The man in the hat

Rene Magritte poses for Duane Michals

Pay and display

Anyone who watched the New Plymouth City Council meeting last year when it agreed to go ahead with the Len Lye Centre could see there was trouble brewing. It wasn't just the nine to six vote but the tone of the debate. Then the local body elections at the end of last year resulted in an even more volatile mix on the NP City Council. Committed to "sorting out the Council's financial situation" made the Govett-Brewster's situation even more tricky. Reading the report in the local paper you can feel in the Councilor’s language that there is more than just the Len Lye Centre in their sights.

The new bosses are now starting to express themselves and one of their decisions is to impose entry fees when the Len Lye Centre opens. There's the usual caveat that only out-of-towners will be charged. Govett-Brewster director Simon Rees will certainly be able to demonstrate through any amount of national and international research that entry fees will devastate attendances, even if watered down to an out-of-towners-only charge. And of course these door charges add virtually nothing to the budget.

What can be done? Well the first thing we might expect is for the museum directors of NZ to come out with a strong public statement calling on the Council to rescind its decision to charge for the Len Lye Centre. The LL Centre will have a common entrance with the Govett-Brewster (a much promoted feature). Who'll be surprised when the Govett-Brewster is next to get a door charge imposed? Then watch the dominos start to fall. Local bodies around the country are all itching to apply user-pays wherever they can.

Then there's the government. It already has $4 million dollars of skin in the Len Lye Centre's game (and who knows how much over the years in the Govett-Brewster’s). If Len Lye is a National treasure as we have told countless times then it is surely a National responsibility to ensure it is available free to all of us.

COMMENT: Roy Clare, Director | Auckland War Memorial Museum | Tamaki Paenga Hira 
AKL Museum is free at point of entry for Aucklanders (who pay for us through their rates); but as of last October we have charged overseas visitors $25 and invited donations (unspecified sum) from NZers outside AKL. On average NZers donate $5.27 per head.

We were reluctant to implement this regime, but sustainability is all … the revenue stream is significant for us – and the turn-away numbers have been very low. The new system is also more intelligible than its forerunner – which specified a “voluntary donation of $10” for non-Aucklanders. Excuse me … when is a donation voluntary?

In principle, I agree that public collections should be freely available to the public. But we all have to live in a real world. Tourists have spent $000s flying or cruising here – it’s only fair they contribute to the costs of places of culture/arts that receive no state subsidy.

And all of us who lead these kinds of places need to be sensitive to the brutal evidence that relevance, cost and value are a complex equation in the public minds. We professionals all need to be better at expressing value and relevance. Secure in the knowledge that everyone else will be fluent in expressing costs.

Art is where you find it: Berlin

Never mind the quality add to the width

Talk back

While you were sleeping Creative NZ got a focus group together to advise it on what should be done with the visual arts. It has now released a draft report and wants your thoughts before it writes a final report for the Arts Council.

Ok, all this might seem a little abstract but what ever the Council approves will be put into action from January next year. And at this stage there are some significant changes in the wind.

You can tell who's who in CNZ's world by the make up of the focus group:
4 from art institutions (including Chartwell)
3 from tertiary institutions
2 from the commercial world (dealer and art fair)
1 representing ‘non commercial exhibition spaces’
1 practising artist

Oh, and two more art institution people who somehow joined in the discussions.

So not surprising the key driver in the document is Organisational Leverage. Creative NZ wants to team up with the existing arts infrastructure in NZ (art museums, universities) to spread its money further. Looking at you Artspace and Physics room.

To get to the good stuff check out the series of 'options.' You can read and respond here.

Red flags? A trend to greater centralisation, more bureaucracy and support of the status quo, aka art museums and tertiary education. As an organising idea leverage has one big negative - to reach agreement among participating organisations they tend to support the same projects with the same people around the same ideas that have already been proved successful.

Watch out for:
•    A strong indication that independent art spaces may be under attack for future funding. The options are complex but two possibilities are some kind of centralised organisation to manage experimental work  in non-commercial exhibition spaces and CNZ focusing its visual arts support via regional art museums and artist-run space.

