“If the artist talks about it what's the point in making it.”

Ralph Hotere, who was awarded the Order of New Zealand today

Just saying

The trouble with interactivity is that it is just so…interactive. The City Gallery is finding this out with its latest efforts to get people into Prospect - NZ Art Now. The campaign consisted of five different poster variations inspired by the initial letters of P.R.O.S.P.E.C.T. one of which is ready to be filled in. The City Gallery (or perhaps its ad agency) primed the pump with four examples. You can see the Gallery's efforts plus one from a member of the public by clicking the image above. Your mission? Pick the punter. You can see more audience versions at the exhibition many of which, in all fairness, are positive.

Click on image to enlarge

art as metaphor

Q: When is a work of art not a work of art? A: When it's a hedge. Some private/dealer sales here (rumours of McLeavey selling a handful of Hammonds for $100,000 plus) indicate that our top one percent are also looking for art to protect their money during troubled times. Might work, might not, but it is a world-wide trend. This year in spite of economic woes in Europe and the States top-end auctions broke records at nearly every outing. An example? Roy Lichtenstein’s “I can see the whole room… And there’s nobody in it" brought in $56 million or, in our language, 400 Hammonds.

Tuesday's chart

A quick reminder as you travel round the galleries these holidays of Komar & Melamid’s research results after asking 'what constitutes the most popular and most disliked kinds of painting?' You can see the full results here. They are also available in Komar & Melamid’s book Painting by Numbers: Scientific Guide to Art, published in 1997.

Art at work

Max Patte’s sculpture Solace in the Wind doing seasonal work on Wellington’s waterfront.

Enough already

Christchurch Art Gallery's heartfelt response to a miserable year

OTN will be back on 3 January. Posts between now and then will be intermittent.

Copycat

A Wellington paste-up channels Hotere channelling McCahon

Googling on: Christmas edition

One great benefit of friendships with artists is the occasional original Christmas card that comes your way. The tradition goes back aways, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner famously made cards for friends like Ray and Charles Eames and you could always rely on Ad Reinhardt and Philip Guston for one at the end of the year. 

Even the bright idea of making Christmas cards has art/museum origins with the first one being run up by the first director of the V&A in London. That card was designed by John Horsley (a copy of it was sold in 2001 for $45,500) and ran into trouble for showing a child drinking, a very long way from David Shrigley’s FU Santa card published this year by the Guardian. And only Damien Hirst could elevate the most banal of ‘Peace on earth’ imagery into the rarified air where people pay big bucks for reframed popular imagery.

You can see a range of American artists (including Guston, Pollock and Reinhardt) Christmas cards on the Smithsonian site and a range of British artist cards (including the Shrigley) commissioned by the Guardian here. You can see Hirst's translation here, and a very Happy Christmas and a great New Year to you all from OTN.

Images: Christmas cards from top to bottom, Richard Killeen, blanche readymade of et al. and Shane Cotton

Branded: Jim Allen

The moment when artists become brands

Look who’s putting the layer back into layer cake

In a surge of enthusiasm for middle management both Auckland Art Gallery and Te Papa are on the hunt for someone to head up their curatorial departments. Both jobs are virtually the same with similar requirements and expectations. Applications are due on 20 January and 27 January respectively. See if you can spot the differences.

1      Which institution offers “an inspiring place to work”?

2     Who requires “A minimum of 5 years experience in a public gallery/art museum, managing exhibition and collection processes and delivery”?

3      Which job requires the applicant to be ‘politically savvy’? 

4      Who requires the successful applicant to be “responsible for increasing the awareness, understanding and enjoyment of works of art”? 

5      Which institution wants to “ ensure that art scholarship and research is of the highest standard”? 

6       Who insists on “an exceptional track record of exhibitions and publications”?

7       Who's on the lookout for a "coach"?

8       Which manager will be in charge of “seven curators and exhibition project coordinators”? 

9      Who wants their manager to “lead the development and display of the art collection”?

10    Who wants their manager to be responsible for the “development and provision of high quality, innovative exhibitions”?

Te Papa = a, AAG = b. Answers: 1b, 2b, 3a, 4b, 5a, 6a, 7b, 8b, 9a, 10b

Lookalike

Top, a haul by noise control officers in Wellington pictured in the Dominion Post. Bottom, Sean Kerr's Stacker

Done deed

Sometimes you just don’t want to rush stuff. That was certainly the case when it came to the transfer of Colin McCahon’s Landscape Theme and Variations Series B from Creative NZ’s collection to Te Papa. Way back in 1964 the newly formed Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council purchased the work in order to stop it from going overseas and with the intention of gifting it to the National Art Gallery. 

The first objective was obviously a great success as the work is still in the country and the second? Well that was only achieved a couple of months ago. Yes, 47 years after it was purchased Landscape Theme and Variations Series B has become part of the National collections at Te Papa. Mind you the Arts Council did try to give the work to the National Art Gallery back in 1964, but they apparently said they were full. 

Somewhere along the way the works were pasted down on boards and the banners became framed panels, something McCahon was very unhappy about. "I feel the more official treatment of the B series was a mistake." Another version Landscape Theme and Variations Series A survived the glue pot and framing and ended up in the Auckland Art Gallery’s collection as a gift from the McCahon family.

Image: Landscape Theme and Variations Series B (rear) with Practical Religion: the Resurrection of Lazarus showing Mount Martha being exhibited at a Dowse Art Gallery in 1980. You can read the CNZ story here.

Lookalike

Images: Left Chales Ray's Firetruck outside MoMA. Right Firetruck on top of Fun Ho! Museum in Inglewood

Copy that

A reader sent this image to OTN playing to our interest in lookalikes. This painting is a copy from a photograph that artist Jonathan Monk took of a Martin Kippenberger painting. The painted copy was made by a Chinese copy painter and is one of an open-ended edition available from Monk's dealer gallery. The stinger is that the Kippenberger ‘original’ was also a copy made from an image created by Kippenberger and rendered by Werner a billboard painter for Kippenberger’s exhibition Dear painter, paint for me. So there you go, a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. (Thanks M)

Image: Jonathan Monk, The D.E.A.R. Painter Seated On The C.O.R.N.E.R, 2011.