‘Reality’ bites at the La Budget Biennale

Displays of unbridled wealth are tipped to give way to retro recession chic at this year's Venice Biennale, the world's oldest, most-venerated annual contemporary art event. Held this year in the shadow of the global financial crisis, the international art market, a luxury market, is set to be reminded that collecting art is mostly discretionary. Michael Hutak reports.

Like last year’s return to minimalism on the catwalks, this year’s 53rd International Art Exhibition will reflect global belt-tightening with a back-to-reality motif from Swedish curator, Daniel Birnbaum, who will present "Making Worlds," which he says will emphasize process and materials and will be "closer to the process of production and the venues of creation and training -- the studio, the laboratory -- than traditional museum-style exhibitions”.

Accordingly, we can expect a more muted stanza in 2009 when the four-day preview or 'vernissage' kicks off on June 4, with the official opening two days later, when avant garde totems, Yoko Ono and John Baldessari, will be honoured with Golden Lions for careers that have “revolutionized the language of art”. Displays of unbridled wealth are tipped to give way to a revival of recession chic, and the corporate celebrations aboard the flotilla of luxury yachts, in six-hundred year old palazzi, and at swank already booked out hotels like the Cipriani, or just about any along the Grand Canal or the Lido, will be careful this year to avoid any association with the holders of so-called toxic assets.

Venice is in fact a many-headed “Mostra”, from the art olympics of the national pavilions at both the Giardini and scattered in palazzi throughout the city; to Birnbaum’s curated survey show at the Arsenale, to the ad-hoc independent and satellite shows which simply add to the frolic and ferment.

There will be enough on show to attract more than 50,000 artworld cognescenti to this treasured city to party, play, network or sell. The hard sell in Venice is not restricted to art objects or artists. A growing band of sovereign states turn up to buttress their national brand and draw a reflected glory from their official selections. In 1988, Australia was the last country to secure a lot on the hallowed bohemian Arcadia of the Giardini, one of just 26 elite nations, although our pavilion is widely regarded as a difficult space to present contemporary art, and is often mistaken as the restrooms for the imposing French pavilion which conceals it.

Selection for one’s national pavilion at Venice is often the peak of an artist’s career. While no correlative studies are extant, the attention an artist attracts in the lead up and at the Vernissage always effects prices. In 2007, emerging artist Shaun Gladwell was no exception when the work that appeared in curator Robert Storr’s official survey show, Storm Sequence, later sold at auction in Australia for $84,000, the highest price paid for a digital artwork in Australia.

Clearly the Gladwell phenomenon is still to peak, considering the Sydney-based artist’s selection again for the Australian pavilion this year. Given his 2007 Venice triumph, and his prominence since (he’s been in over 20 group exhibitions since), the perhaps predictable rumblings among Gladwell’s peers have come asking why another artist was not given the opportunity to enjoy the international exposure afforded by being the official selection? Professional development or professional jealousy? We asked Doug Hall AM, commissioner for the 2009 Australian exhibition, what the rationale was for selection in terms of international development of Australian contemporary art.

“Shaun Gladwell was selected because the selection panel thought he was the best fit in terms of the quality of his work, his international profile and career trajectory,” says Hall. “Shaun is a great Australian artist – and that above all was the main selection criteria. His work is fresh, relevant and speaks with an international voice. He was selected from five short-listed artists who submitted proposals to the 11 member selection panel.

“The fact that he was chosen as part of Robert Storr's curated show at the 2007 Venice Biennale wasn't a consideration - only past official Australian representatives are ineligible. We weren’t going to penalise an artist for being successful. The fact that Shaun exhibited Storr's show in 2007 adds to his value in representing Australia in 2009 – it allows a more in-depth exploration of his works by the various curators, artists, and other attending the Biennale.

“It's artists like Shaun, who already have some international profile, that exposure at the Venice Biennale tends to benefit most.”

Influenced by the outback, and Mad Max movies, Gladwell will present a “suite of videos accompanied by sound, photographic and sculptural works”.

The 53rd International Art Exhibition, directed by Daniel Birnbaum, runs from June 7th to November 22nd, 2009 (preview on 4th, 5th and 6th June 2009). Go to: labiennale.org/en/art/


Satellites of Art

The energising art team of Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro get their widely expected big break with selection by curator Felicity Fenner for Australia’s major satellite show in Venice, Once Removed to be held at The Ludoteca, a former convent conveniently located in the sestiere between the main art venues of the Giardini and the Arsenale. Along with works by Vernon Ah Kee and Ken Yonetani, Healy & Cordeiro will present a new installation cut again with the rich vein of irony at play in works like last year’s show in Berlin with former Australian galerist, Gitte Weise. Works like Intelligent Design or Dust to Dust (which presents pulverised Ikea coffee tables in oak and glass vitrines) can be expected to attract critical attention, supported by pair’s judicious talent for incorporating objects and detritus found on site into their works. As we write the pair are preparing a massive installation for Venice at their Sydney studio, using a stack of old VHS cassettes and a caulking gun. Living as artworld intinerants with shows all over the world in recent years, Healy and Cordiero emerged out of Sydney’s lively artist-run space scene at the turn of the millennium and are represented by Sydney dealer, Barry Keldoulis.

Art champions package it up

Australian art bureaucrats consider Venice the premier forum for presenting our contemporary art to the world; a form of cultural diplomacy that brings real commercial benefits to Australian artists lucky enough to be chosen. The Australia Council contributes a base budget of $700,000 towards the Australian participation in Venice 2009. This is supported by a fundraising program (cash and in-kind) which takes cues from the previous two efforts managed by John Kaldor, art patron and 2005 and 2007 Commissioner. Kaldor fashioned the program with both "supporter packages" for individuals and corporate packages, similar in structure to the marketing of headline sporting events. There are two levels of supporter in the 2009 program – “associates” can give $2000 or more and “champions” can give $10,000 or more if they choose. While there are no quid pro quo’s, those that give can then partake in a series of special supporter events both in Australia and in Venice during the Vernissage. They can also receive Vernissage passes – near impossible to get without connections. However, “this is an act of giving for giving’s sake,” as Commissioner Doug Hall AM says. Major corporate sponsors this year are UBS and The Balnaves Foundation. Already in excess of $1 million in cash and in-kind contributions has been generated by the program. Should one suspect that Venice is the sweetest taxpayer-funded junket in the public service, the Australia Council assures us that “all official Australian events are geared towards raising the profile of the artists during the Vernissage period and boosting attendances at both the Australian Pavillion and Ludoteca. The council says maintaining profile during the Vernissage is crucial to attracting leading curators and other thought leaders to see the works. Collectors interested in becoming a supporter can contact the Australia Council on 02 9215 9090.

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First published in Australian Art Collector No.48, April-June 2009

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Russian Pavilion, Venice Vernissage

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Turner Prized

Michael Hutak profiles Australian critic and curator Jonathan Turner.

