is to build fund-raising capability. That is, by teaching institutions (and we presume artists) how to increase the funding they receive from individual donors, businesses, trusts and foundations. They call it Creative Giving. And it would need to be creative as there isn’t much on offer to make philanthropy/sponsorship attractive or worthwhile for the givers. Unlike most countries NZ only accepting cash contributions to registered charities for tax breaks cutting out a lot of services, and gifting of course. 

One organisation that is already off into the über commercial world is Te Papa. It looks to be in the process of converting itself into a production house with private sector wunderkinds WETA to build and flog exhibitions (no, Jennifer they won’t be art exhibitions, now go to bed) to the museums (read Asian) of the world.

Now arts organisations can make do and cut back but the real worry about this growing reduction of government investment is more insidious. In the UK art institutions are already talking about the ‘freedom’ they will achieve by being supported via the private sector rather than by government. This is deeply deluded as anyone who has worked in a corporate communications office will know. Even in the arts, nothing is for nothing.

So you might ask why doesn’t Creative NZ rally the troops, go public and push the government to increase its spend? Hang on, rather than ask CNZ it's probably better to email your local MP and copy the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage (it’s Maggie Barry).

Your tax dollar at work

Anyone looking at the latest round of general Creative NZ grants was in for a pleasant surprise. The majority of the funding for the 15 visual arts grants has been gone to women, 68.5 percent of it in fact.  And most of those grants (seven of nine) went direct to the artists concerned. That meant they received $271,965 all up plus another $25,000 to galleries for two publications. The guys got $95,680 (24 percent) although it was kind of supplemented by a separate $50,000 to the Serpentine Galleries for Simon Denny’s exhibition via Creative NZ’s International Presentation category. For some reason a similar grant of $26,160 to the IMA in Brisbane for a Luke Willis Thompson exhibition was included in the general grants.

There also seems to have been a significant rule change around the funding of university staff. Since the university art schools decided making art was ‘research’, the funding of their staff through Creative NZ was covered by a double–dipping rule (i.e. the same activity being funded by the state through both the tertiary sector and through Creative NZ) and they were specifically excluded in many circumstances by the following clause:

“employees of tertiary or other educational institutions, if the arts activity for which they are seeking funding is part of their job to include a written statement from your Head of Department, or the equivalent position, confirming that the activity is not part of your job”.
 
It was always hard to understand when their art making was not part of their research and hence their job so it will be interesting to see whether this change is bureaucratic (simplifying processes) or strategic (accepting the dominance of the tertiary sector over the contemporary art scene in NZ). While there is a case for staff at smaller educational institutions without much in the way of research resources to be funded, it's hard to understand in some other cases. In this round, for example, why couldn't a university the size of Massey stump up with $49,000 for one of its well-paid Associate Professors to prepare for a PBRF-rich public art museum exhibition?

You can see the former Creative NZ rules in full here on the Wayback machine (Let's hear it for the internet).

Cash for art

Something for nothing anyone? That seems to be what's on offer by My Art. It's a scheme that loans you money at no interest to fit you out with art works. You find the work, they pay for it. OK, not quite. You do have to pay 10 percent up front and pay the rest back over nine months but it’s all interest free! Given that My Art is operated by a finance company (not usually given to interest free loans) how is this even possible?

The idea comes from the UK where the same idea runs under the name of Own Art which started up 11 years ago. There's the similar Art Money scheme in Australia - how do they manage to come up with these funky name? So far the UK's Own Art have forked out over $69.5 million covering 35,000 art purchases, the average loan being around $2,000. As with the UK scheme, the NZ one will no doubt include some small admin fees and penalties but essentially the purchases are financed via a cut in the dealer commission. So all good for everyone: the artist gets paid, the dealer doesn’t have to chase the money and the collector gets the work on the wall or the floor where it’s wanted. Getting galleries on board will obviously be vital. The UK version has around 250 participating galleries although most of them are well down the market as the average loan size indicates.

NZ's My Art is ‘brought to you’ by Avanti Finance whose major shareholder is Glen Hawkins. Glen and Sonja Hawkins are keen art collectors and are both known as major Auckland art supporters. Glen is a trustee on the Auckland Art Gallery Foundation and both appear on the Auckland AG honour board.

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.

