Auction fever

Is the art market collapsing? Not if you apply the thick-o-meter test to the latest two auction catalogues from Webb’s and Art + Object. Both are the same size as catalogues from this time last year, although this time both have South Islanders on their covers. It also looks like the quality of entries has gone up a bit. The only unusual thing to note is that the two houses have programmed their auctions within days of each other, Webb’s on 30 March, Art + Object 2 April.

Best served cold

Go on, admit you’ve wanted to do it a few times over the last couple of years. Now’s your chance to get your own back on Over The Net. Attack us with wasps, scribble over the bits you don’t like or, if we’ve really pissed you off, piss back. Your dreams and our nightmares made real here on netdisaster.

Who’s the blonde next to Moana?

When Germany made plans for its presence at the Venice Biennale this year, they made a couple of decisions that might help Creative New Zealand understand what the Venice Biennale is all about.

The first was to hire a curator who heads up a Dutch art museum. Nicolaus Schafhausen directs Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. The second decision was to select an English artist to show in the German pavilion. This is not to say that these decisions didn’t cause some fuss, they did. The selection of Liam Gillick to represent Germany resulted in the Deutsche Bank Group almost immediately pulling its sponsorship. But do you know what? The world didn’t end. Instead another sponsor, Hugo Boss, stepped right up. Since then the Deutsche Bank has reconsidered and returned to the fold.

How far away this is from the nationalistic myopia of CNZ? We understand CNZ plans to send Moana and the Moa Hunters and possibly a Kapa haka team over to Venice to make the event more “NZ-ie”. It’s as though they have learnt nothing from New Zealand’s previous outings to Venice. There is some justification for this of course as all the people with experience have left the building but even so, apart from the cost (and you could be forgiven for wondering whether the KiwiConcertParty sideshows might end up costing more to produce than the art), there is the question of focus. The Venice Biennale is designed for the visual arts. Like they would send et al to help zoom up the Rugby World Cup!

We’ll ask CNZ for the budget breakdown and let you know how the figures stack up for the different components. At least this is one occasion that “commercial sensitivity” can’t be used as a reason for non disclosure!

Memory Lane

As international art prices settle back to more reasonable levels, consider this list of the ten top-selling artists of last year. Andy Warhol has been knocked off his perch by Picasso who has been the regular list topper, apart from last year. Warhol’s total auction value for 2008 dropped an extraordinary $NZ347 million from the previous year. Living artists included on the list are Damien Hirst, thanks largely to his über auction, and Gerhard Richter. A single one of his works was auctioned for more than his entire auction total back in 1998. Here is the list in $NZ.
Picasso $469 million
Bacon $458 million
Warhol $422 million
Hirst $411 million
Monet $311 million
Giacometti $236 million
Richter $218 million
Degas $198 million
Fontana $170 million
Klein $163 million
Numbers from ArtPrice.

Busted

You can say what you like about Mark Whyte’s sculpture, but you can’t say he doesn’t get a good likeness. That being so, when the curtain was pulled back as part of the launch of 12 Christchurch Heroes and revealed a sculpture of Charles Luny in her place, children’s author Margaret Mahy instantly spotted the mistake. (Mark Whyte’s other claim to attention is his membership of the artist-rich space metal band Into the Void along with James Grieg, Dave Imlay, Paul Sutherland, Jason Grieg and Ronnie Van Hout). It is hard to understand why W A Sutton was named one of 12 Christchurch heroes, or Margaret Mahy for that matter. Whyte has already bronzed two undisputed heroes –VCs Charles Upham and Sargeant Henry Nicholas – but these ‘new’ Christchurch heroes suggest heroism is simply an extension of celebrity. Well, that’s public sculpture for you, ignominy or bust.
Image: Heroes by Mark Whyte.

Grease – the movie

“Phil?”
“Yeah.”
“Like if I got you like a hundred or so hamburgers…”
“Yeah.”
“Could you like use the grease in the meat patty to do a painting of the Mona Lisa?”
“No way Dude.”
“What if you could eat the burgers you don’t use?”

Dear OTN

Thanks for the post on Peter Mcleavey launching into cyberspace. I was blown away when he got a digital camera, but this is huge.

Until, of course one finds that it was registered in 2005 to the developer of the former Janne Land site. Then I must concede to the heart sinking a little.

http://www.firstbite.co.nz/

http://www.whois.net/whois/petermcleaveygallery.com

On a brighter note, the domain expires in 2 months...

A

Going green

One response to our Moore is less post was a vote for not protecting Moore patinas with any sort of coating. Above is Henry Moore’s sculpture, Oval with points made in 1969 and located in the Princeton University Gardens. Apart from the polished bit that has served as a seat, it has been allowed to go the way the weather has pushed it. Thanks S

Things you thought you'd never see

A Peter McLeavey Website

MOORE or less

Billy Apple has never been one to shy away from controversy. The last time he used public sculpture as subject matter (or in the case of The Wrestlers, the absence of it) a good number of people in Wanganui, appropriately, lost it. Now Apple is going to take a swipe at Henry Moore’s Bronze Form that stands in the Wellington Botanic Garden. From what we have read, it seems that Apple intended to have the work’s protective coating removed, hence the title of his One Day Sculpture event, Less is Moore. It also lines up with his cleaning themed exhibition due to open to the public at the Adam Art Gallery on the same day. We say intended because we have now heard that Apple will not be stripping the protective coating but hiding the sculpture with a billboard.

That certainly makes more sense, in conservation terms anyway. It is hard to imagine any conservator in New Zealand who would be bold enough to agree to remove the protective covering from Bronze Form in one day and then walk away leaving it unprotected. There is afterall a virtual industry around the protection of Moore’s many sculptures located around the world.