While the international success of Australian artists has become commonplace, it's much rarer to encounter a writer/curator making their mark in the rarefied circles of the international contemporary art scene. Which is what makes Sydney-born's Jonathan Turner Continental presence so noteworthy. Turner, working out of Rome and Amsterdam, has since the early 1980s curated more than 100 solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries in Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, the U.S., Thailand, Macau, Australia, New Zealand. He recently won the prestigious Premio A.B.O., awarded annually to the most influential critic/curator in Italian contemporary art and beyond. Previous recipients have included Rome's current Mayor Walter Veltroni, artists Joseph Kosuth and Enzo Cucchi, English collector Alex Sainsbury, and Danilo Eccher, director of Rome's Museum of Contemporary Art.

"Although it is just an ugly piece of metal, it is in solid silver," Turner quipped in an interview with Australian Art Collector on his rooftop terrace in central Rome. "They even bottle a special wine for the event." The award is named for its patron, Achille Bonito Oliva, director of the 1993 Venice Biennale and best known for single-handedly promoting the influential Italian contemporary movements, Ipermanierismo (Hypermannerism) and transavanguardia, (Trans-avantgarde). Turner first worked with Oliva in Venice in '93 when Turner was on the selection committee of Aperto, the section at Venice dedicated to emerging international talent which that year featured a young Sydney artist, Hany Armanious. Turner considers Oliva "one of the most brilliant, fascinating, charming, and also irritating men you are likely to meet. He was extremely important figure in Italian and European contemporary art in the 1960s and 1970s and invented, the Italian version of neo-expressionism. He identified it, he put it together, and basically proposed a completely different view of what Italian art was considered at the time, which was the arte povera, championed by Germano Celant."

Turner triangulates his time between Rome, Sydney and Amsterdam: "I've put on Italian and Australian shows in Holland as well as Dutch shows in Italy and so on." The author of scores of artists' monographs, he writes widely on European contemporary art for titles like ART + Auction and Flash Art, and has been the Rome correspondent for US magazine Artnews for more than 20 years. In Rome he has been a driving force behind the annual contemporary art fair RIPA and has had a long relationship with Il Ponte Contemporanea, Rome's leading contemporary commercial gallery, where in 2005 Turner curated and an all-Australian group show that featured Tracey Moffatt, Maree Azzopardi, Paul Ferman and others. Turner has also curated shows in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, mainly the Nederlands, for Australians Patricia Piccinini, John McRae, William Yang. In Australia he is probably best known for bringing a touring exhibition of iconic French art photographers Pierre et Gilles to Sydney and Melbourne in 1995. "I work a lot with Roslyn Oxley, Martin Browne and Robin Gibson in Sydney and with Tolarno in Melbourne and Libby Edwards." In the summer of 2007 Turner returned to Australia to curate solo shows for Azzopardi and Ferman.

However it's his internationalist approach that earned him the ABO. "I only work with artists whose work I appreciate. There are a lot artists, both Australian and otherwise, who I've been working with for more than 20 years … I'm not Italian, but I also don't view myself or my work as being a national representative of anything. And again, even though I've lived in Rome for more than twenty years now, I've returned every year to Australia to work - and I feel 'at home' wherever I am."

In this era of the touring blockbuster, Turner believes the independent contemporary art scene has adjusted well by "moving beyond elitism and is thriving. I'm seeing more private philanthropists than I did before, and more collectors and patrons are taking up the role of developing artists that business used to occupy more. I used to work a lot more with business, I'm not now. The corporations that are breaking up collections that they have spent years putting together are very ill-advised."

Turner's criteria for working with collectors: "Anyone with passion is perfect. A good collector tends to have such a strong vision of what they want and like that it's a pleasure to work with them. A collector is never wrong, just like an artist is never wrong." His approach to curating revolves around the demands of the space: "I only organize shows when I know exactly where it is going to be seen. I don't attempt to helicopter a show in, and say here it is, fit it in however you can. Each show must be tailored to the space it will be shown in. You don't try to pander to a particular taste and neither would you pretend that you're so fabulous that people must accept it from on high."

Turner eschews any adoption of a general philosophy of curating: "It can be ad-hoc. Artists tend to need help. And if I think they have talent and I like their work, then if I can help them I do. I'm a bit like a one-man Ministry of Culture." Meanwhile, the art life beckons and our interview ends: "I have to rush, I am going at midday to see two newly restored paintings by Caravaggio, which will be nice for the soul, since both are owned privately, and neither I have seen before."

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First published in
Australian Art Collector
No.40, April 2007

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d/Archive: Michael Hutak

Archive of super 8 films courtesy d/lux/media/arts.

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Quai to the Kingdom

TEARS flowed freely at last week’s press preview of the landmark Aboriginal art commission at the Musée du Quai Branly, the new museum in the heart of Paris dedicated to non-western art. Surrounded by the media and basking under the artwork that has colonised the ceiling of one wing of the complex, East Arnhem Land artist Gulumbu Yunupingu broke down as she contemplated the moment. “I can’t believe I am here in Paris, underneath this, my gift to you. My painting brings us together and brings us healing; I am proud that you people here in Paris recognise my painting ... We standing here together. We are standing here strong.”

It was a cathartic moment at the end of a four-year journey that began when French President Jacques Chirac personally petitioned Prime Minister John Howard to join in his pet project on the Seine: a museum, a paean to the diversity and creativity of the world’s people, a project that could not be complete, implored Chirac, without a cultural contribution from Australia’s first people.

The $398m project, the first major museum to open in Paris since the Musée d’Orsay in 1986, attracted controversy from the outset. First due to its origins in two vast state collections of art and artefacts (some 350,000 objects) pillaged primarily from France’s former colonies, and secondly for its self-serving function as Chirac’s bricks-and-mortar legacy in the city where it all began for the former mayor.

In a multicultural nation recently racked by a rioting immigrant population drawn from former colonies, Chirac said the museum was an homage “to peoples who have suffered conquest, violence and humiliation”. Curiously, no solidarity with such black-armband sentiments was forthcoming from the large Australian contingent of benefactors, bureaucrats, curators, artists and their representatives in Paris to celebrate the product at hand, the $1.4m Australian Indigenous Art Commission at MQB.

There was much talk about this being the largest ever Aboriginal art commission, about the respect in Europe for Aboriginal painting, that it was finally being recognised in the cradle of modern art as one of the great movements of the 20th century. All of which is true, but the tone was hollow. As one local dealer in Aboriginal art complained, it was a story not underpinned by cultural cringe but overlaid with “cultural arrogance”. Another local said it had been “a difficult collaboration from the French side. The Australians seemed to think because they were paying for it, they could dictate to us.”

Official claims from both camps that the project puts “Australian indigenous art at the heart of the architectural project” are overstated if not inaccurate. The Australian artists’ efforts augment not the museum proper but its administration block: an ancillary, conventional modern office building which bears no immediately apparent relationship to the striking, unique structure housing the main collection. Putting architect Jean Nouvel’s protean reputation to one side, rather than a meeting of media, it appears the art has been accommodated into an already designed structure.

