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.

Principled

Here's some good news. Zara Stanhope has landed the job of Principal Curator for the Auckland Art Gallery. That's the new position under the restructuring and nice to see it filled so quickly. Zara has been in Australia (she was Senior Curator at Heide Museum of Modern Art) since being the first director of the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington.

Copycat

A poster on the streets in Wellington channels Rembrandt's painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp

This way up

The new director of the City Gallery in Wellington Elizabeth Caldwell certainly has her work cut out for her. The latest annual report from the Wellington Museums Trust shows that in the last year attendances at the City Gallery took another slide continuing a trend over the last four years. 

Attendance figures peaked in the 2007-2008 year at 203,919 but are now down to 143,000 lifting the subsidy per visitor to $16.79. And as if that's not enough the approval rating for the City Gallery is also on a decline. This year’s report has it at 86 percent with general awareness of the Gallery by the Wellington public down to 79 percent, a six percent drop on last year. 

In this context then it's got to be full marks to the Museums Trust for announcing in its annual report that it has decided not to impose a door charge. 

The City Gallery's struggles appear to be with exciting, fresh programming that builds a repeat audience. A surfeit of sculpture shows, eccentric combos (think Rob McLeod with Rohan Wealleans) and an overall lack of direction have undermined the Gallery's standing. Something that will make a real difference is the appointment of a senior curator. It's getting on for a year since the last one (Kate Montgomery) left the building so it's hard to understand why this job hasn't been filled by now. There's always the suspicion that delays in appointments help trim budgets but saving money isn’t going to save the day. 

You can get a copy of the Wellington Museums Trust’s 2011-2012 Annual Report here. 

Images: Left, Rohan Wealleans and right Rob McLeod at the City Gallery

Art in the workplace

Art hard at work in the foyers of the world

Dream time

Now that the barriers between design and the visual arts are easing, this is the perfect time to take another look at what used to be called commercial art. Fortunately one of the most beautiful and comprehensive reviews of one area of such design has just been published and it's all about NZ. Selling the dream: the art of early New Zealand tourism comes from the publisher Craig Potton and has been conceptualised, assembled and designed and by Peter Alsop, Gary Stewart and Dave Bamford. That it's the result of dedicated collecting and researching over a very long time is evident on every gorgeous page. 

One thing you notice is how many of the images that feature in the book are by unknown artists. While there are the well-known visual art-crossover names like Leonard Mitchell, Marcus King Russell Clark and John Holmwood, most of the credits are for anonymous artists at work in places like the Tourist Department and the Railways Department. This makes it a real Wellington book as the government departments running NZ tourism were based in that city for so long. There's a lot of amazing new material to discover and some stunning images. One favourite is Leonard Mitchell’s classic man alone on a mountain top which we remember bowling American art historian Charles Eldredge for a six when he was curating the touring exhibition of New Zealand art Pacific Parallels.

Will there ever be a better book than this one on New Zealand’s unsung commercial designers? It’s hard to imagine looking at what a terrific job has been done here. 

Image: Left: Selling the dream. Right, an illustration titled The great Franz Joseph Glacier by Leonard Mitchell for Scenic playground of the Pacific published by the Tourist Department around 1935

Mightier than the pen is

Another mash up of OTN favourites this time lookalikes and giant outdoor sculptures. On the left at just over 20 meters high the proposed sculpture Verity by Damien Hirst that is being installed at Ilfracombe in North Devon this week and on the right Mother Russia a Hirst belittling 52 meters high on Mamaev Hill in Volgograd

One day in the offices of Dr Seuss Enterprises

Director 1: I've been thinking that we need another Dr Seuss Fine Art Gallery out there in the world. Just having one here in Chicago and one in Sydney is small-time thinking, it lets down our collectors. 

Director 2: Do you think anywhere else will be interested? I mean, they're only reproductions, you know ... they were made after He died. 

D1: Ok, so He didn’t make them Himself, big whoop. He never liked the idea anyway. Frankly all this stuff about prints needing to be overseen by the artists or signed on the sheet is just professional nitpicking. What we need is some big-picture-thinking. How about stretching out even beyond Sydney. Is there anything like that?

D2: There's Wellington in New Zealand.

D1: You're kidding me?

D2: Absolutely not. Think about it. “Dr Seuss Galleries only in the USA, Australia and NZ". 

D1: Put that way I'm not so sure ... still, as the great Dr Seuss, God bless Him, would say “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.” 

D2: So ... we’ll do it? 

D1: Why the hell not. But it’ll need a lot of publicity to kick it off. And that means a big time NZ art celebrity to open it. Anyone spring to mind? 

D2: Sally Ridge for sure, I checked her out on the Internet last week. 

D1: Last week? … probably left it too late. How about some big shot art museum person? 

D2: Yeah, I've got one of them too, the CEO of Te Papa. It's the national museum of New Zealand. 

D2: The CEO of Te Papa. Open a Dr Seuss reproductions gallery! Give me a break. He’d never do it. Not in a thousand years. 

But he did. 

Lean too

We’ve already posted on this angle being taken in sculpture by our own John Radford in Ponsonby but here’s some more works submerging or, more optimistically, emerging. 

Images: Top to bottom left to right. The Glue Society’s Buried digger, Bicyclette Ensevelie by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen in Paris, Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Cornelia Konrad’s Still life in Essen, Trowel I by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, furniture project by artist Hannes van Severen

Had to happen

Mari Kasurinen's My Little-Damien

The knowledge

Mami Kataoka, this year’s Walters Prize judge, will be back in New Zealand next week to decide who gets the cash and the trip to New York. Looking back over the winners so far (Yvonne Todd, et al., Francis Upritchard, Peter Robinson and Dan Arps) it hasn’t always been easy to guess the winner but recently we did meet someone who has guessed every winner from Yvonne Todd on. Not only that, they are also confident that they'll be able to tag this year’s one too. 

