Tut tut tut

If you love the art of ancient Egypt you might be excited to see there's a Tutankhamun exhibition in Melbourne. That excitement would probably increase when you saw the posters up around Auckland showing the famous golden mask of the boy King, the mask that inspired unheard of queues last time it left Cairo. Wow! Imagine the Egyptians allowing one of the most valuable artifacts in the world to be displayed at the Melbourne Museum. Gotta be worth an airline ticket and a hotel for a couple of days.

Not so fast. The Melbourne Tutankhamun mask is a classic new wave marketing special courtesy of Photoshop. We're looking at a blow-up of a cropped detail, and not even a detail of the famous mask everyone immediately thinks of. As the museum says on its blog, it is not the Tutankhamun mask but ‘an exquisite miniature replica of Tutankhamun’s canopic coffinette.’ What they don’t mention is that not only is the image blown up, but it is cropped to make it look as much like the famous mask as possible. As for the marketers, you know they know they are pushing the boundaries when you read the very, very small print at the bottom of the advert: ‘Image Canopic Coffinette of Tutankhamun. Not the funerary mask.’ You'd know that if they'd shown the whole figure instead of just the head. Beware.

Source: Museum of Victoria

Big ears

One day at the Auckland Art Fair

Dealer: Excuse me would you mind not touching the sculpture.

Woman in her sixties: why not?

D: Ah...you wouldn't touch a painting would you?

W: But it's not a painting.

D: Well you wouldn't touch a sculpture if it was in a museum. 

W: I would… so you'll have to do better than that, particularly when your sculpture is so tempting to touch.

D: Ok, so can I touch your breasts? So tempting. 

W: (outrage)

Thanks J

Spam

reckless guesswork, insinuations and possible inventions that have turned up in otn's email:  a wellington dealer ended up dancing on the bar at an art fair after match function owned and operated by two other art dealers • auckland art gallery was required to secure detailed arboreal permissions before tying a rooftop sculpture to a tree • rumours about that a senior position at the auckland art school has been advertised before the completion of the current contract • fisticuffs when an auckland dealer took offence at a damien hirst work being given as a gift • ronnie van hout is winging his way to lower hutt to measure them up for a giant robot sculpture • a growing maturity as police are not called to a full beaver photographic exhibition at an auckland dealer • art made from spit and sultana bran sells to australian collector at art fair • any lavish additions, changes to outright lies, indignant denials or embellishments gratefully received and always, and we mean always, rewarded.

Pure gold

We would never sell an item for less than its melt value"

Jo Langston, Christie's

A centre on the edge: the audience

The Govett-Brewster is projecting an annual maximum audience for its proposed Len Lye Centre of 56,000. At the moment there is no mention of what their acceptable minimum is but they are clearly hoping for the 'Bilbao effect' big time.

Warming to that theme architect Patterson told the Taranaki Daily Herald that the Guggenheim Bilbao had, "turned a sleepy seaside town into one of Europe's top tourist destinations". Sounds good except that Bilbao was already a commercial hub of the fifth biggest economy in Europe, and calling it a seaside town is like telling the people of Sydney they live in a village. Besides which the Guggenheim Museum is one of the richest and most famous contemporary art collections in the world. So you do have to wonder how realistic the estimated audience for the Len Lye Centre will prove. Is the G-B suggesting that virtually all the its annual visitors will also visit the LLC? And if they do, and given the common entrance, how are they going to count them? 

Counting audiences in museums has always been something of a mystical process a fact that was entertainingly revealed some years ago when auditors found the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt was getting a decent wack of its annual visitation courtesy of accommodating birds flying to and fro past the electronic beam recorders. Anyone who has watched bored staff clicking audiences in and out of art museums will have some idea of how arbitrary the process can be. As one senior museum person told us, “the only way you can guarentee attendance figures is when they are matched to ticket sales.” 

From press reports it sounds like the Govett-Brewster gets around 60,000 people in a year of which you could assume around 20 percent is represented by school parties. It’s a respectable figure for a catchment area of just over 100,000, even assuming a fair number of them are multiple visits, and you could imagine that for the first year the novelty value of the LLC will be a serious attractor. But the Len Lye Centre is also likely to be far more static than the constantly changing programme of the G-B. Keeping numbers up will be very tough. The fact that there is no admission charge to either the G-B or the LLC certainly helps attendances especially when you add in non-voluntary visitors like school kids. Even then, you could probably divide the LLC's visitor goal by at least two and maybe more. That said, 25,000 plus would be a very respectable annual tally for a highly specialist art museum five hours drive from any major city.

You can read part one of this post on the Len Lye Centre here.

Desk job

If 2009's Auckland Art Fair was shoes, this year the style motif is furniture. From the eccentric to the corporate no table was left unturned in the cause of working in the name of selling art.

 Images: Top to bottom left to right, Suite Gallery (chairs customized by Bishop & Bagnall), Robert Heald Gallery (purpose built), Whitespace, Melanie Roger Gallery (Wellington brothel), Anna Miles, Ivan Anthony, Hamish McKay (Martino Gamper), Neon Parc (Parnell Road), Michael Lett (German beer hall) and FHE Gallery.

