Where the hell are they now?

We will be in Bangladesh for a while and won't be posting, so no OTN until around 25 Jan. We will finish off the Saturday serial but that's pretty much it. Have a great New Year. If you sign up to our RSS feed in the right hand column of the blog you will get our first post next year automatically.

The Saturday serial: Part 4

Click on image to enlarge, Part 5 next week

When good sculpture turns bad

Happy Christmas from OTN

Christmas greetings

To animal artists everywhere.

By the numbers

Creative NZ has put the number of people visiting the Francis Upritchard and Judy Millar exhibitions in Venice at 114,000 –around 31% of the total number of people (375,000) to visit the Biennale. The NZ Herald has claimed the full 114,000 for Judy Millar, but we suspect this is just Super-City talk and that the numbers were split between the two venues at around 57,000 each. However you cut it, it’s a lot. For example, it’s 30% more than the Irish pavilion (in the same building used by et al. in 2007) that attracted 40,000 visitors. We tried to get numbers for previous years of NZ Venice exhibitions for comparison, but they seem to have vanished from the Googlesphere. We couldn’t even find them in the report on Venice commissioned by CNZ. It would also be interesting to know the split between Upritchard and Millar visitation, so if anyone is keen to dig around over the holiday season and uncovers the numbers, let us know.

One more for the road

Call it the Zeitgeist, call it a design fad or call it a whole lot of circles with details of art in them, it looks like something weird is going on. The Dunedin Art Gallery joins the dots with the recently published book on its collection.

Lookalike

Looks like Richard Killeen's imagery has been taken into the culture like Gordon Walters before him.

Image: Advert in yesterday's Dompost

Romancing Maria

Kinetic sculptures are the bane of public art museums with their I-won’t-start engines and is-that-metal-fatigue-I–see-before-me? fractures. Install one of these ADHD sculptures outdoors and you are talking repair to the power of ten. In Wellington – where we pitch sculptors up against winds that are world famous – there is a predictable ongoing repair cost for a bourgeoning family of outdoor works. The proposed amount to keep things spinning, turning and swaying on cue for 2007-08 was $50,000 (but that was the estimate made in 2003, the last time the Wellington City Council updated its Asset Management Plan for outdoor public sculpture).

Of course Andrew Drummond’s whirling windo-metre Tower of Light has suffered more from vandals breaking its coloured neons than the wind busting its ball bearings, as has Len Lye’s Waterwhirler which has been bent out of shape at least once by human intervention. Recently Phil Price’s work Zephyrometer has needed work and Leon Van den Eijkel’s Urban Forest has only recently returned from the repair shop to spin again (and that neatly segues into the lookalike that sparked this post). One sculpture that has made peace with the weather and people of Wellington is Kon Dimopoulos‘s Pacific Grass, clumps of rods that sensibly bend and sway with the wind.

Image Leon Van den Eijkel’s Urban Forest restored and a look alike in transit.

The gloved one

Back in May we posted on art gallery staff and the use of gloves to protect art work. So good to see the Italian tax police following museum procedure when they seized works hidden in an attic by Calisto Tanzi, who embezzled 800 million Euros from Parmalat a dairy company he founded.

Happy Happy Xmas

If you’re looking for multiple gifts for Christmas there is no shortage of choice. For $850 you can snap up Reuben Paterson’s Moustache Glass (half a dozen crystal wine glasses with attached whiskers) from Gow Langsford. Michael Lett still has copies of the Michael Parekowhai book - a stunning 600 pages of pics with a strap-on essay by Justin Paton that nicely segues into Objectspace’s offering of Glove Compartment. This limited edition of 10 bags by Vita Cochrane is available for $950. At Artspace the latest in a long list of multiples is Pukapuka Tohunga Mahi Toi a 240-page book with pressed objects by Daniel Knorr. Yours for $200, or for $150 you can pick up one of Pae White’s gorgeous letters A-Z at Sue Crockford.

The Saturday serial: Part 3

Click on image to enlarge, Part 4 next week

When scupture turns bad

The Dompost reports on a car hitting a Chris Booth lookalike at the Carlucci Land scupture park in Wellington.

Famous people in front of art

Number 2: Woody Allen

Spam

reckless guesswork, insinuations and possible inventions that have turned up in otn's email: francis upritchard is to exhibit in vienna’s secession (gasp for air) • mark amery is to leave playmarket and freelance (cross fingers) • tara banks paid a special visit to michael parekowhai’s show at michael lett (squeal) • there is no father christmas (lip tremble) • sriwhana spong has been selected for the statements section of art basel (applause) • te papa has called it quits on its obscurely located sculpture court (sigh) • peter mcleavey is to show nick austin and andrew barber (omg) • chances of roundabout showing at the city gallery not good (raise eyebrow) • cnz to drop art-form categories for grants (say what?) • ivan anthony purchases karen walker’s house in west auckland (grudging respect) • rohan wealleans, jason greig, shane cotton, fiona pardington, reuben paterson and julia morrison are around half the artists selected for the sydney biennale (pause for reflection) and it’s not the welshman for te papa (groan) • any missed details, changes to outright lies, indignant denials or embellishments gratefully received and the best of them generously rewarded.

Mark it

Rothko is clearly décor du jour on American TV this year. Lookalike fans will remember the Rothko-like-product we spotted in Mad Men. Now we’ve caught another "Rothko", this time hanging in Ari’s new offices in Entourage.