Spam

reckless guesswork, insinuations and possible inventions that have arrived at overthenet.blog@gmail.com: word on the street has walters prize finalists as: photographer edith amituanai, sculptor peter robinson, painter john reynolds and new media artist lisa reihana. best guesses from multiple readers reckon walters judges to be andrew clifford, jon bywater, rhana devenport, and heather galbraith. simon denny has been selected for the 2008 biennale of sydney. francis upritchard, who has a morbid fear of flying into wellington, persuaded creative new zealand to have her venice biennale shortlist meeting in auckland. new zealand artists inclusion in the next documenta 13 hangs on the whims of just-announced finding committee member liz ann macgregor, director of the museum of contemporary art in sydney. daniel du bern, maddie leach, lisa reihana and wayne youle are set to “explore the social dynamics and architecture of cultural gatherings” at the field museum in chicago. any missed details, indignant denials or additions gratefully received, and the best (the very best), rewarded with overthenet caps.

Climb every mountain

More info on the living artist who attracts the biggest bucks. Apparently the price paid for the Hotere at Dunbar Sloan's was $280,000 plus premium. The AASD ( a list of Australasian auction prices published online from Australia) which lists the price at $308,000 adds the buyer's premium but not the GST. With that figuring the recent Webb's price would be $326,250. In fact the price paid by the buyer, including GST, ended up at $330,781.25. Thanks S, thanks Roger Douglas.

Uh… gee, great

It takes a while for life to follow art and it looks like the same thing applies to satire. Last week the New York Times featured some nifty interactive versions (you could fold them online) of Mad Magazine’s back page Mad Fold-in. Amongst them was this one busily applying itself to the old art-is-a-con-job argument. Warhol had pretty much dispensed with the Campbell’s soup can line by the end of 1962 although he did do the odd variation up to 1964 (as you can see in the Apple/Warhol pic we posted last month). This September ‘65 cover by Mad Magazine’s Jaffre says more about of Warhol’s impact on the culture than Pop Art as a fraud on the nation.

Big Ears

“…rather importantly, they asked for it.”

Philanthropist John Kaldor telling Emily Sharpe, a reporter for the Art Newspaper, why he gave 260 works of contemporary art to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Smoke signals

As the dust settles over the Hammond price “record” smoke signals have been sighted from all corners questioning just what the $290,000 paid for the bird work represents. Most seem agreed that we are talking about a record for a living artist and that the likes of McCahon need not apply but there are the usual problem for dealers (or gallerists as some of them are now known). Although they often, even most often, set the highest prices for living artists, their discretion prevents the public from ever hearing about it. And so, the auction houses tend to own the records. If the way the auction business is headed in the rest of the world is reflected here, dealers better get used to it. Indeed they might start looking around for another way to sell art. You don’t have to be a genius to see, that while dealer galleries have retained pretty much the same model since the late 19th century, auction houses have radically changed for the times.

And so, as auction houses merge and dip their toes into private treaties, exhibitions and dealer gallery ownership, the space for traditional dealers is getting cramped. Many artists, even here in New Zealand, baulk at 40 percent dealer commissions, so selling wet off the wall via auction must become increasingly more attractive. Apparently Webb’s have apologised for jumping the gun and claiming their “record”. They needn’t have bothered. Apart from disgruntled muttering, who’s going to prove them wrong and what can they do about it?
Image: How to light a smoke generating fire

The undead

Having just posted Webb’s on Webb’s announcement of a record price for a living New Zealand artist (Bill Hammond at $290,000) we were kinda surprised to hear from a reader that back in 2004 Dunbar Sloane in Auckland got $308,000 off an estimate of $300,000-400,000 for lot 25, Ralph Hotere’s Song Cycle The Voyage, 1976. So competition rules in the auction record business like many others. Hotere (still alive) also beat the Hammond price in 2003 with lot 27, Black Window, which achieved $302,500 off an estimate of $230,000-280,000. And that was at Webb’s. No doubt there will be talk of commissions not included etc etc. which might end up giving Bill the edge on the Webb’s price, but Dunbar can probably still claim the record.

Lookalike

Images: Left, New carny ride in the June, 1934 issue of Modern Mechanix. Right, Phil Price Nucleus 2003.

Follow the money

The only thing that excites the media more than fakes, thefts or monkeys knocking up artworks, is art selling for high prices. Well old art that is. TV3 showed unusual interest in art at auction when John Campbell crossed live to a reporter at Webb’s to give out the price paid for a water colour of Simpson’s donkey. The painting went for a respectable $110,000 but was eclipsed by Bill Hammond’s large green bird picture that was sold for $290,000, reportedly the highest price paid for a living artist. Did the reporter change the story to reflect this now obvious shift of the market from pre 60s work to the contemporary? Not a chance. This morning newcasts all have, as Variety might put it, Bill’s big buck birds leading donkey dollars.
Images: Top the purchaser of “Simpson” and his donkey. Bottom a quick mention of the Hammond record before closing down.

