If I were King of Timbuktu ....

Imagine for a moment you're Rick Ellis and you've just been made CE of Te Papa. Whoops. Just kidding. Get up off the floor. After our pretty successful attempt at guessing the kind of person who would be picked as Te Papa’s next CE let's look at his track record and take a stab at what he's likely to do.

Ask questions. Ellis will quickly discover there's a big difference between what Te Papa claims to be doing and what’s actually going on. Basically it’s a kid's museum with scholarly pretentions, so an easy model to change so long as he doesn't get lost in the current echo chamber. Asking real questions and expecting real answers at Te Papa? Brutal.

Focus. The current mantra "Changing hearts, changing minds, changing lives" would suit a neighborhood bookstore just as well as Te Papa. Expect Ellis to take up the challenge and shift scale. The 200 (+ however many) staff of Te Papa makes it a giant in the cultural arena but in media and tech it's a minnow. As he’s done in the past look to Ellis to focus on attracting bigger audiences in the right demographics, and with no advertisers to satisfy. Brilliant.

Bring in some friends to help. It's what professional CEs always do. If he's only got three years to sort things out he's going to need help fast from people he knows can deliver. The current staff spend their time tip-toeing round in what's being called a 'toxic' culture. Rick Ellis is known to be impatient when he's slowed down by anything (especially the incumbent culture slowing things down). Watch for the rapid departure of top-level staff.

Play the game he knows. This is someone experienced in media production, communication and digital services. He'll see Te Papa as an under-utilised brand property with commercial potential as a digital platform. And why wouldn't he.

Play the game he knows Part II. Ellis is a money guy. He's going to expect return on the building and the assets. He believes in the logic of the market. Conventional museum shows don't bring in big profits (especially when you take into account the costs) so what's a new CE to do? Branch out, that's what.

Learn from the Giant Squid. No big secret that Te Papa’s most popular events have all been based on the cabinet of curiosities principle. More, bigger, stranger stuff. Bring on the society of the spectacle. 

Franchise, partner, whatever. Developing new stuff from the ground up takes too long and it's too expensive. The proposed movie museum and WETA are obvious targets for Ellis's media experience and connections. Peter Jackson’s skills can bring people and cash to Te Papa and Te Papa can put the Jackson story round the world with classy packaged exhibitions in premium venues. Born for each other. And Ellis will have many other friends in the entertainment culture industries to play with. He will be furious though about the mega Gallipoli exhibition being held in the old National Museum and Art Gallery and not on the waterfront at Te Papa. But what are the chances of the government changing NZ's remembrance date for him. Not high.

Go national. The drumbeat to serve the whole nation is sounding loud and clear. Sticking the lesser collections and a few classrooms in Manukau City was never going to do it. Talking digital and interactive isn't either but guess he'll figure out the ROI and problems with content soon enough.

Pull a rabbit out of the hat. Work out how to pay for a serious digital presence and not leave the current building as a run down brand-embarrassment? (see staff cuts below).

Cut staffing levels (duh) and move to part-timers for basic operational services. He's done it before. He definitely knows the way.

 Interrogate the scholarly staff and peer review their outputs. Move them out of the building, give them targets and genuine accountability. Threaten them with absorption into the tertiary sector as Plan B. Sorted.

Get all that pesky art stuff the hell out of the building.  There’s no money to be made on it and precious little thanks (Rick Ellis pauses, looks out his window at the old National Art Gallery building in the far distance .... hmmm … he thinks to himself .... maybe after that Gallipoli exhibition…..)

