The name game.

Auckland Council has advertised for its new AAG director and the good news is that they are looking for a serious art person who has already sat in a director’s chair. For everyone outside Auckland we conducted a highly complex OTN survey (we asked everyone we met who they thought might be a contender and who would be on the appointment panel). No takers on the second question (yet) and the only four names we could rustle up were: Greg Burke: but he has just been scored a CEO job at the new Mendel Art Gallery, so forget that (oh, there was a suggestion that a senior curator from Melbourne might be interested but couldn’t get a name so dropped it from the survey results). The other three were all women (no surprises there):

Jenny Harper
Paula Savage
Rhana Devenport

NOTE: These survey results are subject to the usual margin of error associated with gossip and hearsay.

The ping and the pong of it.

Artists Doug Fridlund and Mikael Alcock got to be Youtube celebs just by making their art. And their art it turns out involves putting ping-pong balls in their mouths and standing next to famous paintings in high end museums like the Tate. No sooner do they start a ping-pong-performance than the cameras are out and the images start piling up on Twitter and Facebook. Ping Pong, art and photographing in art museums. It all adds up to an OTN Saturday movie time special.

Branded (doubly whammy edition): Regan Gentry and Andrew Barber

The moment when artists become brands

Vanishing point

A recent panel discussion at the Auckland Art Gallery apparently prompted just one question from the audience. The panel of three art dealers was asked something along the lines of whether people were prepared to buy online without seeing the work. Dealer Michael Lett said yes, they were, but added that such sales are usually based on the buyer having a pre-existing knowledge of the artist. Dealer Gary Langsford even put some numbers around it. According to him local online art shopping cuts off at around $20,000 an item and internationally it hovers around $100,000.

Of course as Lett suggested sight-unseen purchasing has always been part of the art market. For example auction phone bids often rely on catalogue photographs and discussions with the auction house.  Still, when you add developments online with the suggestion that at least one prominent NZ gallery is thinking of closing shop, you have to wonder just how long bricks and mortar will remain the primary channel for art purchases. And if the worst were to happen, you also have to wonder what the hell we’ll all do with our Saturday mornings.

CHRISTOPHER TAYLOR COMMENTS: "Gary Langsford is not paying attention, or misinformed. In the New Zealand alone Ocula Black has sold many artworks online, entirely through the online auction system, one being for well over $200,000, a number of others for over $20,000. And international online sales have long left $100,000.

Pippin Barr’s Art game.

The Art game (review here by Huff Post) puts you in a studio ready to make work for inclusion in a big museum show. It also comes complete with a picky curator and an audience not shy of making their opinions known. Can you get your work into the show? How will it be received? Will you get the sort of recognition you deserve? Only one way to find out. Play it here.

Simply Simon

Let’s put two and two together here. Last year Simon Denny was nominated for the prestigeous Preis der Nationalgalerie für Junge Kunst (National Gallery Young Art Prize) the judges included ex Artspace direrctor Tobias Berger and Massimiliano Gioni. Last week on Radio New Zealand Venice Commissioner Jenny Harper mentioned she'd heard that the first New Zealand artist had been selected for the important Arsenale exhibition that accompanies the Biennale. That exhibition will be selected and curated by Venice Biennale’s artistic director who is also Massimiliano Gioni.

Talking books

“You can’t imagine what it’s like to paint like – Bernard Tufts. His painting hasn’t developed as much. It’s as if I’m faking Tufts now because I’m painting the same Tufts as I did five years ago! In a way, I have to make more of an effort to be myself than I do to be Derwatt."

Bernard Tufts, artist and forger of Derwatt paintings in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley Under ground

Coverage

What do a dead kitten rug, one of Hitler’s handtowels, the model of a model building, and varying shades of pink icing have in common? You probably got it straightaway; they are all part of a new trend in art curation (apart from the pink icing which is the theme of a set of cupcakes that have been ‘curated’ in a local cafe).

 

For a while now mixing traditional museum objects with art has been part of how curators bid for attention, but it's heading into the mainstream. We've already mentioned how much we liked the last Documenta (Hitler stuff) and David Walsh’s cabinet of curiosities Mona in Hobart (kitten) but in 2013 it's Venice's turn. (But first check out what we suspect is a pic of an OTN staffer in the 21 January 2013 New Yorker article on Walsh hanging out with the Chapmans). 