Letter to Listener (not published)

In a recent Curmudgeon column Hamish Keith blames the building for Te Papa’s woes. He needs to understand that bricks don’t make museums, people do. We’ve all seen great museums in bad buildings and bad museums in good ones. Hiding behind a building is a cop-out. Sure we live in a small country, but if Keith really wants to explain why Te Papa turned into a kid’s museum, he needed to name the people responsible. First up there is Keith himself, along with all the others who were closely involved in the culture in the late 1980s and 1990s, ourselves included. In Keith’s case that included being on the National Art Gallery Board for 15 years, and its Chair from 1985 to July 1992. He was also a member of the MONZ Project Development Board. We all knew the model was wrong and we couldn’t stop it. It was people like us who allowed Te Papa to happen, not the carpenters and floor layers. Then there were the architects and builders of the idea at the time. Ken Gorbey (Museum Team Leader) who was there from the beginning and is still proud to be the conceptual architect of the project. James Mack (Assistant Director of the National Museum) who helped invent and test the ocka-gothic story telling techniques. Ian Wedde (Founding Visionary and Concept Leader Humanities) who gave the relegation of art to illustrating Te Papa’s stories some intellectual credibility and, of course, Cheryl Sotheran (CEO) who got the building built on time and on budget.
Image: Hamish Keith at Te Papa Museum Project Board meeting, published in a Museum of New Zealand newsletter.

Last (Last Supper) post

One of our readers has been fossicking around in the OTN archives and saw the post on variations on Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Wouldn’t you know it, there’s a web site devoted to the subject. If you need more of this sort of thing this is where to go. Thanks G.
Images: Top left, Lego (Bless them) right, Popeye. Bottom left, Robert Altman’s Mash, right - the ever subtle - Simpsons

A total riot

The Last Riot, the Caravaggio inspired video, currently on exhibition at the City Gallery and featuring Russia’s best-known male model Danilya Polyakov, is apparently in an edition of three. Even the Russian Group AES+F (Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes) must have been surprised at its incredible success at the 2007 Venice Biennale, which resulted in two of the copies of the edition winding up in Australia. The one on show in Wellington comes from Dick Quan’s Sydney collection, the other Aussie copy went to Tasmanian collector David Walsh. The third copy was variously described as having been “purchased” or having been “gifted” to the Tate in London. Not so according to a correction in this month’s Art Newspaper. “In fact no such offer has been made and Tate has not acquired the work.” So now it looks like there is the chance for someone else in the Lucky Country to snap up their own copy of The Last Riot and claim the trifecta. Meanwhile, back in Moscow, and possibly regretting they had only made three saleable copies of their runaway success, AES+F have produced Last Riot 2, images from The Last Riot in the handier format of photographs on canvas with panoramas priced at $US150,000.

Jolly good company

et al. will be in good company when they exhibit in Art Unlimited in the Basel Art Fair. Other artists in the grand hall include: Rosemarie Trockel, Thomas Ruff, Pipilotti Rist, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Damián Ortega, Takashi Murakami, Karen Kilimnik, Thomas Hirschhorn, Douglas Gordon, Jan Dibbets and Bruce Conner. There are also familiar names from NZ exhibitions, Shintaro Miyake from Auckland Art Gallery's Mixed up Childhood, Jessen Gallery’s Tony Tony Oursler and Artspace exhibitor Diana Thater. For the full list, go here.
Later... Auckland Art Gallery adds to the list: Joachim Koester at Jan Mot - was in Mystic Truths with a 16mm film, photographs and two-channel video work. Jesús Rafael Soto has a work from the collection in this year's Sydney Biennale.

Pick up art

This months Art Newspaper reveals that the site that ex Govenor Eliot Spitzer checked out for online profiles of $1000 an hour prostitutes, also offers art to its high rolling (sorry) clients. International escort agency Emperor’s Club VIP has a, wait for it, “private art acquisition venue.” Emperors go on to add “We act for a select group of educated, refined, successful, international clients who give their best in all they do and who in return only wish to receive the best.” remembering that “The greatest gain is how a beautiful painting always evokes a sense of miraculous reward in your parlour.” But don’t forget that, although “much fine museum quality contemporary art becomes more precious with time, yet, the best advice is always the same: make visual pleasure and quality the benchmarks of your buying so you are certain to derive a deep satisfaction from the piece.” Unfortunately you can no longer play Governor for the day, as the Emperors Club VIP escort site has been taken down, however, you can still visit their art site here.

Ads up

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Art + Object lesson

We've mentioned before how much we enjoy getting the Art +Object catalogues, and the latest one is no exception. So far we haven’t timed a visit to Auckland that coincides with one of their auctions, so it is always interesting to see the pics (and videos) of the work on display. It is a sign of the times that auction house exhibitions are vying with public museums in terms of showing contemporary art in a way that is both engaging and insightful. The best part is that you get to see so many images. The strange case of public museum sites with so few images of current shows continues to be a puzzle. You can go here to get more views and watch a video of Art + Object’s exhibition featuring the Art and Text collection.
Image: Top: Hamish Coney and Ben Plumbly on the Art + Object video. Bottom, exhibition of works to be auctioned by Art + Object this Thursday at 6.30 pm