Will that circle be unbroken

At a local coffee bar these copies of of old iconic ads including the Four Square grocer are for sale as artworks. From the original via Dick Frizzell and nearly back again. Enough to make you dizzy.

Hirst’s castle

“Could you just stand on one leg up there on the plinth?” How many artists get to hear this sort of request from photographers? Many resist but some just can’t. Following super-mugger Jeff Koons, here is the leading British entry Damien Hirst featuring five of his favourite themes, arm-work, face mugging, hand-work, wide-open and head-to-head. 

As a Friday extra some Hirst related quotes.
“There’s no reasonable ‘why’ to it—just a big ‘why not?’
US art critic Peter Schjeldahl 

“Damien Hirst is a brand, because the art form of the 21st century is marketing.” 
Germaine Greer 

“People are very funny, because they like buying things when they’re expensive. They don’t like buying things when they’re inexpensive. All of a sudden, they can buy the art for the same price as it was 15 years ago, but now they don’t want to do it.” 
Art collector Alberto Mugrabi on Damien Hirst’s work at auction 

“When the penny drops that these are not art, it's all going to collapse. Hirst should not be in the Tate. He's not an artist. What separates Michelangelo from Hirst is that Michelangelo was an artist and Hirst isn't."
Art Museum professional Julian Spalding in his book Con Art – Why You Ought To Sell Your Damien Hirsts While You Can 

“That’s not an art achievement, it’s a financial achievement.”
Art dealer Michael Findlay commenting on Hirst's multi million dollar auction in 2000 

“Art is about life and the art world’s about money” 
“We’re here for a good time, not a long time.” 
Artist Damien Hirst

Art at work

Paratene Matchitt's bridge sculpture paying its way in Wellington

I spy

The second episode in our series When art goes to the movies came out back in 2008 and featured Goya's The Duke of Wellington. It had been stolen from the National Gallery in London and turned up as a prop in the 1962 James Bond movie Dr. No.

Now 50 years later the stolen-painting story has been revived for Skyfall. This time the feature item is Modigliani's 1919 canvas Woman With A Fan stolen from the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris in May 2010 and making a brief appearance in the villain's Shanghai apartment. In good news for Modigliani collectors it turns out to be bullet proof as there is no sign of damage after a direct hit with a high-powered rifle. 

Bond is also up-cultured with a visit to the National Gallery in London (where he gazes pensively at Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire. This ship fought at Trafalgar and is seen on its way to the knacker’s yard in one of Skyfall's many I’m-a-metaphor moments. In this case let us consider the demise of old-school spy craft. Back in 2005 The Fighting Temeraire was voted ‘greatest painting in a British art gallery’ and for Trivial Pursuit fans there's even an Ian Fleming moment; he grew up in a house on Cheyne Walk that once belonged to J M W Turner.

Other art references in Skyfall? OK, there’s a fallen ‘socialist-style’ statue on the Japanese island of Hashima that serves as the villain’s lair, and it turns out that the middle name of Bond’s mother was Delacroix. Slim pickings.

Images: Left, Modigliani's Woman With A Fan. Right top, James Bond at the National Art Gallery (behind him Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (left) and Mr and Mrs William Hallett by Thomas Gainsborough). Right middle, The Fighting Temeraire by J M W Turner and bottom right broken socialist sculpture prop thing

Caught in the middle

Neil Dawson's Ferns an iconic presence, even in bloody Middle Earth

F bomb

Watching a painter obliterate the familiar mural from the side of the Moore Wilson’s building in central Wellington reminded us that not only did these product images stop endless tagging (some weird code of ethics between muralists and taggers that works throughout most of the city), but also that they had been painted where some sloganeering from the early 1980s had been. 

This was the site of the abandoned Thompson Lewis building which had housed the exhibition F1 (Factory 1) in November 1982. It was the brain child of Ian Hunter (then acting director at the National Art Gallery) and Andrew Drummond who was also on staff. F1 was a big shambling show that featured over its 2,800 metres just about every sculptor working in New Zealand and some more brought in from overseas. 

The floors were taken up by large-scale installations like Extensums by Pauline Rhodes and in the upper rooms and amongst the beams Andrew Drummond practised his Shamanistic arts. Richard Killeen was there, so too was Peter Nicholls. In fact Nicholls's work Full stop (he convinced the New Zealand Army Engineers to drop a three tonne boulder on to a sheet of heated steel) was on view on the Wellington harbour coastline for years after but seems to have vanished when we looked for it the other day. 

 And the slogan connection? We’ve mentioned it before, “When is a factory not a factory? When it’s a closed shop.” 
Images: Top, mural out. Bottom left, Thompson Lewis back in the day. Right, Peter Nicholls Full stop

Sound alike

Evil Mule et al.

One day in the bedroom

Woman: Darling....

Man: Yes darling?

W: We need to plan the wedding. It’s only four months away now.

M: (looking for remote control) Right, absolutely, yesss (finds it).

W: I was thinking we might have a wedding artist as well as a photographer.

M: (Brightens) A wedding artist? Well, why not. We could go conceptual, have Marina in to do the severed head thing as table decorations … she might even throw in a couple of nude bridesmaids lying on the head table.

W: I was thinking more…

M: Or…or…we could have Tino Sehgal come and do a touchy feeley thingy in the dark with the guests.

W: No, I thought more of a…

M: You’re right. We need to think of something more aspirational. How about huge Barbara Kruger banners?  Your body is a battleground or The meaning of life is that it stops or…

W: … or, You are not yourself…

M: What?

W: Nothing.

