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0 the number of dollars it will cost you to visit the Eli Broad museum of contemporary art currently being built in LA
1 the number in billions spent on art per year by the royal family of Qatar
6.6 the cost in millions of dollars paid for the townhouse in New York where Warhol lived from 1959 to 1974
8 the estimated number in billions of dollars of the size of the annual global auction market
15 the number of curators it took to curate the current Texas Biennial
15 the number in thousands of masters degrees in the visual and performing arts awarded each year in the United States
15.3 the amount in millions of dollars slashed off the value of a Peter
Doig painting offered for auction when Peter Doig announced he didn’t do
it
43 the percentage representing the amount of contemporary art sold in the current art market
93 the number in thousands of new bachelor degrees in the visual and performing arts awarded each year in the United States
137 the number in millions of dollars paid for the work of Andy Warhol in the first half of 2013
425 the number of gondolier available for hire in Venice to get you to the Bill Culbert exhibition at the Venice Biennale
4000 the number of counterfeit tickets to the Louvre found concealed in a parcel from China by Belgian customs officials
Here's a home decorating tip for the weekend. July’s Home and Garden features an Auckland family who have a full-sized ‘recreation’ of Picasso painting in response to the massacre of civilians in Guenica during the Spanish Civil war. “We love this hallway” they told the magazine cheerfully, “it’s always so light and welcoming.”
The Ministry of Transport and Local Government give tribute in the way they know best to the artists of New Zealand. This week the mother lode. (
Thanks for that J)
Last week we put in a request to the Ombudsman that Creative NZ release the names of curator/artist teams who made proposals for the Venice Biennale 2015. Our argument was that it is impossible to evaluate the final decision without knowing the options on offer.
The Ombudsman’s Office will no doubt report back in due course, but as the Creative NZ panel has now met and made its selection to be probably announced next week, here's what we have pieced together from what is already known around the traps. There are still a few gaps so when (and if) we get them out of CNZ we'll let you know.
Robert Leonard curator / Simon Denny and Yvonne Todd artists (two separate proposals)
Rhana Devenport curator / Lisa Reihana and Alex Monteith artists (two separate proposals)
Aaron Kreisler curator / Dane Mitchell artist
Tina Barton curator / Billy Apple artist
Natasha Conland curator / Kate Newby artist
Sarah Farrar curator / Group show
Andrew Clifford curator / Seung Yul Oh artist
Charlotte Huddleston curator / Paul Cullen artist
Anthony Byrt curator / Steve Carr artist
Emma Bugden curator / Ronnie van Hout artist
Vera May curator / Hye Rim Lee artist
Mary Kisler curator / Gretchen Albrecht artist
Mercedes Vincent curator / Maddie Leach artist
Of the other four curator/artist teams we have heard not a word, however as all but one of the artists living in NZ are from Auckland perhaps they are all from the South Island (just kidding).
Image: Secret Squirrel
In what they described as their Definitive Sales Report From the Inaugural Sydney Contemporary Blouin Artinfo announced that Brisbane-based Ryan Renshaw Gallery sold two works by Yvonne Todd to the National Gallery of Victoria and another was put on reserve by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The gallery also sold all editions of Yvonne Todd's first video Smoke Emitters along with five large and three small works.
When was it that artist talks first became an entertainment category for art museums? There was a time when artists were expected to be um…visual... rather than verbal and if they could articulate their work through talk too that was just fine but not essential. Well that’s all been changed thanks to the tertiary education system.
Artists who have been through the system are expected to be able to present a convincing articulation of what they are up to on the wall or on the floor and the art museums have taken note. Now the artist talk has become a staple of institutional programming and those who can't or won't join the talkfest are punished as et al. discovered when they presented a zipped lip at Venice.
But yesterday we went to an artist talk (four artists talking in fact) that was a mix of awkward silences, meandering sidelines, complicated inner monologues and generic presentation skills. It was annoying and refreshing and riveting. The photos sum it up best as Nick Austin grabs for words while he struggles to ‘explain’ one of his works.
When describing another painting (a shark’s fin seen through the window of an envelope) Austin told us:
“I think it’s about worry.
I think it’s about bad news.
I think it’s about worrying about bad news.
Bad news, circling around.”
All this was hard-won with long pauses and fill-in gestures of the hand and body. Thanks Nick... and the rest of you too.
Images: Nick Austin at the City Gallery one of the four artists talking about their works in the exhibition New Revised Edition: Nick Austin, Andrew Barber, Nicola Farquhar, John Ward Knox
unvarnished facts, reckless guesswork, insinuations and possible inventions that have arrived at overthenet: the govett-brewster has gone off shore to get its new director • also from off shore a curator from germany has arrived with his family to take the g-b curator job • hopkinson mossman has scored a direct hit with 70 percent of the artists in the latest city gallery exhibition coming from their list • artists showing in the university of auckland’s porn show were each paid a fee of $5,000 • the director of the aag attended the sydney art fair last weekend and put an option on two works by an nz artist on show in the booth of an australian gallery • the te papa aztec exhibition that was looking like a no go has been saved at the last moment and will go ahead as planned • as of this morning christchurch needs only $7,000 to secure $400,000 via pledges and dollar-for-dollar support to help pay for michael parekowhai’s bull on a piano • any missed details, indignant denials or additions gratefully received, and any that makes us laugh out loud will be suitably rewarded.