Your tax dollar at work

Some big grants from Creative NZ were announced late last week. These are the ones that support artists and organisations for one to three years so they give a good idea of CNZ's priorities. The total grants weigh in at just over $6 million so how did the Visual Arts feature? Not at all really with just $186,000 (Scape and the McCahon House) allocated. That's 3 percent of the total. SCAPE rather hilariously received $99,999.00 so some philanthropist out there might like to send them a buck to top it up. 

Who got all the money? It’s always been an insider joke that CNZ is run by dancers and this time Dance was certainly the winner on the night. This category fetched just under $3 million or near enough to half as it's known in the funding trade. One other thing, of the 22 grants awarded, 12 went to Trusts. You can make of that what you will.

Image: gratuitous dance funding joke

Webb’s struggle to stay in the game

One of the most interesting art auction stories at the moment is centred on Webb’s and it’s taking place via the NZX. There have been some dramatic changes. Chris Swasbrook has withdrawn from his management position at Webb’s. It was Swasbrook (a collector himself with two works for sale in Thursday night’s Webb’s auction) who engineered the bold move to Parnell. Now as Acting Chairman of Bethunes the parent company of which Webb’s is a trading subsidiary Swasbrook has just informed NZX, that they intend to raise up to $2.87 million to try and save the well known auction house.

The capital will be raised to pay off a current debt of $1.5 million accumulated by Webb’s whose current business is described as ‘volatile’. $120,000 of that debt is via investment in a new web site and another $69,000 is owed to Chris Swasbrook’s company Elevation Capital.

Unsurprisingly, the ‘S’ words get an outing, as in reducing Webb’s debt ratio to make it Sustainable and Solvent. Swasbrook has blamed the auction house’s shortfall on ‘extremely vigorous’ competition in the art category. An annual shareholders meeting this Friday will announce plans for the future.

Image: happier days

Giving

News the other day that Te Papa is thinking of joining in on the scramble by NZ's museums and art galleries to cobble together foundations and friends groups. They're all hoping, of course, to get fresh meat to cough up for exhibition costs, public programmes, and acquisitions. This sudden interest in rich-people-who-like-art is driven by the current government’s insistence on philanthropy as the new driver for cultural funding. Te Papa sees itself as something of an expert in this field publishing guidelines for others, but this expertise is resolutely focused on Government funds via the public sector. Corporate and private sponsorship get exactly 40 words in the 3200 word document. It feels like an absurd end game all these public servants making applications to each other for public funding but, moving on, Te Papa's longstanding indifference to expertise and collectors, could make finding passion partners with open wallets a stretch. Add in the growing disinterest of the corporate sector (just check out the scale of some of the enterprises trumpeted as major funders today) and the task feels even more epic.

Of course there have been some successes. Since it was set up in 1987, The Patrons of the Auckland Art Gallery has been responsible for some stunning acquisitions (it has given more than a million dollars according to the Gallery). Amongst others the Chartwell Trust and the Walters Prize have also both been spectacular partnering achievements, as was the gift of the New Gallery to the AAG in 1995 by Jenny and Alan Gibbs. When you observe how well connected the AAG is to these partners, it makes sense. Philanthropy is built on close association and respect between the institution and the givers as much as it is on a call to civic responsibility. There are always ups and downs in such relationships, but for most philanthropists it's not just about passively dishing out the dosh. They see it as a form of activism, of being engaged, having input, making a difference etc. And dealing with that sort of approach is going to demand a very different mindset for institutions.

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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.

Pay and display

Looks like the Govett-Brewster will be forced to go behind a pay wall. The New Plymouth City Council is proposing a rates cap and as part of the cuts required the museum would need to generate nearly $200,000 a year at the door. If the G-B goes with something like the MTG Hawke's Bay's pricing structure where locals get in free, they'd only need around 25,000 out-of-town visitors stumping up to meet the target. With the new Len Lye Centre promoted as a tourist magnet, a door charge would certainly test Lye’s pulling power. Unless of course the G-B can reel in a $200,000 a year sponsor to keep things free for visitors or choose to make cuts elsewhere.

Some of the folding to help straighten things out

Last year’s Sydney Biennale had a bad run with its principal sponsor pulling out after artist protested their relationship with detention centers on Nauru Island. Now a new sponsor has come forward with $A600,000 plus for the 2016 Biennale. Keir Neilson set up the Platinum fund and his wife Judith started the White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney. The total budget for the Biennale of Sydney is around $A10 million. You can read the full story here.