Careful what you wish for

"take dramatic steps forward"
“move its capabilities to a different level”
“require a shift in the culture of the organization”
“take Te Papa to a new level of performance and excellence”
“help strengthen a national treasure”
"extend beyond the walls of our buildings"
"make Te Papa available for everyone in New Zealand"

Media quotes from Te Papa in announcing its newly appointed CE Rick Ellis ex TVNZ and Telstra Media

The block

As the final major art auctions of the year approach there's been a rush to print by the two competing houses Webb’s and Art + Object.  Webb’s catalogue doubles up as a magazine with news from the art world and an aggressive PR piece on Milan Mrkusich. Surprisingly it's written by one of our academic art historians Professor Emeritus Michael Dunn. He's abandoned his usual tone of scholarly consideration to pump the “famous” Elements series and the “celebrated” Corner series and then claims that Mrkusich has “outlived most of his contemporaries and outpainted them as well.” Well, maybe.  The numbers show that Mrkusich’s work has not so far commanded the marketplace. Of the 53 of his works put up for auction in the last five years, over 50 percent failed to reach their lower estimates and were passed in on the night. Of course many of these were probably sold privately in the following days but we couldn't find a Mrkusich painting that had broken the $100,000 mark during those five years. Of the 53 only seven were bid above $50,000 and 10 went below $10,000.

Art + Object's catalogue is not out as we write this but the latest issue of the magazine Content has arrived and again it’s impressive. Mostly interview-based, it focuses on artists living overseas including the ubiquitous Simon Denny. And outlier Dunbar Sloane chose a minor Affordable Art auction to join the hipster art catalogue crowd. Using a close-up of a Dick Frizzell painting (do any of these artists get a case of wine for their promotional services?) the catalogue looks as snappy as the Auckland ones, until you open it anyway.

One day in the old house on the hill

A: What’s that slithering sound?

B: I didn’t hear anything.

A: There it is again. It’s a kind of rustling

B: Oh, now I hear it. I think it’s getting closer.

A: Yes but what is it?

B: I’ll have a look (goes to the window)

A: Well?

B: It looks like a whole lot of women crawling up toward the house.
 
And that’s exactly what it was.

Images: American women do copycats of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s world

The life artistic

“Wake up. Make love. Go for a walk along the beach. Pick up materials to make installations later. Have a yerba mate (tea) and a coffee and breakfast of feijoas. Put a record on. Work on the installation.”
Artist Samin Son tells the Dominion Post his perfect day

Killing you would be too easy, Mr. Bond

Who was the bright spark that added ‘Saving the planet’ to Te Papa’s key strategies? Headlining “Te Papa’s environmental impact” probably sounded good at the time but it’s a tough one to deliver on in the jump-on-a-plane world of today’s global museum culture. 

Take the James Bond exhibition Designing 007 that Te Papa has its eyes on. It opened at the Barbican in 2012 and since then has been whizzing round the globe (London-Toronto-Shanghai-Melbourne-Moscow) and recently (after 50,000 kilometres in the air) touched down in Rotterdam where it is currently on view. If Te Papa gives it the tick that means bringing the whole shebang back to the other side of the world again. Is the environmental impact even put on the table when programming decisions like this are made? Probably not or the Bond show would have been picked up after its stint in Melbourne.

At the moment Designing 007 is only being tested as an idea via an internet survey but why doesn't Te Papa take its saving the planet thing more public? The museum's carbon footprint is already measured to benchmark and understand its energy use but how about giving all touring shows an energy rating? That way when the public is consulted about whether an exhibition like Designing 007 appeals or not, we can factor in the real environmental cost for ourselves.

Image: Odd Job's hat, recently sold at auction for $99,000

Art in the workplace

Art hard at work in the foyers of the world

Do not disturb

There was a cartoon in the New Yorker many years ago with an artist and a collector looking at a large empty canvas. The collector was looking unimpressed and the artist was saying “It’s minimal at the moment but if you want maximal, no problem." Welcome to the world of the Art Hotel. The first question you might ask is how does anyone actually sleep in one of these super jazzed-up curated rooms? Art hotels have obviously decided that more is more and, if you can get even more in, that’s good too. There are at least six of them in Australia with some themed on one artist (be careful) and as we know one in Wellington run by ex Te Papa Board member Chris Parkin. Hotels have used art as a metaphor for cultivation and class forever but this new style? Definitely more Madonna Inn than The Ritz.

Images: top to bottom left to right, Semiramis Hotel in Athens, Byblos Art Hotel in Verona, San Francisco’s Hotel Des Arts, Au Vieux Panier Hotel of Marseille, the Fox Hotel in Copenhagen and Daddy Long Legs Art Hotel in Cape Town.