(and thanks to L, T, I and P, you know who you are)
The moment when artists become brands
Has any new art museum (or indeed any art museum that has just undergone a rebuild) ever failed to tell its audience that it will now be making its collections more available through open storage? And do they ever do it? That would be a no.
Sure, the idea of 'open hang' was been tried a few times by putting a lot of the collection up on a rotating basis. And sometimes, when institutions are opening or closing their buildings, they try to make a big splash by hanging virtually everything from the collection at the same time. And yet whatever they do the back rooms, and the mystery that surrounds them, remain out-of-bounds except for the odd special tour and prowling photographers who are regularly drawn to the stored collections as their subject matter.
On Sunday at the Dowse Art Museum we saw a small light shining on this ‘hidden’ storeroom dilemma. Simple solution really. They just hauled some of the storage cabinets out of the storeroom and into the gallery spaces complete with the objects stacked and packed inside. It might be a bit odd for the makers of these objects to see them presented like this wrapped, collared and rolled, but people were intrigued and looking hard. It was a back room experience without having to get into that back room.
A next step? How about asking people to note things they spot in the cabinets they’d like a better look at and make a small exhibition of them. With exhibition budgets at an all time low we figure your going to be a lot more of this work-that-collection activity.
"She's the Picasso of the entertainment world."
Painter and entertainer Tony Bennett speaking about Lady GaGa
A waking nightmare for public art museums is the suggestion that they might be using public money to advance private gain. To that end they are pretty careful to ensure that people don’t lend paintings to them and then use the exhibition to promote the work they own. It's not clear how much being in a public museum exhibition does affect value but the institutions certainly believe it does and the importance that artists put on their work being in public collections gives some credence to the idea.
So there must have been some fast in-takes of air when Webb’s started promoting their next premium auction in their catalogues and online noting that the featured work “is currently exhibited at City Gallery, Wellington, Shane Cotton: The Hanging Sky, until 6 October”. And there it was full page. Shane Cotton’s The painted bird, 2010. This is the same work that is featured on the banner currently hanging outside the City Gallery and on the cover of the luxurious publication that accompanies the show.
The work was purchased three years ago at the Anna Schwartz Gallery in Sydney from the exhibition Shane Cotton: smashed myth in which Cotton spectacularly filled Schwartz's enormous space in an old railyards building known as Carriageworks. We happened to be there when the sale was made and the obviously super rich I'll-buy-the-painting guy told us that he didn’t have a wall big enough for this work so he'd have to build something for it. We were impressed but clearly it never happened and now the painting's on the block rather than on the wall.
Given the original price (around $A90,000 or $NZ110,000 at the time from memory), the low estimate of $120,000 at auction minus the seller’s commissions and so forth doesn’t seem to make much sense in terms of making a quick killer-profit, but maybe having it featured as the icon work in a trans-Tasman survey exhibition will justify the public museums' fears and fly right through the roof.
Images: The painted bird features in Webb's upcoming auction top and at Wellington's City Gallery bottom.
When Andy Warhol said he thought “everybody should be a machine” he almost certainly wasn’t thinking of them becoming painting machines. We’ve talked about machines that can paint before but now the IT guys are at it and going that extra awful step. Not content with machines that can paint like…um..machines, they're cranking up machines that can paint like humans (as if we can’t already do that ourselves).
Let's take Kenichi Yoneda. He claims in a recent Wired magazine to have created a machine that can make human-looking marks mimicking brush strokes and palette knife sweeps. It’s alright Mr Richter, you don’t have to panic just yet. Although the algorithms can imitate the human hand (sort of) they're a long ways away from the human mind. You can judge for yourself here.
Twitter's Ask-a-curator day responds to questions
If you've been to the Gregory Crewdson exhibition at Wellington’s City Gallery, you'll have probably figured out the close relationship between Crewdson‘s imagery and the paintings of Edward Hopper. Crewdson himself talks of Hopper’s “ideas of beauty, theatricality, sadness, rootlessness and desire.” We've previously posted on Hopper’s influence on the movies but taking up the beauty and sadness theme in lookalike mode, some riffs on Hopper’s most famous work Nighthawks.
Images: Top to bottom left to right, Nighthawks recreations in NY’s Flatiron building and in Star Trek, LEGO and The Simpsons. Wim Wenders does a homage in his 1997 movie End of violence. The New Yorker covers Hopper and CSI fills the diner with bodies