This accommodation, overseen by Sydney architects Cracknell & Lonergan, has nevertheless installed a visually stunning result, melding the designs and motifs of the eight artists into what are essentially typical workplaces, and avoiding what could easily have been a lapse into mere décor. The works, by artists of such standing as Yunupingu, Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford, and John Mawurndjul, are elegantly transposed onto the building’s surfaces using the structure as a gigantic framing device. As co-curator Hetti Perkins noted: “It is finished and it is good.” However, while the ceiling designs have been installed to be seen by passers-by from the street, the public will not have unfettered access inside. The permanent exhibition of Australian indigenous works in the MQB suffers for being tucked away and hung in relative obscurity, doing an injustice to the works on display, headed by a selection of barks acquired in the 1950s arranged floor to ceiling as if in a fin-de-siècle salon.

The Australia Council has attracted criticism for jumping at high-profile overseas opportunities which play well at home but leave no lasting footprints. This may be changing, with the announcement of a three-year program to promote indigenous art overseas, of which the MQB is the first project.

And when arts-loving adman Harold Mitchell was approached by the AC to donate $350,000 to secure the project to completion, he had long-term caveats. “We were excited by the project but suggested they take it a step further. So we pitched in another $150,000 for a publications program for 10 years and set up our young curators’ program.” Each year a young indigenous Australian curator will take up a residency at MQB and develop a project in conjunction with the museum.

Ironically, Mitchell admitted he doesn’t collect Aboriginal art himself. “Bugger me, I just don’t,” he told The Bulletin. “But I will now. I actually just believed in this project – I reckon it will be very good over the long term both for Aboriginal people and Aboriginal art. And we’ll be going up to some of the art communities later this year and we’ll make sure we pick up some pieces then.”.
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First published in The Bulletin

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Collectables: John Young

If you want to know the most collectable emerging Australian artists, then look offshore first.

Apart from Aboriginal art, which enjoys the support of both a thriving domestic and international market, Australia’s contemporary art market has been virtually hermetically sealed to foreign collectors: Australian contemporary art is almost exclusively collected by Australians, whether locals or expats.

This is despite the fact that most Australian contemporaries produce art which is international in terms of outlook and ideas, and lacks nothing in execution, ingenuity or inspiration when presented alongside the best international art.

Yet barely a handful are well-known in the artworld’s hot spots like Manhattan, London or Cologne. In an age where artists have joined the ranks of celebrity, only Melbourne sculptor Ron Mueck, officially hot enough to be collected by billionaire tastemaker Charles Saatchi, has achieved anything approaching superstar status.

Yet tides can turn quickly and last week’s successful launch in Berlin of “Face Up”, an important group show of Australian contemporary art, added credence to recent claims that our living artists are starting to make a real impact in the international arena. Of course for Australians, acclaim abroad always resonates loudest at home, thus the canniest investors in Australian art today are looking for artists who are busy building reputations overseas.

A typical target is the postmodern painter John Young. Mid-career and on a roll, this Hongkong-born, Sydney-educated, Melbourne-based artist has just been picked up a prestigious Berlin gallery, Pruess & Ochs. In the past year has had a sellout solo show with Sherman Galleries in Sydney, and shows in Hong Kong, and Berlin, with yet another planned for next month at Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne. Already in 2004 Young has solo shows lined up in Pirmasens in Germany, Sydney, Tel Aviv and even Bali. Group shows will take in Singapore, Beijing, Germany and Indonesia.

The auction market tells the tale. After barely a dozen works changed hands for small sums in the previous decade, at Deutscher~Menzies’ Sydney auction in March a work that cost $18,000 from Young’s 2001 show with Anna Schwartz sold for $32,900.

Young’s dealers have crept up prices in the past year to $25,000 - $32,000 for an average-sized work to $60,000 for large works. Such sums are still quite low for European collectors, making work of Young’s quality a bargain, but they represent a trebling in the past five years on the Australian scene, and those who have been buying Young’s works for the proverbial song since the early 1980s must now be feeling very happy.

And perhaps a little vindicated.

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First published in The Bulletin

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Collectables: Bonhams' Oz joint venture

A new joint venture aimed at grabbing a slice of the booming fine art auction market may struggle to get into the frame.

Breathless excitement greeted the news that UK firm Bonhams, founded 1793 and the world’s third largest auction house, will dive into the local market via a joint venture with Double Bay auctioneer Tim Goodman. “Our brief is to compete with the multinationals in this market,” said Goodman, targetting the world’s number 1 and 2 gavel bangers: NYSE-listed Sotheby’s and French-owned Christie’s.

Bonhams & Goodman have already opened new offices in Perth and Brisbane and Goodman has recruited no less than five former specialists from “Christoby’s” to kick start the venture.

Both Goodman and Richard Brooks, Bonhams’ UK chairman, cut their teeth in the collectible motor car trade. Goodman’s is already the local market leader in this area and also has a strong profile in jewelry and sports memorabilia. In the UK Bonhams’s strong suit is decorative rather than fine art.

Local skeptics doubt whether this latest foray by an international firm in the super-competitive, and now crowded Australian fine art market, can do much more than nudge the dominance of the “big three”: Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and the Australian-owned Deutscher~Menzies, which entered the market in 1998.

In the late 1990’s French-owned firm Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg embarked on a similar quest down-under but failed.

Goodman argues that “the oldest firms are losing market share” in Australia, which is true but they have been losing it most spectacularly to D~M, owned by Melbourne cleaning tycoon Rod Menzies. And although the market itself has expanded to the spectacular tune of an average 10 per cent per year, the big three again have carved up the lion’s share.

According to Australian Art Sales Digest data, in 1992 almost $20 million in total sales of fine art was split roughly three ways between Sotheby’s ($6.9 million), Christies ($5.6m), and all “others” ($6.7m). A decade later, in a market now worth almost $80 million, and Sotheby’s ($23.5m) had increased sales four-fold, Christie’s ($18.2m) had more than trebled, D~M ($25m) had exploded in just five years, while “other” ($13.2m) had only doubled.

Goodman's still remains in the “other” category and while its annual "National Art Sale" has grown in 13 years to a respectable $1.75m in sales last July, the Bonhams joint venture will face stiff competition, not least on their home turf in Sydney from Menzies’s other firm, the new look, gung-ho Lawson~Menzies.

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Abridged version published in The Bulletin

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Collectables: Rupert Bunny

Change in Tempo: Security and cleaning magnate John Schaeffer has gotten out of Australian art, but not quite while the going was good.

Schaeffer's sell-off last week of almost all his beloved Rupert Bunny’s, plus a couple of other out-of-fashion colonial-era artists was “a limited success,” says Sotheby’s Sydney painting’s expert, Geoff Cassidy. The sale draws a line under the greed-was-good 1980s boom in colonial and traditional art.

The fourteen lots fetched just AUD$1,016,700 - well below the low estimate for the sale of $1.5 million. Schaeffer and Sotheby’s were happy to offload most lots at below the auction house’s low estimate but the sale’s “hero” lot – Bunny’s 1985 Portrait of Jeanne Morel - failed to reach reserve and was passed in at $490,000. Schaeffer paid $500,000 for the work at the landmark Sir Leon and Lady Trout sale in 1989.

