Room service

Imagine for a moment that John Key has to pop down to Dunedin for a couple of days. He’s taking his wife and they'll stay in the best hotel the city can offer. So what’s front-of-mind for the staffers organising the trip South? We know. Arranging for some great works of art to hang in their hotel room. Quick!  Call the Minister of Culture and Heritage (on second thoughts don’t bother, he’ll fill the place with Piera McCarthur #cheapshot #butwelldeserved). Hang on a moment. It was all a dream. An impossible dream.

But not impossible in Dallas back in November 1963 as you'd see if you visited the Amon Carter Museum. For the exhibition Hotel Texas the Museum has reassembled the works selected for the Kennedy’s suite 850 in Hotel Texas, Fort Worth. It was there they stayed the night before President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas . The President's room featured the more masculine oriented works by Thomas Eakins, Marsden Hartley and Charles M. Russell but ironically the couple didn’t get the ‘theming.’ The President slept in what was intended to be his wife’s room with Van Gogh's Road with Peasant Shouldering a Spade.
 
Images: Top, Hotel Texas November 1963. Bottom left the 'President's room' showing Thomas Eakins' famous painting Swimming and Charles M. Russell's Lost in a Snowstorm and bottom right the suite's living room featuring Lyonel Feininger's Manhattan II, Franz Kline's Study for Accent Grave and Spirit bird by Morris Graves. (source: Guardian)

By the numbers: Te Papa

0       the number of objects irreparably damaged by visitors to Te Papa last year

.5      the increase in the average age by years of the staff since last year

1       the percentage of items in Te Papa's collections that are on display

1.3    the amount in millions of dollars Te Papa spent on advertising and PR last year

3       the number of Te Papa staff members who are paid over $250,000 per year

6.5    the millions of kWh that Te Papa consumed last year

9       the number of publications published by Te Papa last year

13     the number of Te Papa staff who have declared a disability

15     the amount in millions of dollars by which the value of the art collection has decreased over the last year

36     the reduction in the staff headcount since last year

56     the percentage of Te Papa’s income that does not come from the Government

58     the percentage of staff working at Te Papa who are women

60.4  the cost in millions of dollars to run Te Papa for a year

75     the percentage of Te Papa staff members who are European

143.4 the value in thousands of dollars of items gifted or funded into Te Papa's collections

150    the amount in thousands of dollars paid to members of the Te Papa Board last year

338    the value in millions of dollars of Te Papa’s building and land

Really? The art world described

“A realm of self-proclaimed royalty full of ‘Black lists’ and ‘Grey lists’ and an astonishing chicanery.’
The judge presiding over the Zwiner/Robins suit

“The most opinionated group of people outside the Vatican.”
Richard Armstrong, Director Guggenheim Museum

“I like that it isn’t regulated”
Gerry Saltz, critic

“Although it reveres the unconventional it is rife with conformity.”
Sarah Thornton in Seven days and nights in the art world

"The art world is now a slave of mass culture. We have a sound-bite culture and so we have sound-bite art."
Matthew Collings, art writer and critic 

“It is the real world in microcosim. The same principles adhere, the same passions and sins, There is good as well as bad, and I have met some delightful people, some scum, and one or two who could be called noble.”
Sophy Burnham in her book The art crowd

“The first rule is you cater to the masses or you kow-tow to the elite; you can’t have both.”
Ben Hecht, film director and writer

“Very conspicuous consumption, very private gratification.”
David Zwirner, art dealer

School days

“Instead art school made instant radical changes to the kind of work I thought was acceptable. Rather than freeing me and releasing me into the slipstream of my ideas and giving me the technical skills to ride the current, art school changed what I thought was relevant.”
Megan Dunn in her essay Submerging artist that includes a poignant and soulful account of three years at art school - published by The Pantograph Punch (always a good read)

By the numbers: Venice 2013

Creative New Zealand announced yesterday that 218,000 people had visited the Bill Culbert exhibition over its six and a half month run at the Venice Biennale. Given that it also reports 14,000 of these people came in the first week alone, that’s 1,250 a day for every single day of the following 163 days. To put that into perspective, it’s over twice the number of people who go to regional galleries like the City Gallery Wellington, the Dowse Art Museum and the Govett-Brewster in a full year.

How do they count these people? As it happened we know as we visited the Culbert exhibition and saw the staff member at the door recording everyone who stepped inside. At one second per visitor that’s over 60 hours of work just there.