M: Ok. How about this. We slip Vito Acconci under the floor boards as a bit of a surprise … hmmm, perhaps not. I know. Five giant screens with videos of elephants sitting down, guys knocking their heads against cars or for later in the evening that Martin Creed one where everyone vomits…. er… (noticing)… but what did you have in mind?

W: I was thinking about having a wedding painter.

M: A wedding painter! I DON’T  THINK  SO.

But that is what they did.

Image: You can meet your own wedding painting needs here.

Who knew

"The Govett-Brewster is a pathfinder, generating courageous exhibitions, innovative artists’ projects, cultural initiatives, significant publications and rigorous conversations with a wide national and international reach that stimulate ideas, challenge preconceptions and enrich the imagination." 

The Govett-Brewster spruiks itself in its advert for a senior curator. More amazingness here. 

Gilty

Webb’s has always done a bit of it, Art+Object in general resisted, Hotere was always a sitter for as was Fomison, and as for Goldie, it’s impossible to imagine one without it. We’re talking the frame here, not just on paintings, but in the photographs of paintings.

The latest Art+Object catalogue (Tuesday 6.30 pm) looks like a push into having the frame become an essential part of presenting paintings for auction. This time 32 percent of the works in the catalogue have been photographed with their frames included, that’s twice as many as in the Les and Milly Paris auction back in September.

Webb’s latest catalogue (Wednesday, 6.30 pm) only has 15 percent of its entries photographed with frames, but back in March it was only eight percent so maybe the increase is a trend. If anyone can be bothered going back through a hundred or so auction catalogues they might be able to confirm this but, in the mean time, we’ll settle for it being a cluster. Still it isa truism that many dealers and collectors play the frame game. People might not understand the value of a work but whack an expensive or exotic frame round it and there's not many who don't get the message.

In case you’ve drifted off, here's a guessing game. The frames in this post’s image are all from the Art+Object catalogue. Can you name the artists they enhanced? Answers here.

By the way, if you’re after work by women artists at either of these two auctions, forget it. Artworks by women at A+O are 8.3 percent of the 84 lots and Webb’s 11.5 percent of their 87.

Limited

Much has changed in the six years OTN has been publishing. Back in 2006 the idea of a serious artist who wasn’t Andy Warhol putting his or her name on a product was unusual whereas now artist brands fill every corner of the what-will-we-buy-someone-who-has-everything (i.e. super-rich) market. 

Still, we couldn't let this one pass without mention. Yes, a limited edition Tequila with Gabriel Orozco’s signature and signature patterned skull going for $2,250 a bottle. If you think half a dozen or so of these will help fill your Christmas gift needs you'd better get going. Orozco's tequila is in the inevitable ‘limited edition’, this one of 400 signed bottles.

Not so lookalike

The history of artists writing inscriptions on their paintings is well established in New Zealand and never more needed than on the streets of Dunedin. A OTN badge for the first reader to identify which one of the two figures in this Ivan Hill painting is Justin Paton.

Ad break

Someone at Pataka, Porirua's art museum, has a long memory and a wicked sense of humour. The marketing campaign for their exhibition Wild at Heart includes a poster under a mock Porirua Standard masthead with the arresting headline “Oxen charge patrons…” 

Anyone who was in Wellington in the late seventies and early eighties will fondly recall The Double Standard. To the delight and horror of the morning’s commuters these mock newspaper posters were put up around the city late at night by an anonymous feminist group. The most famous took a poke at then-Prime Minister Robert Muldoon (known to his enemies as Piggy Muldoon). 

As was its want The Double Standard mashed up two events: one real and one rumoured. This time it was the reported shooting of a wild pig in the bush in Ngaio mixed with rumours that the PM had a mistress who lived in the suburb. The Double Standard gleefully announced, “Rooting pig shot in Ngaio. PM safe.”

Munchkins

In a new museum photo craze many visitors have traded in taking pics of the paintings to taking pics of themselves mugging the paintings. One of our favourite sites Hyperallergic trawled up a good range of examples from MoMA's Twitter stream featuring some ‘Screamers’ in action. They also pointed their readers to this nice Scream animation.

Family jewels or excess baggage?

Should art museums sell off works in their collections to streamline their collecting efforts or, even more controversially, to raise funds? All art museums have works (often gifted) that sit in their store rooms like bumps on a log with no real ties to anything else, but it's rare that they're subjected to the D word. That’s de-accessioning (the wonderfully distancing name museums give to flogging off works from the collection).

In fact high value works are sold out of public collections every year all around the world. In the US, for instance four high-end works have recently being talked up and sold at auction. The Cleveland Museum of Art has just let go Monet’s Cornfield which was gifted to them just after the Second World War (they got just shy of $15 million for it), the Virginia Museum of Art put Renoir’s Vase of Roses and Dahlias on the block ($1.2 million) and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington decided to sell a 1967 Picasso Musketeer With a Hat ($5.2 million at auction earlier this week). So together the four lots accrued around $21.5 million.

Announcing that works are to be removed from an art museum's collection often results in an explosion of public indignation. Ironically this reaction often mirrors the indignation expressed when public money was used to get the item into the collection in the first place. For this reason museums here often border on the furtive about any sales although the Govett-Brewster ran a model process we’ve mentioned before that involved getting past directors together to discuss each item proposed.

In a previous post we pointed to Te Papa's works by Natalia Goncherova as prospects for sale. These stand outside the rest of the collection but have an extraordinarily high value in the market. Dunedin’s Monet is another example. Is local pride a good enough reason to hold onto them? As the collections of public art museums in NZ grow year by year and demand more resources to care for them, you can bet deaccessioning will be a conversation that funders will want to have with our museums before too long. Maybe the museums should start it themselves and head them off at the pass.