“The Trout sale was really the last big one-owner auction of the 1980s before the bust in the early 1990s,” says Cassidy. “Even though the market has well and truly recovered since then you’d have a lot of trouble getting the prices paid for most of those popular artists of the 1980s. The market is definitely moving towards the contemporaries at the moment, and it’s been difficult to sell top-end Bunnys for some time... We were quite happy to move them.”

Cassidy said that when Bunny was at the height of his popularity “John (Schaeffer) was driving the market quite hard and when you take such a major player out of the market it gets quite hard.”

Son of Melbourne Judge, Bunny (1865-1947) spent almost 50 years living and painting in Paris and even managed to get hung several times in the Salon of the late 1880s alongside the masters of impressionist painting. Bunny was a hot ticket in 1980s but in the last 10 years of the 327 works offered at auction 135 have failed to sell and of those more two thirds were offered – and rejected - in the last five years.

The sale was cannily marketed by Sotheby’s as merely a change in focus from Australian art to Schaeffer’s first love, 19th century English painting (he competes with Andrew Lloyd Webber as the world’s biggest private collector of Pre-Raphaelite Victorian art). This is no doubt the case for the super-wealthy, publicity-shy patron to the arts, but like any canny businessman the CEO of Tempo Services also had other reasons for the dispersal (don’t call it a fire sale!).

After a well-publicized split with his wife Julie last year, Schaeffer was forced to sell $7 million worth of his private-holding in Tempo’s stock. He told The Bulletin last November he would be selling off some of his magnificent collection to repurchase his holding.

"My love for this company is far greater than my love for my paintings," he said bluntly.

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Abridged version published in The Bulletin

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Collectables: Art & Super Funds

Hanging offence: To hang or not to hang. That is the crucial question confronting today's super fund trustee, reports Michael Hutak

FINE ART has long been considered a legitimate asset class within the investment strategy of some of Australia's biggest superannuation funds. C+BUS for example, the building industry fund, counts its important art collection housed in regional galleries around Australia among assets of more than $3.5 billion.

But the most action in this area in recent years has been at the other end of the market, as private collectors rush to purchase art as part of their Self-Managed Superannuation Fund.

SMSFs have been the fastest growing sector of the super industry with approximately AUD$95 billion under management out of a total $530bn. The Australian Tax Office says SMSFs have grown by almost 25 per cent over the last three years to around 240,000 funds. It receives 1,000 new registrations each month and there are around 408,000 people with accounts, with an average balance of $234,000.

With the total secondary auction market in fine art in Australia at just $80 million per annum, the art trade understandably sees a great opportunity to grab a bigger slice of the estimated $10 billion that flowed into SMSFs during 2001-02.

The art market has a good story to tell potential investors: that $80 million already represents a quintupling of the auction market in just a decade. And headline-grabbing sales of telling of 100, 200 even 300 per cent returns for works by artists across all sectors of the market – traditional & modern, contemporary, and aboriginal art – make investing in art an easy, even sexy, sell.

Targeting the small investor, many galleries and art “consultants” are currently spruiking art in an SMSF as making “more sense than other assets in that you can hang it on your wall at home or office and have the visual pleasure of your own work of art.” One gallery’s web site even states: “It is a little known fact that it is perfectly legal to purchase investment artworks, acquired through your super fund, hanging on your wall at home.”

In fact this is not ‘little known’. It’s also not true. The big art-super push has hit a big snag called the ATO. “We’ve gone through this already with people trying to claim anything from Swiss chalets to Coles-Myer cards,” says Matt Frost, superannuation spokesperson for the ATO.

“The bottom line is yes, you CAN certainly invest in art for your fund, but when people ask us ‘can we put it on our wall’ the short answer is, ‘no you can’t.’”

Any investment for the purposes of a SMSF cannot contravene the so-called ‘sole purpose test’: it must only fulfil one purpose and that it is to provide a benefit on retirement. “And any investment that also provides any ancilliary benefit clearly fails the test,” says the ATO’s Frost.

Prominent Melbourne collector and art world accountant Tom Lowenstein isn’t taking the ruling lying down.

“I completely disagree with the Tax Office’s view and I’ve put a submission to them putting that case,” he told The Bulletin. “If the work has been bought for investment and fulfils the aims of the fund’s investment strategy then what does it matter where it is stored? My argument is the asset is just as safe on your wall at home as in storage, and is probably even safer.”

Lowenstein said cost of setting up even a small SMSF were not inconsiderable. With a modest investment of $100,000 “you’d still be looking at $2000 to $3000 in legal, accounting and auditing expenses. Add $5000 to $6000 per annum to insure and then store the works and you’ve probably wiped out any capital gains right there.”

Lowenstein argues, rather facetiously, that he is currently advising clients to either not hang their artworks, or to make sure they don’t enjoy them if they do. Which makes for a bizarre twist on an old adage: I don’t much about art but I know what I don’t like.

He predicts one of two outcomes to the controversy: “Either the ATO will back down, or it will be decided in the courts.”

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Abridged version published in The Bulletin

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Collectables: Emily Kame Kngwarreye

The market aand experts differ on the value of early and late works by the legendary indigenous artist, Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

Undoubted highlight of last month’s bumper Sotheby’s Aboriginal art auction was the sale of the late great Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s 1991 canvas, Untitled (Spring Celebration).

Bidding on this sensual colour field of green, brown and yellow dots was the most competitive at the 560-lot sale, with four bidders on the phone and several dealers and collectors in the room vying for the prize.

The hammer eventually fell for a Swiss private collector who bid $463,000 – more than three times Kngwarreye’s previous auction benchmark, one of 17 saleroom records set for individual artists at the $7.4 million auction.

But what’s in a record? Are we to assume that this work was the pinnacle of Kngwarreye’s extraordinary achievement?

“These aren’t her best works in my opinion,” says Emily expert, Margot Neale, curator of Kngwarreye’s landmark 1998 national touring retrospective – the first ever for an Aboriginal artist.

“They’re very beautiful and there’s a quiet poetry about these early dot paintings,” says Neale. “But Emily didn’t pick up a brush until 1989, when she was in her late seventies. These works are only two years into her [eight-year] career," said Neale, now director of the First Australians Gallery at the Australian National Museum in Canberra.

“In my opinion Emily really came into her own with those looser, more gestural works of 1993-94, when she put all her verve and passion into it.

"She had enormous physical strength in her arms and hands from a lifetime of camel-driving and in the later works she really gives vent to that physicality on the canvas.”

The market begs to differ. But then the market judged at Sotheby’s corresponding sale in 1995 that a similar work to the new record breaker, Flowers of Alagura 1991, was worth only $2,300.

Meanwhile works from what Neale (and others) regard as Kngwarreye’s best period are still going for more modest prices of around $30,000 and up. Canny investors might look to what is called counter-cyclical buying and snap up these bargains while they last.

But, again, for those that buy for money there is always a downside – they will eventually have to part with a work of art whose aesthetic value is priceless.

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Abridged version first published in The Bulletin

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Cox on Venice: Tear down my shack!