NZ’s 218,000 total tops Australia’s Simryn Gill presentation (in the Giardini and therefor subject to ticket sales) by 18,000 visitors and means that nearly half (45.9 percent) of the total visitors who attended the Biennale (475,000) went to the New Zealand pavilion. This hopefully also included half of the 4,655 journalists representing the foreign press.

The only other comparative stats we could find on the CNZ site for New Zealand at Venice was that 114,000 people visited the two exhibitions (Upritchard 21,642and Millar 92,914) in 2009.

The takeaway? Location, location, location. A prime spot on the promenade leading to the Giardini not only hooks in Biennale visitors but also gets the added values of tourists doing the stroll thing along the Riva degli Schiavoni from the Bridge of Sighs.

In which Claudia goes to the Academy

What’s going on at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts? Now that's not a question you'd ask very often and even if you did you may not hang around for the answer. Back in the seventies though the Academy's gallery was the place you went to see some of the best art exhibitions available in Wellington. There were at least a couple of reasons for that - Brian Carmody and Constance Kirkcaldie. Constance was director from 1975 to 1977 but was really running the place from the beginning of the seventies. She got up a programme that featured things like the Ten big paintings show from the Auckland Art Gallery, as well as a slate of exhibitions that included Ralph Hotere, Colin McCahon, Pat Hanly, Jim Allen, Tony Fomison and Terry Powell. 

Since then the Academy slowly reverted to being…er…an Academy again but now it has appointed Claudia Arozqueta as its new director and believe us this is no prints and pots curator. LOL was invented for how you would respond if anyone told you that this would happen even a couple of years ago. Claudia has been director of Enjoy (another Academy? .... just kidding) and before that a highly regarded and very well connected curator in Mexico and Russia. She is also a regular reviewer for Artforum so the NZAFA’s is waving rather a large contemporary art flag here. Go Claudia.
 
Image:The Selection Committee for the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, voting in 1956. (Negatives of the Evening Post newspaper. Ref: EP/1956/2170-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22659842

Square is the new pointy

We must have walked by it many times over the last few years but last Friday we actually noticed Rachel Walters sculpture Hau te kapakapa: the flapping wind. In an age of extreme art and in a land of tall pointy sculptures (the lower part of the North Island anyway) a work that sits quietly on the pavement in no big hurry to grab your attention is not common. 

Walters has cast a banana box (a staple for generations of apartment movers and the container of choice for ceramic artists to shift their wares) and set it like a bird trap on Queen Street at the entrance to Myers Park. A couple of bronze birds have already been caught and the work wonderfully provokes a mix of anxiety tinged with comedy. While we were watching two kids got down on their stomachs to try and count the catch, a couple of people took photographs and a passerby told us that she had seen them installing it a few years ago. It’s that sort of art, the kind that gets on with people and starts them talking to one another. There are couple more in the series by Walters nearby in the park.

Always last to know

A reader has let us know (thanks B) that Te Papa has in fact appointed an Curator Historical International Art and a Curator Modern Art. We were fooled by the Te Papa staff list still saying the positions are vacant. Oh that and the fact that if you Google their names you don’t get a news flash or 'Te Papa' in the results.

Anyway, Curator Modern Art is Chelsea Nichols. She was previously an exhibition assistant at the police museum and then a Research and Development Coordinator at the Auckland Art Gallery helping to “develop new gallery interpretation strategies” for he opening of the new building and then onto ST Paul Street.

Curator Historical International Art is Mark Stocker who is an associate professor in the Department of History and Art History at Otago University. Stocker is a past editor of the Journal of New Zealand Art History. His main research area is Victorian sculpture but he also publishes on Numismatics and was awarded the Numismatic Association of Australia Ray Jewell bronze medal in 2011. You can watch him talking about his favourite painting in Te Papa Zinnias by British artist William Nicholson here.

Your tax dollar at work

The Te Papa score sheet (sorry, we mean Annual Report) is just out with last year’s results.  So what have they been up to over the last year?

ART GOT MORE SPACE. The commitment to an “increase in art exhibition space from 2,500m² to more than  8,000m² is being met with the first  650 m² already open.
 
OUR PLACE IS NOT NECESSARILY YOUR PLACE. 45 percent of visitors (just under 600,000 of them) are international tourists while 32 percent of NZ visitors are from the Wellington region. Just 24 percent of visitors come from the rest of New Zealand.

