David in Adland: Volume 1

When a replica of Michelangelo’s David toured stores in New Zealand, it was fig-leafed up to save local shoppers from getting over-excited at the opportunity to compare the diminutive Italian model with the distinctively larger sized penises they were familiar with in New Zealand, or something like that. We’ve already had a few posts on David’s excursions into the world of advertising, but here for your viewing pleasure is a round-up of the latest efforts.
Click on images to enlarge

art in the workplace

Art hard at work in the foyers of the world

One of the world’s greatest art works to see before you die

How many times in your life do you stand in front of a work of art so extraordinary that you are left speechless? Not many, maybe a handful. After a quick discussion we came up with Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross at the Prado and Jackson Pollock’s Lavender Mist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Then there was Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, McCahon’s The Lark’s song in the Auckland Art Gallery and Matisse’s Tea (the one with the dog scratching in the foreground) at LACMA. But what about Manet's Asparagus at the D'Orsay and his Woman with Parrot in the Metropolitan, Ana Mendieta's Alma Silueta works, and the bust of Nefertiti at the Neues Museum in Berlin, can't leave them out. OK, it's more than a handful, but not so many more. 

This debate was inspired by seeing one of these overwhelming works over Easter weekend in the Wairoa Museum. We had seen this carving of Te Kawiti (originally from the meeting house Te Poho O Te Kawiti) when it was allowed to leave Wairoa on loan for the exhibition Mau Mahara. Twenty-one years later Te Kawiti is no less extraordinary than on first sight. Carved some time in the eighteenth century with stone tools, this work has the same grave timeless beauty you see in the great art of the Egyptians, the Etruscans, the Greeks. And there it is, one of the world’s great artworks, in a small town south of Gisborne, waiting for you to encounter it any time you choose.

Image: Te Kawiti, Wairoa Museum

Money in the bank

“Art is not, after all, what we thought it was; in the broadest sense it is hard cash…. Another decade, and we shall have mutual funds based on securities in the form of pictures held in bank vaults.”

Leo Steinberg, way back in 1972, predicting art investment funds in his book Other criteria

Whatamibidforthisbeautifulcolinmcahonlandscapeonboard?

Want to buy art but don’t like crowds, openings or putting on a clean shirt? You might try Ocula, a new NZ/Australian focussed online auction site and news source. You can also sell art on the site with a negotiable commission capped at only 5%. 

Will it work? Well, there are a few artworks poised ready to leap into cyber auction mode - a Billy Apple silkscreened Bartered work kicks off today with an estimate of $15,000-20,000 and a beautiful signed Max Dupain Sunbaker print comes up for bidding on 10 May. 

So far there are no time limits against any of the listed auctions but maybe they’ll be added when the bidding starts. Elsewhere on the site auctions are described as either being seven or ten days long. Without them of course you don't really have an auction so much as a listing.

The proof of Ocula will be in the results and in the transparency of the entire transaction. We’ll check in again around the end of May to see what info is provided on sale prices, best bids and all the other stuff that make auctions such fun to watch and nerve-wracking to join. 

In the meantime, you can check Ocula out here.

On the road

#49 in OTN's ongoing series celebrating Ministry of Land Transport and Local Body support of New Zealand artists.

For others in the series hit the 'on the road' label tag below.

One day in the marketing Department

A: Just landed another cool job!

B: What for?

A: Some sort of scholarship thing we give to artists

B: E-x-c-e-l-l-e-n-t. Let’s do a TV spot

A: Only got a couple of K for the whole campaign

B: OK…a newspaper ad…small newspaper ad

A: We’ll need an idea, a graphic idea

B: How about a planet far out in space exploding into millions of glowing fragments the shape of butterflies?

A: We can only afford black and white

B: OK, thousands of black and white butterflies

A: Behave yourself, it’s a small ad at the bottom of the page

B: Um… I’ve got it… one butterfly, one black and white butterfly

A: And I’m, not so sure about the planet thing

B: How can I do creative work when my hands are tied like this?

A: That’s brilliant!

B: It is?

A: Absolutely.