It's time for the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale to go, says the architect who designed it. Michael Hutak reports.
Prominent architect Philip Cox, fed up with snipes from the artworld, has declared he would support tearing down his "temporary" Australian pavilion in the elite Giardini della Biennale in Venice, the official venue for Australia's participation in the world's most prestigious artfair since 1988.
"I would be very pleased if the Australia Council or the Australian Government replaced that building because it is a temporary structure," Cox told The Age. "I am completely behind putting a permanent building there."
Currently occupied by Patricia Piccinini's critically-acclaimed suite of mutant sculptures, Cox's construction clings to a bank that falls away steeply to a canal, squeezed into a backlot behind the leafy, spacious environs enjoyed by the other 25 national pavilions. Australia was the last country to be granted a permanent pavilion.
Cox said the critics who "always moan about why we don't have something of the order of the French or the German or the English pavilions forget that it's a very cheap building put together in 10 minutes".
"They forget the whole project was virtually gifted to the Australia Council. We donated our services and we got BHP to provide the steel and Transfield to also provide materials. And on the record and to be perfectly frank, it gives me the f---ing shits considering we all worked so hard for nothing to put it there."
The 1988 Bicentennial project bears Cox's trademark prefabricated steel tubing, and might have made a luxurious split-level beach shack for a 1980s high flyer. But as a showcase venue for contemporary art, it routinely comes in for a biennial bashing as an almost unworkable space, one that dictates to the artist, not vice-versa. Wall space is cramped and large paintings are almost impossible to hang favourably. This year, Piccinini was praised for making best use of the difficult space by choosing to display three-dimensional work.
Cox concedes these criticisms, but says the artworld has short memories when it comes to the building's genesis. "The brief was - well, there wasn't a brief," he said. "The Venetians made it a case of either you fill the space quickly now or you'll miss out."
Cox then had a seat on the Australia Council's design board and realised that to be completed in time, the construction had to be prefab. The building permit was issued on May 25, 1988, and Arthur Boyd's show curated by Grazia Gunn opened less than a month later, on June 24. It then promptly closed for two weeks to allow builders to finish the roof, fit missing windows and repair the floor that had been covered by tarpaulin.
Several sources in Venice this year close to the Australia Council said official moves were underway to finally do something about the pavilion, however Australia Council chief executive Jenny Bott confirmed that the venue would remain unaltered for the 2005 Biennale at least.
"We need to develop a 10- year strategy for Venice," Bott said. The council spent around $900,000 on this year's Venice adventure, but Bott said "any capital expense would never come out of our budget".
However the Australia Council's temporary lease over the treasured block this year moved to permanent status, clearing the way for a complete rethink of the building.
In alternating years Venice's Architecture Biennale consumes the Giardini. However the Australian pavilion remains mothballed because, says the Australia Council, "architecture does not fall within (our) brief".
Under moral rights amendments in 2000 to the Copyright Act, any substantial changes to the pavilion would have to meet with the architect's approval.
Cox says he hasn't been approached by the Australia Council but would nevertheless give his imprimatur to a new, more suitable structure.
"I would love the opportunity to design it," he enthused, "but you'd need $10 million to do something decent and where would you find that sort of money for a single arts project in Australia today?"
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First published in The Age

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Collectables: Cricket Tragics

Is Don, is not so good: Legend drives the market for items with a direct and personal connection to Don Bradman during his playing days

Nostalgia aint what it used to be – today it’s big business, especially if your name was once Bradman.

Like an artist who must expire before his works soar in value, the Don’s passing in March 2001 has ushered in an era of record prices for collectibles at one end of the scale, and rapacious trading of memorabilia at the other.

Christie’s London set the benchmark in June when Bradman's baggy green cap from the 1946-47 Ashes cricket series attracted a record auction price of AUD$88,835. And last month the prodigy’s most famous ‘baggy green’, worn in his final innings in 1948, was sold privately for an unconfirmed $425,000.

Christie’s Australian head of decorative arts, Richard Gordon, says the July sale should not be cited as a new benchmark for the Bradman market simply because it was so unique. “Given that he may have never had another chance to buy it, it was clear the purchaser was prepared to go to great extremes,” says Gordon. “It now seems very unlikely to come onto the market again in the near future.”

Gordon acknowledged that the market for such genuine collectibles – items that had a direct and personal connection to Bradman during his playing days – was being driven by the legend that has built up around the Don.

“These items are steeped in such history and the man himself seems to generate such divided passions in people – he is not universally loved.”

Tell that to the purveyors of the burgeoning market in mass produced memorabilia and limited editions. Bradman’s attempts to devalue his signature by flooding the market – it is well known he would sign anything put in front of him in an effort to ‘decommercialise’ it’s significance – has done little to dull the appetite of cricket fans for anything vaguely associated with their hero.

A random search at online auction house EBAY found 124 Bradman items up for grabs ranging from a signed bat - starting reserve $9,999 and purchased from “a close friend whose grandfather was said to have known [the late] Clarrie Grimmet,” - to a used 1996 paperback on the Don, asking price $2.

In between one can bid on still more bats and books, plus stamps, coins, posters, pewter and porcelain figurines, trading cards, coasters, balls, audio tapes, videos - even a “very rare” fork and spoon set.

Just $150 will open the bidding on a shop-soiled entry ticket to the Australian’s tour match against Surrey in 1934. Bradman made 61 not out that day. Talk about tragic.

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Abridged version published in The Bulletin

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Collectables: Important Aboriginal Art

Aboriginal art continues to bring the bids and bouquets at Sotheby's in New York.

SCANDALS ASIDE, the Aboriginal art sector has been the most dynamic performer in last five years of Australia’s booming fine art market and Sotheby’s upcoming winter auction of Important Aboriginal Art has become the key barometer of the sector’s health. Each year the local franchise of the NYSE-listed company trumpets “the most valuable collection of Australian indigenous art ever assembled for sale”. Each year the boast is proved correct.

In 2002 Sotheby's shifted a record $5.1 million worth of precious paintings and rare artefacts. This year the 560 lots to be knocked down at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art on July 28 and 29th have been pegged at an upper estimate of $9.69 million. With more than 20 lots listed with estimates above $100k, saleroom records will likely fall for the established hit parade of indigenous artists: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, Alec Mingelmanganu, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, Dorothy Robinson Napangardi and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri.

However, this year’s indisputable highlight, the massive 5 metre by 8 metre Ngurrara Canvas 1, underlines the collaborative nature of much Aboriginal art. Painted in 1996 by 19 artists from the Great Sandy Desert to demostrate their Native Title claim to 800,000 hectares, it is valued between $300,000 and $500,000. Consigned by the artists themselves, it would look nice in a State gallery where everyone could contemplate its ongoing significance: the land claim is still in dispute.

After seeing off a brief challenge from rival auctioneer Deutscher-Menzies in the late 1990s, Sotheby’s virtually has the serious end of the market to itself. This year, with the war in Iraq casting its shadow, the firm’s Sydney-based Aboriginal art specialist, Tim Klingender, cancelled the traditional New York preview, but made up for it by scoring a front page article on the sale in The New York Times. This week (July 23) The New Yorker magazine publishes a similar glowing appraisal.