Big Ears: on the fly edition

“I ended up telling him I’d never even thought of having art in the laundry.”

Thanks J

Branded: Chris Booth

The moment when artists become brands.

Big Ears

 At the Auckland Art Fair.

“There’s a lot of psychological shit going on in this one.”

“When I see something I like I just stop.”

“Yes, that’s a great idea. That’s what I’m going to do.”

“If you text this number they bring you fruit juice.”

“Is that a shark’s mouth?”

“I don’t know but it’s got a better set of teeth than I have.”

“That’s amazing – all those rockets, and over there, is that a pair of glasses?”

“I think they belong to the dealer.”

“Oh, right.”

“Where can I put my glass?”

“Just don’t put it on an artwork.”

“I think I’ll hold onto it.”

In the Rangitikei

Thinking about Richard Prince and Edward Ruscha

Fair go

The Auckland Art Fair is open and a very social affair it is. Internationally most art fairs are dominated by collectors and dealers but last night were artists everywhere and all seemed to be having a very good time. As for the art, it was variable as usual. You could certainly feel for the guy who was complaining in the media a while back about being left out. There probably was a bottom line but it was impossible to tell where it was. If there was a theme it would have to be monochrome. One wit dubbed it ‘Pale blue-chip.’

Robert Heald had a very smart looking stand as did Hamish McKay, Sue Crockford, Starkwhite and Jonathan Smart. Michael Lett offered a solo presentation of Campbell Patterson who had turned up with towels covered with spots made from spit and sultana bran. They looked terrific and most had sold on the opening night. Patterson had also rushed in an hour before the opening to deliver his latest video made today (it’s 11.55pm as we write this). Hard to tell how much business was being done but most booths looked busy.

The oddest feature was probably the VIP lounge which loomed above the crowd with floor to ceiling windows. The VIPs pressed their noses against the glass longingly staring down at the fun below (just kidding). Not the most tactful metaphor in the world and exacerbated by a huge staircase from the lounge down into the Fair itself.

The evening ended with what looked like everybody heading off to the Hopkinson Cundy Lett party at Swashbucklers. You had to be there.

Len Lye Centre Part 2 Monday

Image: Left, the VIP lounge in the sky. Right, VIPs descending the staircase

Magic wand-delete-clone-flatten

You can’t stop Photoshop. Here Web artist Michael Guppy proposes what’s behind the figures in a handful of Masterpieces. Still a bit rough around the edges but you can see a bit of the future here.

Image: Michael Guppy shows what's behind The Scream

Better than collecting dust

With the Auckland Art Fair opening tonight we thought you might enjoy this selection of quotes about and by collectors. 

"It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout." 

Ben Shahn

"Ruthless, greedy, tyrannical, disreputable... they have had one principle worth all the rest, the principle of delight!"

Kenneth Clark

“I think, therefore I buy.” 

Barbara Kruger

"Collectors are happy people." 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"To appreciate a work of art, is it okay to like what you like, and the heck with the art critics and experts? Absolutely." 

Thomas Hoving

"I think the collectors have made an enormous contribution, not only to the market but to painters themselves... These people that buy, that set standards, make everyone else itch to emulate." 

Philip Johnson

"The people no longer seek consolation in art. But the refined people, the rich, the idlers seek the new, the extraordinary, the extravagant, the scandalous. I have contented these people with all the many bizarre things that come into my head. And the less they understand, the more they admire it. By amusing myself with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous... I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time." 

Pablo Picasso

"Nobody can give you advice after you've been collecting for a while. If you don't enjoy making your own decisions, you're never going to be much of a collector anyway." 

Charles Saatchi

"You can either buy clothes or buy pictures." 

Gertrude Stein

"There's some human instinct which makes a man treasure what he is not to make any use of, because everybody does not possess it." 

Mark Twain

Image: Alice B Toklas and Gertrude Stein

Tweeting you right

OTN hasn’t been the best twitterer in the world. Our first continuous session was from a Wellington seminar on public sculpture last year but as we only had three followers at the time, the spread of information was thin. This year we will tweet from the Auckland Arts Fair so OTN followers can get an idea of what’s going on at the Vernissage (from 7 pm on Wednesday 3 August) and during the first day of the Fair on Thursday. It will be the usual mix of sensible and stupid.

OTN Tweets as over_the_net

Camo

Chameleon self-portrait photographer Cindy Sherman is back in the advertising space with a new campaign for MAC. Sherman has made a limited edition for the cosmetics house that will hit US stores in September. Sherman is a regular visitor to Adland. Last year she did work for Balenciaga dressing up as a ‘fashion victim’ an ‘aging doyenne’ and other familiar art scene personalities. She has also worked with other artists on Adland ventures including photographer Juergen Teller for a series commissioned by Marc Jacobs.

Images: top, Cindy Sherman for the MAC collection. Middle, Cindy Sherman for Balenciaga. Bottom, with Juergen Teller for the Marc Jacobs' advertising campaign Ohne Titel