Look! Sad-eyed puppy!
Mea culpa. Apologies for being so slack with the posts of late. But I have good reason. Things have been very busy in the offline world. But the outcome of all this hard work is that if you’re in Melbourne, or have reason to be here on 15-16 July, I’m co-convening a symposium at the University of Melbourne with speakers drawn from across the art world talking about all things current in the Australian art industry – from fakes and forgeries, to the sustainability of the Aboriginal art market, and the potential effects of the resale royalty legislation and the proposed changes in the Cooper Review on the market. Artists, dealers, auction house representatives, legislators, academics, all going head-to-head. It’s going to be juicy. Keynote addresses are to be given by the Minister for the Arts, Peter Garrett, AM, MP, and Sam Leach, the winner of the 2010 Archibald and Wynne Prizes, and there’s an associated Melbourne Conversations event at Fed Square on the evening of Thursday 15 July. More details can be found here – including how to register. More updates to follow.
For those of you who have asked how to channel your inner sun-god/dess, the iPhone/iPod/iSanitaryPad application you need to download to drive Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Solar Equation, now showing at Fed Square, is up and running. Detailed instructions for finding the free app can be found 
Much to the annoyance of contemporary art dealers everywhere, in 2007 auction leviathan Christie’s acquired the suitably obscurely-named London gallery, Haunch of Venison (in answer to the inevitable question, it was so named because the building in which it first took up residence is located in the wonderfully named, ‘Haunch of Venison Yard’). The gallery was launched in 2002 under the tender ministrations of Harry Blain and Graham Southern, who was head of Christie’s contemporary art department in London until 2001, and established in the premises formerly occupied by retired über-dealer, Anthony d’Offay. Its sale to Christie’s caused no end of consternation amongst dealers, because in the then-buoyant marketplace of the mid-ish ‘naughties, there seemed to be a considerable potential for conflict of interest in a circumstance where an auction house that was aggressively promoting its contemporary art auctions also owned a large commercial contemporary art business. How would Christie’s manage to maintain a disinterested outlook if, for example, it was selling a major work by one of the artists represented by its commercial gallery?
A small but portentous victory for artists and art buyers alike today, with the ruling of Justice Peter Vickery that three works of art by Charles Blackman and Robert Dickerson are forgeries and must be destroyed. The artworks, one of which is illustrated at left, were sold by art dealer, Peter Gant, although the court found that Gant did not know the works were fakes or that he had acted improperly. The case was brought against Gant by Dickerson and Blackman in the Victorian Supreme Court, their lawyers claiming that the fake artworks damaged the artists’ reputations by 