GO FIGURE. Even with refurbished exhibitions Te Papa still struggles to raise visitor numbers. In total 65,600 (just over 1,000 a week) fewer people visited than last year keeping Te Papa’s figures stuck at the 1.3 million mark.

UP AND OUT. The number of staff paid over $100,000 has gone up from 31 to 34.  $1,396,535 was paid to 31 people made redundant over the year

MAJORITY RULES. Visitors of European ethnicity are now up to 78 percent, a 5 percent increase on last year.

DON'T PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED. For all the talk of art being important there is still no senior curator, curator of Modern art or historical NZ art, so the publishing is negligible.  2 research papers, 3 conference presentations, 4 ‘popular’ articles and 1 book (The New Zealand art activity book: 100+ ideas for creative kids)

PURCHASES FOR ART POST-WWII ARE KIND OF SKEWED. 8 paintings by men (John Pine Snadden, Gordon Walters, Michael Illingworth, Brent Wong, Allen Maddox, Peter Robinson, Darryn George and Shane Cotton who’s painting is recorded as Contemporary Maori art unlike Peter Robinson and Darryn George), 4 works on paper by men (Eric Lee-Johnson, Edward Bullmore, Michael Stevenson x2) and 2 digital works by men (x2 Michael Stevenson). Then there's 1 sculptural installation (Yuk King Tan), 1 international installation (Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser) and about 96 photographs including around 40 works by Ans Westra and 1 by Bryony Dalefield. New Zealand based and born Bruce Connew filled in as an International Artist with Te Papa's purchase of 5 photos.

Te Papa's Annual Report is also interesting for what it doesn’t tell you: 

•    The number of visitors under the age of 16 (they aren’t separately recorded - maybe they are hiding in the 16-24 year old figures?)
•    The percentage of attendances that were not for museum purposes (i.e. people who were there for conferences, film festivals, Marae functions, weddings etc.)
•    The percentage of involuntary attendances (i.e. school groups etc)
•    The visitor numbers for each of the paid exhibitions like Game Masters, Angels & Aristocrats and Warhol Immortal
•    The number of visitors to non paying exhibitions like Angels and aristocrats

We’ll ask Te Papa all these questions and get back to you.

You can download the Te Papa Annual Report as a pdf here (we found it under Legislation and Accountability).

Pasted

Watching the efforts of public art museums to attract their audiences often makes apparent the chasm between the marketers and the curators. Tried and true ways to pull the people that seem obvious to marketers are often at odds with the programming strategies of the very same institutions. Its crudest form was to be seen in campaigns like the Saatchi & Saatchi billboards displaying fake McCahons to promote the opening of the City Gallery in Wellington 20 years ago.

To promote its latest tranche of exhibitions Te Papa has taken to art punning duos (‘art warming’, ‘art stopping’ etc.) setting ‘ordinary visitor types’ against art works (striking self portrait by Rita Angus / striking photo of a contemporary woman that looks a bit like her). We didn’t say it was subtle, and a major upside is that the poster pasters themselves can zoom it up, which is fun for the rest of us. 
 
In the north, Auckland Art Gallery in the midst of its major commitment to showing contemporary art has decided to advertise that it is …. free.  While this is a classic ticketing venue approach (where tickets are usually paid for) it’s bizarre for an institution that rarely charges for New Zealand exhibitions and never does for general entry. And the marketer’s call to action?  “A summer showcase of new exhibitions and special events”.  Exciting. What ever happened to promoting Freedom Farmers as one of the most ambitious exhibitions of local contemporary art that the Auckland Art Gallery has ever mounted? Its title is only included in the smallest of type as part of a photo credit. Art Breaking.

Images: Top TePapa, bottom AAG

...and on the table

Today seven years ago we started OTN. Here’s a post from each year (you get eight thanks to OTN starting late in 2006)

The list of artists in Contemporary painters volume II December 2006
Here’s a piece of advice to anyone in the publishing business: never call anything volume I unless you are definitely going to come up with volume II.

Trip of a lifetime July 2007
When Helen Clarke threw a paddy over et al.’s selection for the Venice Biennale, Creative NZ made a big decision. Rather than send an artist to the next Biennale it would spend $56,000 sending a committee of five instead. They’d have a look around and see if it was worth going again some time. You can follow the committee and their Trip of a life time via the various links in this post.

My camera mon amour August 2008
Art in the movies, movies and art, what’s not to like.