Sotheby’s prints around 4500 catalogs for the sale and despatches 500 in equal measure to collectors in Europe and North America. Klingender says there are around 100 serious private collectors who consistently bid for works worth more than $50,000, and only about 10 kindred spirits who can afford to wave their paddles at works worth more $500,000. “They are a disparate group of people,” he told The Bulletin, “mainly Swiss, French, Dutch and American. What they all usually have in common is that they’ve visited Australia at some stage and fallen in love with Aboriginal art.”

The record price for an indigenous artwork was paid not by a private collector but by the National Gallery of Australia, which went to $786,625 to secure Rover Thomas's All That Big Rain Coming From Top Side for the national estate, at - where else? - Sotheby’s 2001 sale. The firm has three more important ‘Rovers’ on offer this year with upper estimates scraping $350k. Yet, as The New York Times acknowledged: “The one group of Australian citizens rarely seen in galleries and salesrooms are Aborigines themselves, who are too poor to buy the products of their own culture.”

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First published in The Bulletin

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Deal Me In: Stuart Purves

Australian Art Collector caught up with Australian Galleries' Stuart Purves in Rome, where the dealer was passing through en route to Tuscany where he planned to take possession of the latest raft of works from his octogenarian stable star, Jeffrey Smart.

STUART PURVES: I’ve come to Italy to honour Jeffrey [Smart], who’s in his early eighties now, and why not, we’ve been dealing with eachother for over a quarter of a century. I am a second generation dealer and I had two parents [Anne and Tam Purves] who were full-time art dealers. Believe it or not I’m the oldest continuing art dealer in the business. I can’t believe it coz I’m still young and that shows you how young the art world is in this country. But what it all comes down to that it is art before money. It really isn’t a business, instead you’re more like a leaf floating down the river, steering a course. There’s no real competition in the art world because everybody is in a sense heading in the same direction - to find that kernel of proper and inspiring art. There’s too much chasing of the money in it today. The money’s there, it’s always been there for good things–

MICHAEL HUTAK: -but as a dealer your responsibility is two-fold - one to your collectors and one to your artists–

SP: -and one to myself! I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I’ll wring as much out of it as I can. But what you have to ensure first is that you’re putting good work forward, and then make a powerful shot at the money. Not the other way round.

MH: - there’s no mint to be made out of mediocre art.

SP: You can for a while, but then it goes back to that adage that eventually you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

MH: What effect has the rise of the auction scene in Australia had on your business?

SP: Absolutely fantastic. If you took the auction scene out of the galleries now, the prices would go back to about a quarter of what they are now. They’ve popularised it and they’ve proved it. The thing is they have also destroyed some artists as well, but they are quite forgiving in that they don’t talk about that much, whereas they sure as hell make a big fuss about the things that go up. It’s a bit like an undercurrent, it’s inclined to drag everything along – rubbish, weeds, sand, shells, crabs the whole lot - and I think that’s the effect it has had on the entire art world.

I remember one day, I was at Euen Heng’s place, we’d been dealing with him for quite some time and he’d never been offered at auction and I was looking at the work as we were about to have an exhibition. So I was looking and thinking, this work was just fantastic and I thought what can I do here, and I turned to Euen and said ‘We’re going to double the prices’. They were $9000, they would now be $18,000. Well, he went pale, I got in the car with a dry throat thinking 'what have I done?', but I might tell you they sold better at $18,000 than they had at $9000. His previous clients who’d bought three or four were thrilled because the works they’d bought had immediately doubled in value and it was simply a case of saying, well if we don’t respect this artist’s work how can we expect anyone else to?

But the whole thing was also timing. I didn’t do it when it wasn’t ready. I didn’t do it until the day I looked at these paintings and thought, shit, this guy is a real artist and we had better respect that. It’s not as flippant as that either. We changed our attitude on framing, we produced a proper catalogue, we backed it up, we played the right music for it and it’s worked out very, very well.

MH: And that’s now Heng’s new base level.

SP: Absolutely, and I think we’ll be doing it again, because he really deserves to be up there and one of the ways you can call that attention is to raise the prices. I mean you can show and show and show, but sometimes you have to make the leap of faith and back your artist’s talent.

MH: What happens when say an artist like Jeffrey Smart has a breakthrough sale at auction that is streets ahead of his current gallery price? How do you cope with that?

SP: It’s pretty easy. You just add a zero to everything you’ve got in the stockroom. (laughs) But, what it means is this: it’s time. It’s as simple as that - the market has told you. Because for every sale like that there’s an underbidder. Jeffrey is a perfect example, he’s been a perfect gentleman in every sense of the word, and his paintings have honoured him in the same way.

Like I said we’ve been representing Jeffrey for over 25 years and the first painting we sold of his was a thing called The Dome. It’s quite famous now, and we sold that for $6000, good money in those days but now we sell similar works for $250,000 maybe $300,000. I think it gets back to the fact that Jeffrey’s senior, and the art world is interested much more in itself than it once was and therefore it is looking back to its senior artists, and they are few in number on the ground. It has to go that way. He’s also had recent retrospectives, [Art Gallery of New South Wales’ director] Edmund Capon is a fan and that doesn’t go astray.

I’m now becoming more interested in the contemporary area. When my parents ran the gallery, you have to think I grew up with Sydney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, Fred Williams, John Olsen and Brett Whiteley, and then I’ve done my own reshaping and I’ve made the gallery quite big – I mean it’s now four galleries in two cities, a production department, it employs 14 people, it needs ten thousand fresh dollars of profit every day to stay in business, we have a publishing program. But the other thing is I feel as though I've got to keep growing with it so an artist can grow through the gallery, doesn’t have to leave and go somewhere else.

Think of Brian Johnson, Violet Guila, William Mora, Rudy Komon – the common factor with all those dealers is that their galleries died with them and I don’t want that to happen to our gallery. It’s a long term family business, it will be 50 years old on June 13th of 2006, we’re going to do a big production book for that. We’ve got a record of every exhibition we’ve ever had going back to 1956, the date and what pictures were in it. We’re scrapbook people. (I might tell you our house burnt down in 1970 and we lost an enormous amount of records, two Boyd Bride paintings – the impact killed my father, he died at 59 years old.) But we’ve got 25 volumes of newspaper clippings, the State Library has a program where they keep our correspondence. I’m interested in shoring up what my parents started, I’m interested in my own success with this group people that I represent now, and I’m interested in starting two contemporary galleries, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne, so that the whole thing continues to roll on.

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Abridged version published in Australian Art Collector

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Collectables: Jeffrey Smart

Jeffrey Smart has virtually no market outside Australia, yet short supply keeps his work in demand

With his latest show at Sydney’s Australian Galleries another sellout, evergreen artist, Jeffrey Smart, appears at 82 years of age to be at the height of his powers and success. Netting almost $5 million in sales, the show comes hot on the heels of another record auction price: $439,450 for the 1990 work Near Pisa Airport, paid in late August at Christie’s sale of the BHP Billiton Collection.