 So, if you want to be at the Walters Prize dinner next week and have the pleasure of just shrugging your shoulders in a so-what-I-knew-that-already kind of way when Kataoka makes her announcement, here’s what you’ve got to do. (Spoiler alert: it involves research.)

 No big surprise that each Walters judge brings along the way they frame up art before they came to New Zealand. This frame is what you need to define as it determines who they give the prize to. It’s as easy as one, two. 

1) Get a list of the most recent exhibitions, projects or biennales curated by the judge and read up on them very carefully to figure the kind of work that will be top of her/ his mind. 

2) Check on any recent (has to be very recent) statements the judge has made. 

Then simply apply the frame you have developed and see which artist fits it best, or equally, who falls outside it. 

But does it really work we asked. How about Dan Arps. Surely he was a dark horse winner? Not so if you look at judge Vicente Todoli’s most recent exhibition before coming to NZ. Apparently it was all very Arps-like and, as important, not at all Connor, Leek or Monteith-like at all. OK, how about Yvonne Todd? No one picked the first winner. Not so. Turns out a month or so before he came to Auckland Harald Szeemann who had famously supported young artists all his curating career said in an interview that he was focussing on supporting the work of young women. Game set and match. The three other artists nominated were men. 

Thanks to our Walters Prize guesstimator, you know who you are.

White Cubism

“MoMA has been hugely influential, so that almost all of the other museums in America have a modern wing attached to them. And frankly these wings impress me as deadly: the same white walls with the same loud, large, obvious, instantly recognisable products lined up on them. Nothing in the so-called academic institutions of the 19th century approach them in orthodoxy and predictability.” 
Nicholas Penny, Director, National Gallery, London in The art newspaper

Crowd sourcing

Art museums the world over have become obsessed with getting bums through the door. It’s turned out to be one of those ideas that makes sense right up to the minute it doesn't. Yes, be careful what you wish for. Anyone who has tried to get a glimpse of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre or struggled through the crowds at MoMA or the Met knows that now the experience is often not worth the ticket price. Long queues to get in, longer queues to park your coat and bag if it’s Winter and then a constant crush on the stairs, in the corridors and lined up in front of the most famous works. It's crowds all the way down. 

Some museums have reacted to the avalanche of visitors by putting on time restrictions and others by limiting entry numbers but the best visitor strategy is to concentrate on works that aren’t on the greatest-hits list. When you speed walk (ok run) through the Vatican’s corridors to try to have the Sistine Chapel to yourself (we did it back in 1975 by following Georgina Masson's instructions in her classic guide to Rome but it may not be possible any more) you zoom past Raphael’s masterpiece The School of Athens in a room that rarely has more than a few people in it while the Chapel itself is quickly packed with craners. It's the same in Paris where the Mona Lisa shares space with da Vinci's beautiful but not as famous and therefore not as crowded Madonna of the rocks. 

In all the competition over increasing attendance numbers the irony of the next few years may well turn out to be instead how to let fewer people into the building. 
 Image: Crowds at MoMA

X marks the spot

The recent outpouring in Twitter over the defacing of a Rothko painting in the Tate the other day (here’s a good summary on Best of 3) got us to checking out how many times that artist has appeared on OTN over the years. Well that was a bit of a surprise. Turns out we have featured or mentioned Rothko 17 times, including a terse post of 16 May 2007 “Sell Rothko” (so much for us knowing anything about the art market).

Rothko on OTN::

His inclusion in 1952 MoMA show 15 Americans Sell
Rothko Hanging on the set of I am legend
 Getting rained on in Australia
Coming in second fiddle to a four year old
Being insulted by the Arts Channel
Telling it like it is Being hung upside down
Getting rained on – again (well, it was a great story)
Starring in Kick-ass
Standing up and being counted
Being on MTV
Making a guest appearance in the AAG’s collection
Starring in Entourage
Spotted in an Auckland Sushi bar
Influencing McCahon
Starring in Mad Men

Image: Mark Rothko’s 1958 canvas Black on Maroon the way it should be

Stand up

Well you have to hand it to Alastair Carruthers, Chair of Creative New Zealand. Not only did CNZ put up a video tour of the Contact exhibition in the Frankfurter Kunstverein on YouTube just days after the opening, but Carruthers stepped up with Haniko Te Kurapa and fronted it himself. The two give a very useful tour of the show talking with the curator Leonhard Emmerling and the Kunstverein director Holger Kube Ventura who also commented on the exhibition’s themes. “It’s completely different to what we had before … with the other shows of guest of honour countries…. It’s a much more political show … with Iceland I was wondering why are there not any political questions from Iceland? It is just the opposite here.” 

So did CNZ stand behind the politics of the artists, curators and especially the hard-hitting Peter Robinson work with the swastika? They did indeed. Robinson’s paintings are featured full frame with Carruthers describing them as a “series of confrontations laid down by Peter Robinson with his extremely provocative images. A remarkable thing, to not just present a Maori Pakeha confrontation, but [also] to bring a swastika to Germany, does feel kind of bold.” 

Say what you like about Creative New Zealand (and we have at times) you couldn’t expect anything more from your arts funding body than this. 

Image: Alastair Carruthers (left), stands in front of work by Judy Millar, talking to Kunstverein director Holger Kube Ventura