Venice curator Massimiliano Gioni is taking his theme for the big show from the model of a museum building made from wood, plastic, glass, metal, hair combs, and model kit parts by Italian/American folk artist Marino Auriti. The model for Auriti’s Encyclopedic palace of the world is 1:200 scale so we're talking 36 floors reaching around 700 meters. The idea for the museum's content was not modest either. It was intended "to hold all the works of man in whatever field, discoveries made and those which may follow.” Perfect for the Venice Biennale and Gioni is up for it. There’s a rumour he may even stretch as far as New Zealand as he sets out "to explore these flights of the imagination in a show that—like Auriti’s Encyclopedic Palace—will combine works of contemporary art with historical artefacts and found objects.” Now that's what Auriti was dreaming of.

Image: Marino Auriti with his model now housed in the American Folk Art Museum

Light headed

“If I want drama, I’ll go to Broadway.”

Art dealer Richard Feigen commenting on a New York consumer affairs commissioner’s view that auctioneers taking bids from the chandelier added a bit of theatre for the clients

Onward my brave Hawkmen

It’s not everyday that the people running our cultural institutions let their guard down and reveal what they're thinking - particularly about the future and how it might affect their audiences. In the weekend a long piece in the DominionPost got Te Papa CEO Michael Houlihan to open up on the ways Te Papa intends to implement its radical new plan to split into a museum of living culture and a museum for the future. They are:

Create a display of a Gallipoli trench

Display more of the fine art collection

Continue showing art on the fifth floor

Collect furniture

Collect video games

Change the Treaty of Waitangi exhibit

Exhibit more photography

Record plays and performances

Tour Te Papa exhibitions

Not be the home of the usual museum-going crowd

Let the magic begin

Image: Red stave chair by Humphrey Ikin purchased for the Te Papa collection in 1997

Filler

Issue 2 of the large format Australian magazine Vault (it also features Simon Denny) offers a crossword puzzle with a few NZ related questions. How would you do?

·      New Zealand conceptual artist Barrie Bates conceived what new name in 1962? (10 letters)

·      Who represented New Zealand at the 2007 Venice Biennale? (5 letters)

·      What is the name of New Zealand artist Michael Parekowhai’s seven metre-inflatable rabbit?  (5 letters)

·      Who won the Baloise Art Prize at Basel last year? (10 letters)

And for all you folk in Dannevirke:

·      Which architect controversially departed Australia during the development of the Sydney Opera House? (9 letters)

Answers here

The upward spiral

All art museums need more space. Our own Te Papa has plans in the wings and the Govett-Brewster is off on a new build for their Len Lye Centre. But how about this idea for enlarging the Guggenheim Museum? It comes from Athens-based architects Oiio

What’s the point?

Over the years we have featured a number of versions of well-known paintings and sculptures. They make them big, they make them small, they form them from trees and carve them out of ice. Here, following up on the recent Seurat post, is A Sunday afternoon on La Grande Jatte subjected to the full gamut of copycat and lookalikeism. Not so sure Seurat would be amused - he was very clear on the copycat / lookalike issue, “originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.” Still, it’s a chance for us to show off our past achievements in this field.

Images top to bottom: The Office cast on the bank, topiary in the city of Columbus, Ohio, weird statue version in Davenport, Mississippi, Babar Seurat, a wedding party does the Seurat thing and folk in the city of city of Beloit do a recreation in situ.

Previously on OTN:

Medusa madness

Last supper? I don't think so

Art in the workplace

Art hard at work in the foyers of the world

Gripping stuff

You don’t expect to see much art in a Tarantino movie (how to remove bloodstains from art here) but Django unchained has a major surprise. Giving some art cred to the movie's persistent wrestling theme there's a major cameo for a copy of The wrestlers based on a copy of The wrestlers at the Uffizi. There they are (a small scale version of a copy of the original that was lost long ago) sitting on a sideboard behind OTN featured bird handler Leo DiCaprio who plays Calvin Candie. Yes, this is the same sculpture that dominated the dome gallery of the Sarjeant in Wanganui until Billy Apple gave it permission to spend some time in the storeroom. We had our own encounter with The wrestlers when it featured in the 1987 exhibition When art hits the headlines.

 

You can learn more than you want to know about The wrestlers here including the alarming fact that both heads were later additions, that this wrestling position is known as the ‘cross-body ride’ and that such a close arrangements of figures are called symplegmata. There are thousands of copies of The wrestlers in varying sizes located all over the world. The Sarjeant copy is by Raffaello Romanelli who is most famous for his equestrian statue of Charles Albert of Sardinia in Rome. The Django copy was probably made by a Hollywood version of WETA.

Image: The Wrestlers butt into Django.