For instance once a year the National Gallery in Washington “completes an intensive maintenance treatment that preserves the artist's vision and protects the sculpture from the detrimental effects of an outdoor environment “ by rewaxing its Moore sculpture. You can read a description for cleaning and removing the protective layer (“In order to treat every inch of the sculpture, at least six people must work a minimum of three days”) from the National Gallery’s Moore sculpture Knife Edge Mirror Two Piece here, and details on the rewaxing of the J Paul Getty Museum’s version of Bronze Form here.

It appears that to these institutions and their experts that patina is not something that arbitrarily builds up over time, but rather the term used to describe the finish established by the artist when a sculpture is first completed. This patina is then protected from the elements and corrosion. Henry Moore himself was famously hazy on the effects of weather on bronze and his lasses-faire approach was debated at length at the 1995 London conservation conference From Marble to Chocolate: The Conservation of Modern Sculpture and his opinions on the effects of weather on bronze have become an historical footnote in the light of contemporary conservation practice. Like other Henry Moore's the world over, Wellington’s Bronze Form was waxed by an institutional conservator and is probably long overdue for a clean and a new coating.

Bronze Form is a bit of an oddity. Made in the last couple of years of Moore’s life, it is one of three elements that initially made up the monumental sculpture Large Figure in a Shelter. Moore never saw the work cast or the patina selected by his one-time studio assistant (1936-39), sculptor Bernard Meadows (himself 70 at the time), who oversaw the work’s production. There are two copies of the complete sculpture – one at the Henry Moore Foundation and another at the Peace Park in Guernica – plus three other stand-alone forms including the one we have already mentioned at the Getty in Los Angeles.
Image: Left Wellington’s Bronze form waits its turn. Top right, Getty Museum conservators clean Henry Moore’s Bronze Form cotton bud style while below conservators give the Washington Moore its annual rewaxing.

Snap

We’ve been fans of Ricky Swallow for a long time now. When we were last in LA we visited him and his partner artist Lesley Vance in their studio /home which is in a terrific neighborhood on the way to Pasadena. The photos we took of Ricky at the time don’t quite come up to the moody heights of those just published by Hedi Slimane (ex Dior Homme designer). They are part of a set on LA artists. The rest are on Slimane‘s site.
Images: Ricky Swallow and Lesley Vance photographed by Hedi Slimane

The Millar’s tale

CNZ have just announced that Judy Millar will show her work at the Venice Biennale in La Maddalena the same venue that was used for Michael Stevenson’s outing. The upside of this change of venue is that it puts the two New Zealand spaces much closer to one another. The downside is attracting people this distance from the main Biennale site. It was certainly a struggle for Mike Stevenson. So all the more reason to concentrate resources on getting key people (curators, critics, museum and art fair directors and dealer gallery people) to the venues and then to New Zealand. Once the work is installed, resources not spent on that task could easily be wasted.
Image: La Maddalena in action during the 2003 Venice Biennale

Bye-bye bio

What could be harder than describing abstract paintings? Describing them for over 113 pages of text is a start. But that’s just what Alan Wright and Edward Hanfling promise and exactly what they deliver. It’s an impressive thing to do as any art writer who has clung to inflated biography like someone going under for the third time will agree. Wright and Hanfling fearlessly chuck the comfort of the biographical away in the first few pages.

“The ‘facts’ of Mrkusich’s life are harder to come by. Mercifully, he does not encourage the spectator to ‘read’ his art in relationship to his personal biography.”

And, quoting Mrkusich himself, “A painting shows the facts of its own particular condition.”

Well, yes, that’s true, but for 113 pages? So far we’ve only dipped into Mrkusich: the art of transformation but even on that brief encounter it is fascinating. It brings in enough art history for Mrkusich to mix it in principle with peers like Guston, Poons and Mangold and, while biography may not be significant to Mrkusich, the book traces the story of New Zealand’s cultural swing from the UK to the US as clearly as a book devoted to the topic. And then there is a terrific selection of colour plates.

Inspired by the Wright/Hanfling achievement we talked about Milan’s paintings for an hour or so. Then we remembered the time the secretary at the Dowse addressed an envelope to Mr. Kusich.

And ruined everything.

Running on empty

”When you start working, everybody is in your studio - the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas - all are there. But as you continue, they start leaving one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.”
Musician John Cage talking to painter Philip Guston, quoted in his daughter Musa Meyer’s book Night Studio

Desperate lives

The week before last we spent far too much time watching a Twitter feed from someone at the Yves Saint Laurent sale. An extraordinary result with rare items like Duchamp’s La Belle Haleine – Eau de Voilette (a perfume bottle with a Rose Selvay label) fetching astronomical sums. The YSL estate catalogue (2009 - $US 484 million) now joins the catalogues of the Andy Warhol estate (1988 - $25 million) the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis estate (1996 - $34.5 million) and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor estate (1997 - $23 million) as a marker of extreme shopping and extreme lives. It bears noting that a single Eileen Gray chair at $28 million sold for more than the entire contents of the Andy Warhol estate.

Each of these catalogues reads like a graphic novel, a sensation that has been adapted by Leanne Shapton in Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. As you might have guessed, the book-with-the-very-long-title has been constructed as an estate auction catalogue. Through the sequence of lots and notes that accompany them the reader falls into the not very successful marriage of Lenore and Harold. And so:

LOT 1232
A brown mug A broken brown glazed mug stamped "brickett Davda Made in England" on base.
$5-7
Included in lot is a note handwritten by Doolan. R " H I'm so sorry, I know this was your favorite. Will get it fixed, I promise."

and

LOT 1234
A series of photographs
Twenty photographs taken by Morris of his feet at the end of the bathtub. 5 x 5 in.
Not illustrated
$60-70

In all 300 lots, and lots of fun.