Going into one of the video installations...

...at the Yokohama Triennale we were thinking about Andrew Beck

All dressed up and nowhere to go

Masterton used to be a place you went to see contemporary art, then it wasn’t and then it was again and then it wasn’t. So who'd expect to walk into Aratoi, Wairarapa’s Museum of Art and History, and find a major installation of formalist abstract painting? Milan Mrkusich's pursuit of what he calls ‘specific surface’ has occupied him for over 40 years and these three series of paintings from the nineties are shown here for the first time. That these painfully perfect abstract paintings, the sort of paintings that are destroyed by a single scuff mark, have finally made it onto the wall with everyone happy is amazing in itself.  

Anyone who knows the presentation standards demanded by Mrkusich and now executed by his son Lewis can only stand back in awe at a small regional museum taking on such a massive challenge. The gallery spaces have been remodeled and painted to within an inch of their lives. You can still feel Lewis Mrkusich pacing up and down, pointing out imperfections and obsessively checking measurements. In this case there was the added complication of making a tightly specified architectural space so that Mrkusich's paintings could be placed in the arrangement he had imagined. 

Sometimes elaborate installations like this are created as permanent sites, those out-of-the-way destinations of art pilgrimage that the rich and the obsessed trek to throughout the world. But here in NZ, on 31 January 2015, these works will be taken down, packed up and probably never again be seen as an entity outside these few months in the Wairarapa.

Image: Milan Mrkusich installation inspiring a new interest in formal abstraction

Heavy lifting

"...how can artists, thinkers, writers… through images, objects, words, movement, actions, lyrics, and sound bring together publics in acts of looking, listening [and] responding to make sense of the current upheaval?”
Okwui Enwezor curator for the 56th Venice Biennale next year

Liquidity

A while back we made a list of who owned what in New Zealand art. Killeen owns cutouts, Pick owns dreams, Mrkusich owns corners, et al. owns grey, Harrison owns cats, that sort of thing. Now we would add to that list Maddie Leach owns water. This weekend we went up to look at the MA candidates’ submissions at Massey where Leach teaches and of the 10 or so presentations four featured water (including one massive moving image taking up the full wall of a large lecture hall). Then yesterday we received an invitation to a talk at Massey by German artist Rainer Junghanns with an image that is so close to Leach’s Walters Prize newspaper spread as to be uncanny. Well forget it Rainer. Maddie Leach owns water.

Images: top, Leach and bottom, Junghanns

The best art is business art

Business people pose in front of art. This time BNZ chief executive Anthony Healy in front of Gordon Walters' painting Makora

Charles the first

Has any artist ever been as kind to the media as C F Goldie? Over the last five years Stuff (the Fairfax media brand) has run around 34 stories on Goldie mostly in pairs of this-one-will-sell-for-a-lot-of-money followed by wow-we-were-right/wrong-this-one-did/didn’t-sell-for-a-lot-of-money. The rest of the story is usually an accumulating tale of sales from earlier Goldie stories ending with the mini-fact that the artist died in Remuera. That must have been a tough break.

Most of these stories are lightly rejigged media releases from the International Art Centre which is an Auckland-based dealer and auction company. Their director Richard Thomson who borders on being a PR genius really should get commission for the number of column inches he fills in a good year. Stuff's latest story is headed ‘Goldie fetches season high’ following a story a few days ago ‘Goldie paintings expected to fetch $1 million’. And for the record, they almost did. Of course these prices get big leg up from the hammer price via the buyers and sellers commissions that aren’t really reflected in the auction estimates.

For the record, over the last five years 56 Goldie paintings sold at auction. Thirty percent did not sell on the night, 13 were hammered down under the low estimate, three sold for a hammer price over $500,000 and seven for below $50,000. The rest mostly sell between $200,000 and 250,000.

Image: Goldie's for sale. Source for auction details: Artinfo

It's Sandro about the Biennale

The Saturday movie clip for everyone who thinks that Biennale's are a bit of a laugh (not you Simon).