Smart’s signature style – the industrial settings and motifs, the clean lines, bold colours and precise attention to composition – settled in when he left Australia in the late 1960s for the rural idyll of a Tuscan villa. From his studio there, for almost four decades, Smart has meticulously produced 20 to 30 major works per annum, feeding shows for his Australian dealers who can barely get their hands on works before they are sold.

Not too many investments outstrip Sydney real estate but Smart’s average price at auction has more than trebled since 1997.

Melbourne football identity, Sam Newman, kicked things along in 1998, blaming too much red wine when he paid a then-record $288,500 for Guiding Spheres (Homage to Cezanne) II at Christies Melbourne. The tabloids scoffed at the folly, but Newman, it appears, knew exactly what he was doing (or was acting on sound advice). The major touring retrospective of Smart mounted in 1999 by the Art Gallery of NSW sparked another jump in values and a minor rush on Smarts - 27 oils were offered at auction that year with only four unsold.

While they are a genuine blue chip investment, we are unlikely to see an glut of works by Smart filling auction catalogues any time soon.

Unlike, for example, Brett Whiteley (around 15,000 works) or Arthur Boyd (some 20,000), Smart’s lifetime output numbers only about 1000 major paintings. Exacting a rigid quality control, he has often destroyed works which, in his opinion, haven’t made the grade. Rarely does an inferior work reach the market. In the past ten years only 145 paintings have been sold on the secondary market through the auction room.

No more than 100 major works are in state or public galleries, the rest are held tightly by private collectors who typically would have bought them straight out of a show with his dealers.

The short supply has meant Smart has virtually no market outside Australia, yet he does have international standing. Global art auction data firm, artprice.com, rates Smart No.407 among the top 9,000 artists at auction, just below Mexican Frida Kahlo (402) but above the more-renowned contemporary Joseph Beuys (447) and venerable English master John Constable (436).

Today Smart enjoys his fame without paying the price. “I don’t really want to be well-known here in Italy, I’d like to lead my quiet life here,” he told The Bulletin when we visited recently. “It’s very thrilling to go back to Australia and find out you are Mr Famous.”

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First published in The Bulletin

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Strictly modern

Intriguing connections surround the recent Australian visit of British art critic and author Matthew Collings, best known here for his British Academy Award-winning television series, This is Modern Art.

Collings, who has charted the rise of the so-called Young British Artists movement of the mid-1990s, wound up a sell-out speaking tour last week with a talk at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, where his subject was "The Solemn and the Trivial versus the Serious and the Playful". Collings' witty, plain-speaking accounts of the works of YBA stars such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst have done much to demystify art for the general public.

But now he believes that, while the popularity of modern art is on the rise (in Britain, at least), artists should have no obligation to be popular. Indeed, art is "neither democratic nor a form of entertainment but is a specialised endeavour for those willing to make the serious effort to engage with it".

While Collings' thesis is less applicable in Australia, where contemporary art more often attracts derision than praise in the popular press, the would-be painter is apparently planning regular sojourns down under.

Collings' visit was organised by Melbourne artist Mary Lou Pavlovic, who revealed to The Bulletin ambitious plans to open a gallery in Melbourne next year - working title: Pav Modern - with her first show being paintings and mosaics by none other than Collings and his artist wife, Emma Biggs.

Pavlovic met Collings at the height of the YBA ferment when she was studying at London's influential Goldsmiths College. The tour, she says, is just the beginning of her entrepreneurial forays onto the local art scene.

She says Pav Modern's backing is already secure and she will be joined in the venture by her brother, pop music promoter Steve Pav. He is a key figure in alternative music circles, being responsible for bringing bands such as the Beastie Boys and Nirvana to Australia long before both acts became household names.

Buoyed by crowds of several thousand for Collings, Pavlovic is thinking big and plans to stage art events that openly court controversy. She cites the landmark Sensation exhibition, where works such as Andres Serrano's Piss Christ were deemed an affront to public morals.

"I've just become sick of the apathy," she says. "Things have been too conservative for too long in the art scene in this country. We need an upbeat, broad-ranging art scene that connects more with what's happening internationally."

While factors such as the proverbial tyranny of distance may kick in before she gets going, either way Pavlovic seems determined to crash through or crash in a blaze of glory.
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By Michael Hutak
457 words
22 October 2002
The Bulletin
Volume 120; Number 43




First published in The Bulletin

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Collectables: Export vs. Heritage

Auction stations: The export market for indigenous artworks is being stymied by bureaucracy, argue the auction houses. But not surprisingly, Michael Hutak reports, the bureaucrats disagree.

What is more important? Australia’s multi-million dollar international market for Aboriginal art, or the value of that art to the cultural heritage of the nation as a whole? That’s the crucial question driving tensions between international auction house Sotheby’s and the federal government’s Movable Cultural Heritage Committee.

Five months after its annual sale of Aboriginal art in July, Sotheby’s is still waiting for the MCHC to decide whether seven works knocked down at the auction will be granted export licences to leave the country with their new owners. The auction house faced a similar situation in 2000 and the subsequent denying of export permits for three works resulted in the sales being cancelled and, according to Sotheby’s, the vendors being unable to achieve the proper market value for their paintings.

Sotheby’s 2001 sale again broke all auction records for Aboriginal art, with sales totalling $5m. But for the company’s Aboriginal art specialist, Tim Klingender, the worrying statistic is the percentage of works bought by overseas collectors, which fell by more than a third from 69% to 39%.

“It’s been nothing short of a disaster for us,” says Klingender. “International confidence in the Aboriginal art market is being affected. We have been advised by the largest private collector of Aboriginal art in the United States that he will not bid on any lot that does not have an export permit prior to the auction being held.”

Klingender says he told the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, which administers the relevant act, before the sale that some 75 works fell within the act’s guidelines for assessment. But the department would accept only 15 applications, eventually denying export licences to seven works.

After the auction, the department required 16 more works go to the MCHC for assessment, seven of which are still in limbo. A spokesperson told The Bulletin that to process 75 works within Sotheby’s timeframe would have “overburdened the committee; delayed other applications for objects that were definitely intended for overseas export; and risked a more superficial assessment of the cultural significance of the works”.

Klingender claims Sotheby’s has no problem with important works being banned from leaving the country as part of cultural heritage. But he maintains “the irregular meetings of the MCHC contributes to a process that is unacceptably long and frustrating to all involved”. He says: “We want the whole process to be streamlined. The expert examiners of works who advise the committee should be remunerated for their time and expertise and time limits and deadlines placed on their assessments.”

Brenda Croft is the indigenous art expert on the heritage committee. An Aboriginal artist and curator who has just been appointed curator of indigenous art at the National Gallery of Australia, she is unmoved by the auction house’s criticisms.

“People [on the committee] aren’t just there sitting on things,” she says. “We aren’t out to hamper the market but I don’t have a great deal of empathy because I’m not here to further the interests of the auction houses or commercial galleries. Our primary interest here is to protect cultural heritage, not to facilitate sales of work.”

With key US and European collectors refusing to consider works without an export permit in place, one leading Melbourne dealer in Aboriginal art said the act had effectively halved international prices and it was having a knock-on effect in the domestic market, creating an artificial, two-tiered market.