•    Boosted support for international initiatives including artist residencies and the Venice Biennale

•    A proposal for $120,000 king-hit grants over two years for “established” artists

•    A concerted push to give more support to public art museums through artist residencies, curatorial internships, international projects in NZ, publications and organised talking. It's the leverage thing.

•    And most positively the idea of funding being “more tightly targeted towards independent artists who don’t have access to institutional resources, such as studio facilities and research funds for creative projects and publications."

Plus, hilariously “We propose to support a greater level of collaboration between New Zealand institutions”

Good luck with that

Not a Bacon

"It was so badly burned on the secondary market, it was crispy."

Todd Levin, director of New York's Levin Art Group telling Art in America why a Cindy Sherman photograph that had being doing the rounds on the secondary market failed to sell at auction.

Dead reckoning

What is it about rich people and death? Put the average rich person together with a skull or a juicy nature morte or something dead and stuffed and you’re talking happy-rich-person #wildgeneralisation. Start with the never-blink gambler David Walsh in Tasmania. His MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) is dedicated to death as well as to sex as we have written about before. The place is full of the requisite skulls, skins, bones, carcasses, even a time of death wager. Plus there's always the offer of a final resting place for your ashes if you want to stump up for a handcrafted reliquary. And we have discovered what you can find in Tasmania you can see reflected in Berlin, or maybe it's the other way around. The modestly titled me Collectors Room (the me stands for moving energies which will surely come as a surprise to all the cynics out there) is in fact a substantial new building in the centre of Berlin. Its purpose is to display the works owned by another very rich collector, Thomas Olbricht, as well as his international collecting colleagues. With all this money sloshing around you've got an ideal seedbed for lots of death stuff especially in Olbricht's own Wunderkammer. Crucifixes and taxidermy and skeletons are front and centre. So here's an idea. ME and MONA. They’re rich, they're men, they're both deep into death, they should get together. It’s a partnership to die for.

Images: top, death wish at me. Middle and bottom MONA keyring and mummy merchandise

Mitchell & Webb - Art Warehouse

A bit of grim humour to start off your Saturday. (Thanks P)

Homage to Picasso's Guernica

The inside and the outside stories.
Images: top, random tattoo site, bottom The Satorialist

By the numbers

0         the number of speeches the Minister of Culture and Heritage has made so far this election year

1.6      the percentage of dealer galleries from New Zealand in the total number at Art Basel Hong Kong

3.5      the number of years since Te Papa last had a senior curator of art

6         the number in thousands of dollars of the average Boosted grant over the programme's first year

10       the number in millions of dollars the Government wants spent on new public art on the banks of the Avon River ,while simultaneously announcing it won't pay for it

15       the amount in dollars charged as the entry fee for adults visiting the MTG Hawkes Bay (formerly the Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery)

17       the number in millions of dollars that the Ministry of Culture and Heritage is spending on the celebration of World War One

21       the number of reviews John Hurrell has written for EyeContact in the last two months

47.43   the number in thousands of dollars being spent by the new director of the Govett-Brewster Simon Rees on his first submission of contemporary art acquisitions to the City Council

130      the average number of dollars donated by individual contributors to Boosted in its first year 

213      the number of days community leaders, museum and art experts and iwi and cultural representatives have left to prepare a business case for Te Papa North

Cover story

Another Virgin in a condom controversy? Well sort of. Super art collector Aby Rosen has installed Virgin Mother by Damien Hirst in his front yard. Trouble is the bronze Mother is nine meters high and pokes up above the shrubbery. The neighbours found the half flayed nude a bit hard to take and asked Aby at the very least to turn the skinned side away from them and facing him. Being super rich Rosen doesn't warm to criticism but in the meantime he has put a sheath over the work giving us a unexpected segue back to the media storm at Te Papa’s opening exhibition.

Image: The VM channeling the VIAC

Paid in kind

In Canada artists get them by legislative right, the Norwegians base theirs on the amount of product and the duration of display, for the Swedes it’s a standard rate and the Poles attach theirs to the average monthly wage. We’re talking artist fees in public art institutions.