When good sculpture turns bad December 2009
Our favourite Christmas photo of all time snuck into the ongoing series that looks at the perils of public sculpture

Spam November 2010
A classic sample of the unvarnished facts, reckless guesswork, insinuations and possible inventions sent in by our readers (Thanks to all of you)

Te Papa - go figure December 2011
How do the big institutions count their audiences? On their fingers as it transpires.

Last farewells April 2012
Over the last seven years OTN has been the sad recorder of the passing parade but none was sadder than saying goodbye to William McAloon.

And that is what they did November 2013
How do the the big decisions get made in the art world? Let us help you with that.

Boyd watching

Some of our great art experiences have been outside art museums, so if you're ever in Melbourne there's a stunner in the Arts Centre just down the road from the National Gallery of Victoria. It's the building with the Eiffel Tower-like spire. Go in through the main doors and down the stairs to the box office level except at the bottom turn left instead of right. Here you'll find 16 Arthur Boyd paintings commissioned for this space. When art people claims works are 'museum quality' this is what they're talking about. And the environment is fantastic. No barriers and no glazing. Lots of comfortable seating and the sound of rehearsals drifting in from the performance venues. 
 

The red and gold décor (it was going to be red marble and red leather) is straight from the glory days of the late seventies and the number of mirrors is extreme but somehow it works out fine. You can spend as much time as you like alone (we had them to ourselves for over an hour) with some beautiful paintings of the Shoalhaven River, Pulpit Rock and a couple of larger works, one called The actor (a crowned figure with a chook slung over his shoulder) and the other a landscape with one of Boyd’s signature dogs. Curiously, as evocative of the Australian landscape as they are, these paintings were made by Boyd while he was living in London.
Images: top, stairway to heaven. Bottom a sampling of the 16 paintings that line the halls.

Old school

You can never have too many art schools. That’s been the general idea in New Zealand over the last couple of decades. Many of the new ones arrived via a pimp-my-polytech craze that accelerated to absorb the increasing numbers of Gen Y school leavers who wanted to 'do something in the arts'. Now at least one of them - Auckland's Unitec - is reverting back to its Polytechnic roots as an industry-based training institution. In the process they are restructuring the 50 staff in the visual art department down to 17. 

Currently Unitec lists 27 lecturers and seven senior lecturers on its design and visual arts staff. There are some well-known and respected names among them including Yvonne Todd, Nicholas Spratt, Marie Shannon, Lisa Reihana, Allan McDonald, Mark Braunias, Edith Amituanai and Susan Jowsey. Will this return to the old-school idea of specific industry training be contagious? Not hard to think of a number of other art schools that may now be wondering just how long they will keep offering the visual arts as their core business.

You can read more about the Unitec restructure and its implications here.

Roger Boyce comments (28:11:13 / revised 2/12/13): A Neo Liberal sadist's game of musical chairs. By the way, the fellow who's orchestrating the 'pogrom' is Leon de Wet Fourie (former Intelligence Officer,rank of Major, in the South African National Defence Force). Can you beat that for Joseph Heller style black humour? 50 folks wrestling for 17 positions. Would make great Japanese reality TV programming. With Steven 'Pugsly' Joyce fat-fingerdly fiddling the tune. Five hundred and sixty students presently enrolled in the department - Unitec has used these numbers to honk about its scale of "real world learning. Honk, honk, huh? Upper management will, reportedly, be hiring yet more managers of departments who have no teaching experience and no research experience. Students will be galley slaves (um, interns) with design firms ... and teaching will be casualized and insecure. Welcome to the neo-Hobbesian world of modern academia. Taxpayers (via the benefit) will be subsidizing the new low-income, part time status of tertiary teaching professionals.

Talking shop

As the boundaries between design and the visual arts continue to collapse, we’re seeing a lot more art product out there. The segue from gallery to shop was started by museums with a blockbuster agenda and art museums got into the act fast. Gift shops became as essential as cafes with books relegated to a support role. Most of the artists were dead so no harm no foul.
 
But as art products became an essential part of marketing any large-scale exhibition the artists involved often became active partners. Didn’t take too long for some of them to figure out that institutions clipping the ticket was just annoying and so the rise and rise of Hirst, Shrigley and in New Zealand Frizzell and Poppelwell. Now there’s a new art product experience online courtesy of Ruben Paterson. Here's where you can get your Silk and glitter dust flower brooches and headbands, Reuben Paterson for World Badge and Ts.

Nine years later

 

Guys, you've got to let it go.