Buy a nose

They’re at it again. Bond no 9 have just sent us details on their latest Warhol perfume. It came along with nifty Andy quotes like “My favorite smell is the first smell of spring in New York,” and “Another way to take up more space is with perfume.” Above, the rather overwrought colour scheme that brings you the new scent. So, if you want to smell like New York, go here.

Nice one

Best of 3 makes a very neat comparison between CNZ's closed shop and the world of sport. You can read it here.

Lookalike

Above: Meg Cranston’s The Complete Works of Jane Austen, 1991 at Art Space
Below: Weather balloon on the Chinese trade portal Alibaba.com.

Signing up

A press release just in announces that the Auckland Art Gallery is ready to roll on its new building extension.

“Signature gallery closes its doors for a picture perfect upgrade. Councillor Noelene Raffills, Auckland Art Gallery board chairperson, says Auckland City Council’s signature gallery is one of the city’s most beautiful historic buildings, but is not up to today’s modern standards for art museums.”

Signature gallery? Odd description. Still, the Auckland Art Gallery should have fun making friends with all the other Signature Galleries in the world.
The Signature Gallery
The Signature Gallery
The Signature Gallery Laguna
The Kinkade Signature Gallery
The Signature Gallery in Savannah
The Signature Gallery
The Michael Gibbons Signature Gallery
Image: The Signature Gallery, Savannah

Section 9(2)(a)

Last week we asked Creative New Zealand for the list of artists and curators who had applied for the Venice Biennale project. These projects have now gone into CNZ’s evaluation and selection processes.

The response from CNZ was a two-page 12 point letter in legalese refusing to make the list public. Their reasoning? “It is necessary to protect the privacy of natural persons… and this interest is not outweighed by other considerations which render it desirable, in the public interest, to make that information available”.

We have become very interested in ‘the public interest’ and CNZ’s interpretation of the idea. We’re no lawyers but it seems to us that they are arguing that the ‘privacy of natural persons’ overrides any rights the wider public might have to information. And that they are using this argument repeatedly. We recall that they declined to give us any information about the experience of their expert arts advisors last year. They said it was to protect their privacy while we figured there was ’public interest’ in understanding what their expertise was to do the job. It was the same story with the Tripofalifetime reports.

We believe that there is a clear public interest in the Venice artist/curator list. It is a perfect opportunity to have some conversations about what they may be proposing, how they might be regarded in the Venice context, who has not submitted a proposal, and why etc. All the usual exchanges that make for an engaged and committed art community. Set this against CNZ’s insistence that it will protect the privacy of these ‘natural persons’ and the argument turns bizarre (to anyone but a lawyer). Anyone who is in the running for Venice will inevitably have experienced unsuccessful applications, projects that have fallen over and other disappointments. It seems hardly credible that they will recoil in shame over non-selection.

As we have already noted, the selection panel for the upcoming Biennale is considerably older than in previous years. While the previous panel could have been described as largely people actively involved with contemporary art, this one - not so much.

We will continue to pursue the list through formal channels, but in the meantime we have confirmed 5 of the 16 artists along with their curators through less formal means. In the public interest then, if you are part of an application or you know who is, email us. When we have close to the full list we will publish it.

The wisdom of crowds

The Art Newspaper has released its annual report on most visited museums and exhibitions for the year. Alan Gibbs, whose sculpture farm exhibits one of sculptor Richard Serra’s masterpieces, won’t be surprised to know the artists survey exhibition at MoMA was the 4th highest attended in the world last year. Top place went to the Tokyo Museums The Mind of Leonardo (Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation, on loan from the Uffizi in Florence, attracted 10,071 visitors a day for 3 months) followed by Tokyo’s National Art Centre with Monet’s Art and Posterity. Top attended museums for the year? The Louvre 8,300,000 The Centre Pompidou 5,509,425 and Tate Modern at 5,191,840. Let’s hear it for contemporary art.
Read the full list here

That’s the point

Francis Upritchard’s residency in New Plymouth may be drawing to a close but these pages of images by her father E A Upritchard are a bonus for fans. Yes, they may look like something by John Baldessari but they are in fact from Upritchard’s book A Guide to the Identification of New Zealand Common Weeds in Colour. Francis told us that her father helped her make work in his Christchurch garage. Looking at this pen and weed work, maybe it’s time for him to break out on his own.
Click on image to enlarge

Rolling

The Auckland Art Gallery is up and blogging with an early entry about relocating the research library. Our test for great blogs is how personal are they? Do they have a point of view? Did they tell us something new – and relevant? AAG have called theirs Outpost. That’s a start but here’s hoping it gets more opinionated, more inside-out and eases up on the process stuff. After all an Outpost is “A detachment of troops stationed at a distance from a main force.” One comment we liked in the rather long description of the library relocation, “During the pack-up, we found all sorts of intriguing items including a newspaper from 1974 that had an article on how Mick Jagger was still touring at the ripe old age of 31!” How about a picture?
Image: Mick Jagger at 31

... and in 2044 he'll be 21

And the cap goes to William Hsu who clocked in at 3.01 am. H and R also stayed up late/early to respond. All of you plugged for Julian Dashper, all of you were right.

The capping spirit

We’ve always enjoyed the work of young artists and one of the youngest we have in our collection turns 12 on Friday. An OTN cap for the first email received after 3 am Tuesday morning with the name in the subject line.
Image: the OTN cap. Now available in black

Spam

unvarnished facts, reckless guesswork, insinuations and possible inventions that have arrived at overthenet.blog@gmail.com. three new zealand artists have been selected for the liverpool biennial. greg burke is to marry canadian artist christine davis. olafur eliasson was recently in new zealand to repair his fountain on alan gibbs’ farm. read about tony oursler’s trip to the farm here. mr mane-wheoki of te papa is to be doctored by his old university in christchurch on 18 april. whangarei is to build a hundertwasser museum which the mayor says will be a catalyst for the city’s regeneration. aaron kreisler has taken over from justin paton in dunedin but the director’s position remains unadvertised. the stolen mccahon cross sold by dunbar sloane is not in te papa-published mccahon database. mike stevenson’s exhibition persepolis 2530, on show in bristol’s arnolfini, gallery was well reviewed by the guardian’s elizabeth mahoney. any missed details, indignant denials or additions gratefully received, and the one with the most outlandish embellishment- rewarded.

Warning to collectors

"The trend is viewed with consternation by many in the museum community. These new institutions are often erratic in their governance, especially in their early years when their often restless founders are still around; the lines between the private and public interest are frequently blurred."
The Art Newspaper describing Public... whoops sorry, we mean private museums.
Image: Art Newspaper editor wagging finger at bad museums

Bit of a stretch

Thought you would want to see this pic of the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil being struck by lightning a few weeks back. This is public sculpture supersized, 4 meters tall and 700 tons of reinforced concrete.

Membership

It had to happen. Chimps, elephants, turtles, snails (almost) and now pricks. Australian Tim ("call me Pricasso") Patch, is a global sex fair entertainer on the look-out for cultural capital. This year he is stepping up to the plate and entering the Archibald Prize, Australia's anachronistic portrait competition. We expect him to be shafted by the committee, but we'll keep you posted.

The (expletive deleted) bad and the ugly

This from the Guardian. “From the beaches of southern England to the thoroughfares of London, the fightback against “bad” public sculpture in the UK has begun. In recent years an unprecedented number of tasteless statues (with the rare exception, such as works by Antony Gormley) have appeared across the country.

Now Tim Knox, director of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, has attacked the “epidemic of these Frankenstein monster memorials”.

Images: Top, ugly UK public sculpture. Bottom, not ugly UK British public sculpture