Some artist fees are paid in NZ by public institutions (we heard Auckland Art Gallery paid fees of $2,000 to artists included in Freedom Farmers) but they tend to be token compared to real costs. Usually artists are expected to be happy with what the Ministry of Culture and Heritage listed in a recent report as “The feeling of self-satisfaction from producing artworks which exemplify who you are as an artist” and “The value derived from your work being positively viewed by critical reviewers.” Thanks guys.

As usual any debate about fees is fuelled by context. In the museums that show art, staff salaries and conditions have increased phenomenally over the last 30 years. There is now an income and lifestyle chasm between the art professionals (the museum crowd surging ahead) and most of the contemporary artists they show (let's forget the teachers for the moment). Over the same three decades artist fees have stayed pretty much the same i.e. zero except for the odd exception. 

Even when fees are paid they are usually tied to production costs as artists today are expected to fill large spaces with work made for the occasion. Fortunately for the art museums the universities have joined the party with research funding for exhibitions by their staff although that's cold comfort for artists who haven't landed a teaching berth.

So should artists show for the love of it and the value of being "positively reviewed"? Other artists benefit directly from institutional exposure. Musicians get APRA fees and writers get some compensation from libraries sharing their books around. So here's another question. When art museums charge for exhibition entry, why don't the artists get a percentage? Creative NZ could take a lead and insist that any exhibitions it funds have artist fees in the budget.
 
A recent survey of 18,000 visual artists in the UK found that:
• 71 percent taking part in publicly funded exhibitions received no fee
• Of those, 59 percent did not get their expenses paid

Sounds familiar.

When artists pose

Could you just hold the zebra head a little higher Mr Freud? Just to get the stripes...you know. Yes that's perfect. Thank you.

Entranced

Sometimes great architecture is great because it doesn’t stand out from its context or see itself as a catalyst for a big statement. We saw a wonderful example in Renzo Piano’s reconstruction of the main gates to the fortified town of Valetta on Malta. This is the same Renzo Piano who designed one of the most elegant art museums in the world his poem to ‘demonumentalisation’, the Menil Collection in Houston.

Over the centuries six different gates into Valetta have been built with the pre-Piano one looking like something that one of Mussolini’s architects-to-go came up with on a bad day. Piano looked to the scale and grandeur of the extraordinary fortifications left by the Knights of Malta and inserted forms that connect with them in a way that blurs the historic chasm between the two. It is austere but purposeful. 

Best of all it's opened up parts of Valetta that have been hidden or obscured for years as well as offering sweeping new vistas to the island and to the Mediterranean. Making his structures in tune with the original battlements, crypts and turrets Piano has honoured one of the most beautiful cities in the world in a way it so well deserves.

Images: top, parts of the original fortifications near the gates to Valetta and bottom some of Renzo Piano's additions

Perfect

“I practice the piano; I do not “practice” art. I know “practice” is like a code word for what you do, but I don’t practice breathing, even though I do it.”
 
Richard Tuttle in an interview with Blouin Artinfo

The Peter principle

In the eighties we curated an exhibition called When art hits the headlines. It traced a long story of outrage, contention, hilarity and humiliation as the public, funders and taste makers set to about who got to decide what was and what was not art, what was and what was not good art and who was going to pay for it. In an age of increased professionalism art controversies are usually headed off before they erupt, but every now and then a Councillor will raise his (usually) head and observe that something is amiss. That’s clearly what happened in New Plymouth last week when a group of Peter Peryer photographs was put in front of a Council purchase sub committee. Councillor Colin Johnson challenged one, "I like art, and I like some of these pictures as well ... but I can't see the point in the carcass one, and I see it costs $2608." 

The Govett-Brewster’s director’s Simon Rees was quick to point out the irony that the ‘carcass’ was in fact a movie prop and (embarrassingly for the Councillor) a prop used in a movie shot locally #gottalovethelocal. While art controversies are often conceived in Council Chambers they are usually delivered by the media. Usually that media is WTFing over art but they're not above turning around and scorning the same behaviour from a local official. This was what happened in New Plymouth.

In earlier decades media flare-ups like this were usually distressing to the artist involved. Colin McCahon's treatment and his response to it are the textbook demonstration of such negative impacts. Today, it's often different. An email from Peter Peryer letting us know about the fuss was gleefully headed, "At it again!"