Looks like art

 Thanks D

By the numbers

 2.3  the number in millions of dollars that the Government funding for the America's Cup exceeds the entire annual funding for Creative New Zealand

2.5    the average number of dollars that American art critic Robert Storr is paid per word

6       the percentage of total Creative NZ funding that went to the visual arts in the 2009-2010 year

7        the number of years jail time a 62-year-old art dealer from Mainz was given for forging thousands of art works including 13 Giacometti sculpture

10     the percentage of total CNZ funding that went to “other music” in the 2009-2010 year

17     the percentage of the total global contemporary art market in 2010 that came from the sale of Andy Warhol’s paintings and prints

84    the number of Masters students currently being taught at the University of Auckland Art School

96.29  the price in dollars per square centimetre paid for Colin McCahon’s painting He calls for Elias at auction this month

3076   the number of hours Te Papa is open to the public each year

Googling on

In the spirit of Easter (ok, not that one) we present a range of giant rabbit sculptures.

Click on image to enlarge

It all ads up

When the Auckland City Council advertised for a Manager Public-Art, it did so in The Art Newspaper. The city has become very serious about its public sculpture programme over the last ten or so years. Placing an ad like this in a publication designed to attract global interest is another sign that Auckland is making a serious challenge for Wellington’s Cultural Capital brand.

OTN will post on Saturday but not Easter Friday or Easter Monday. Have a good break.

Counter culture

When Te Papa casually announced it wasn’t going to go for a new National Art Gallery after all, they may have made a big strategic error. Te Papa has always used the door-count as a key measure of success and used patsy survey questions to get round quality. In fact this year Te Papa has gone so far as to lower its performance goal for ‘audience awareness and understanding’ from 95% to 75%. Now a quarter of the audience can just hunker down in the cafe and bribe the kids with fluffies.

The thing is, if you’re after a big volume audience (and one that has both awareness and understanding of what it is looking at) art rules. First check out The Art Newspaper’s recent lists of art museum attendances worldwide for 2010. Then consider that other specialist institutions in London like the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the National Maritime Museum attract 4,105,106 visitors, 2,793,930 visitors and 2,367,904 visitors respectively. 

The smart money’s clearly on art, especially when you consider that six of the top ten (Tate, National Gallery, National Gallery of Art, MoMA, Pompidou and d’Orsay) are the institutions formally known as art galleries.

The Art Newspaper list:

Louvre, Paris 8,500,000

British Museum, London 5,842,138

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 5,216,988

Tate Modern, London 5,061,172

National Gallery, London 4,954,914

National Gallery of Art, Washington 4,775,114

Museum of Modern Art, New York 3,131,238

Centre Pompidou, Paris 3,130,000

National Museum of Korea, Seoul 3,067,909

Musee d'Orsay, Paris 2,985,510

Art is where you find it

Some folk in Ngaruawahia channel Colin McCahon

A bigger splash

What is it with painted buildings in Wellington? Whatever it is, there's a lot of it going on. Our very own ‘art’ hotel has a never-to-be-forgotten (see True Lies post) painting by French artist and Berlin Wall painter Gabriel Heimler and now across town the Tattoo Apartments on Abel Smith Street are getting in on the act. 

They are in the final throws of getting a paint job with a mural that looks like a couple of guys doing their own Le Pétomane performance. But hang on a minute, the drawings for this block that were displayed on its surrounding fence while it was being built featured a bird painting by Australian Geoff Dixon.

Agent: “Yeah, I know you were expecting a native bird mural but we thought, what the hell, it’s a university town, let’s go for it.” 

Given that the apartment building is called Tattoo (it’s on the old site of the Wellington Tattoo Museum), they might have gone even further with something like, say, a dragon. That’s what the Tattoo Museum itself has done after moving in a couple of doors down from us. At least you know where you are with dragons: they breathe their fire from the right end.

Images: Top left the Museum Hotel, right the original paint concept for the Tattoo apartments. Bottom left the final painting of the Tattoo apartments and right the new Tattoo Museum on the corner of Vivian and Victoria Streets.

Freudian

"My ideal response from someone who saw a new work would be: 'Oh, I didn't realise that was by you.' "

British artist Lucian Freud quoted in Martin Gayford's book Man with a blue scarf