“I don’t take that argument on board,” says Croft. “There are many, many works that have secured permits. And besides, with a lot of the works that do go overseas, the onsale doesn’t go back to the artists, anyway, because these are secondary sales.”

This differs from the situation in the European Union, for example, where artists have a legal right of resale – or droit de suite – in which they are granted a percentage, usually 2% to 5%, of any resale of an original work.

“We’re not here to stop people selling,” says Croft. “But in my own mind I’ve had problems with seeing indigenous works sometimes seemingly traded like stock and bonds, particularly when I know there’s no right of resale to the artists.”

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First published in The Bulletin

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Regional Leap

A renewed engagement with Asia was the pitch when the heavy hitters of art and capital congregated at the Art Gallery of New South Wales today (Wednesday). They were there to hear former PM, Paul Keating, officially launch the Institute of Asian Culture and Visual Arts, or VisAsia,.
With its headquarters in Sydney, and corporate backers like IBM and Malaysian construction giant IPOH Garden, the peak body is promising a ‘great leap forward’ in cultural co-operation throughout the region.
In a quest to develop new audiences for art and new sources of corporate funding, VisAsia will pool the resources of the AGNSW’s own Asian Art Department with those of other major public galleries in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, China, South Korea, and Vietnam.
The unique model is the initiative of AGNSW director, Edmund Capon, and prominent trustee and 1996 Australian of the Year, Dr John Yu, who will serve as VisAsia’s first chairman.
Capon said VisAsia will provide the new Asian Art Gallery (opening early 2003, part of a $13 million re-development) with a steady stream of quality exhibitions from partners like the Hong Kong Museum of Art, and the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore.
Capon said he had personally invited Keating to appear because of the latter's ability to "send a message”.
“Our political body language toward the region in recent times has not been what you would call warm,” he said.

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First published in The Bulletin

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Freudian slip

In between dealing with a hostile press, public brawls with former and current staff, controversial appearances before Senate estimates committees, and complaints about the air-conditioning, National Gallery of Australia director, Brian Kennedy, has found time to pursue a painting – one with an asking price of $8 million, no less. News broke last Wednesday in The Australian that Kennedy would acquire British artist Lucien Freud’s 1999 painting After Cezanne for a sum that would make it most expensive painting ever purchased by an Australian public gallery.
However on Friday Kennedy told The Bulletin that he was “taken by surprise when the story appeared,” and that the Gallery’s negotiations with the artist, who still owns the work, were continuing. As we go to press, Kennedy still has a $1m shortfall to make up from private benefactors in order to clinch the deal.
Suspicions that Kennedy himself leaked the story seem unlikely, given that it is highly unusual to seek publicity for a work you hope to purchase. There are fears now that Freud may now even raise his asking price, now that he is aware that the work is so keenly sought down under. And for the sale to fall through now would surely be a highly embarrassing nail in Kennedy’s professional coffin.
Informed reaction to the acquisition has, in general, been positive But not everyone is happy. One former director of a major Australian state gallery told The Bulletin that the NGA’s “whole collection policy needs to be reviewed and sharpened. Why in 2001 are we buying up the work of British artists? Why aren’t we looking to the Pacific or Asia or here in Australia for that matter?” And one leading benefactor to the NGA declared if he “had the choice of spending $8m on a British artist or a similar sum on Australian work I know what I’d be choosing.”
However William Wright, curatorial director of Sydney’s leading commercial gallery, Sherman Galleries, dismissed such criticism as shallow. “In New York they wouldn’t blink at such a purchase. It’s a worthwhile purchase.
“It’s a large composition, an excellent transcription of a remarkable earlier work (Paul Cezanne’s L’Apres-midi a Naples) that the NGA already owns. Freud is the best living artist of his kind by a long chalk and we have too few of them here.”
Should it make the voyage, After Cezanne will bring the tally to four Freuds in Australian collections, three of them in public galleries.
The Art Gallery of Western Australia purchased Freud’s Naked Man with Rat (1977) in 1983 for just $78,000. Today it is valued at $6.5 million, marking the $8m for After Cezanne as a fair market price.
The AGWA’s deputy director, Gary Dufour, says his Freud’s worth to his Gallery since it’s purchase has been more than simply fiscal.
“For smaller public galleries like ours, if you don’t have works in your collection that others want to borrow, it affects your ability to borrow works in turn,” said Dufour. “Our Freud has spent half it’s time with us out on loan to galleries all over the world – in Paris, Washington, London, Berlin, Frankfurt - if we hadn’t been loaning out the Freud for the past decade most of these major international galleries would not even know we existed.”
Asked which Freud was the superior work, Dufour said he wouldn’t comment only to say “I’m pleased that we have the one that we have.”
In the mid 1980’s the Art Gallery of New South Wales had the chance to buy an important Freud but decided the asking price of $360,000 too high. Three months later the work was eventually sold for $1.2 million.

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First published in The Bulletin

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Saleroom’s Lot

An auction market in contemporary Australian art appears assured after the French-owned international auction house, Christie’s, conducted its second successful sale in the emerging category in Melbourne last week.
Bidding was brisk and competitive with a respectable 70% clearance rate on the 131 lots, which ranged in estimate from $1000 to $180,000.
Top selling lot at $99,875 was the late Rosalie Gascoigne’s ‘Lantern’1990. Other winners on the night were collectors of Brisbane conceptual artist, Robert Macpherson, whose ‘Scale from the Tool’ 1977 set a new saleroom record for the artist of $70,500, confirming his rank among Australia’s senior living artists.
Other artists to post strong sales include Ken Whisson ($49,350), Imants Tillers ($44,650) Robert Hunter ($32,900) and Dale Hickey ($32,900)
With few dealers or museum curators active, Christie’s Head of Contemporary Art, Annette Larkin, said buyers at the sale were predominantly younger, private collectors. “We also had a several successful bids from ex-pats in South East Asia - young lawyers and bankers earning US dollars in Hong Kong and Singapore who were eager take advantage of the exchange rate.”
The sale aggregate of $918,000 was, according to Larkin, “excellent, considering several big ticket items didn’t sell”. She said the total compared favorably with the $1.2 million achieved at Christie’s inaugural contemporary sale, held in Sydney last August.
The poor performing items were works by Howard Arkley, whose prices had skyrocketed since his untimely death in 1999. The formerly buoyant market for the artist’s airbrushed, day-glo images of suburbia took a stumble when four of five lots failed to meet reserve.
Arkley’s ‘Eastern Suburbs Pink Home’ - the sale’s ‘hero’ lot - was passed in at $130,000 against a low reserve of $150,000, however prominent Melbourne gallerist, Anna Schwartz, believes the correction was long overdue. “Howard would be turning in his grave if he knew his works were being passed in at that figure, but we can see the market for his work is in the process of correcting itself.”
Some dealers have been critical of Christie’s foray into their territory but Schwartz was supportive, saying the sale was “the best advertisement commercial galleries could get. Not enough of the art-buying public are knowledgeable about contemporary art – auctions like this educate them.“

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First published in The Bulletin

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