“I look forward to the time when honours can be bestowed simply for the meaning of a man’s work – without enticing paintings into the competitive arena.”
Mark Rothko, 1958.
(Images via metmuseum.com; Mark Rothko portrait via ‘The Legacy of Mark Rothko’, Lee Seldes)
**Disclaimer – the author may have a personal interest in promoting this program. Please take the following advice with a liberal dose of salt**
Right, let’s get this out of the way. This Sunday 9 May at 10am on ABC Radio National’s ‘Artworks’ program, art world luminary Amanda Smith is hosting a conversation about the vexed question of art prizes and the Australian art world. Essential listening.
The guests for the discussion are Jason Smith, now Director at Heide and former curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Victoria, and artist Sam Leach, whose Wynne win (heh heh) has been the focus of so much debate in recent weeks. Oh, and I was there too. It was a fascinating exchange, mediated by Amanda who asked some very thought-provoking questions. Jason and Sam had some very interesting things to say informed by their fairly unique perspectives. For my part, I think I managed to keep the brain farts to a minimum. One thing I have learnt – don’t drink coffee prior to a radio interview. The whole milk/phlegm thing doesn’t really work when attempting to project a mellifluous and authoritative tone of voice.
For those of you who are unable to listen to the program in real time (I know, I know – Sunday morning, Mothers’ Day sleep-in and all that) – the program should be available on a podcast via the ABC website next week. It’s also repeated on Monday at 1am for you insomniacs, and on Tuesday at 3pm.
Was there a council meeting somewhere to which I wasn’t invited at which it was decided that April should be designated ‘persecute Banksy’ day? If so, I heartily object, your Honour. ’Twas almost exactly a year ago that Glastonbury Council made a colossal blunder and erased one of Banksy’s stencil works from an unsuspecting wall. And now, we’ve lost yet another of our Banksys (Banksy plural: Banksii? Banksys? Banksies?) – some time ago we mourned the demise of the much cherished ‘Little Diver’, which was submerged beneath a wash of silver paint by an street art iconoclast. And now, Parachuting Rat, formerly of Hosier Lane, just behind the Forum Theatre, has met its demise, scrubbed out by a well-intentioned council cleaning crew.
A couple of questions – where in the name of all that is holy can I get me some of that cleaning fluid? The only sure-fire cure for the tags that periodically appear on my front fence seems to be yet another layer of Dulux.
Another question – street art is by its very nature transient and mutable. Should we be surprised that this is its fate? In line with the artist’s intention (why else would he be making art in such exposed places?), wouldn’t it be best to simply let it disappear? Surely the prosaic demise of Little Diver and the airborne Rat is a crucial part of their lifecycle. They are conceived, made and distributed in such a way that they are guaranteed to have a limited shelf life. A bit like we frail human beings, really… see what he’s doing there? As you can see in the picture of the poor, late, lamented rat, a subsequent visitor to the wall had already made his mark. And so it is in the world of guerilla art. The owners of the wall on which Little Diver resided really sealed his fate by encasing him in a perspex sheet. That’s not what it’s meant to be about. It only becomes a problem once people start getting over-excited about an artist in the art market. Only then do we worry about preserving these gestures that were never really meant to last. Because they may be worth eleventy-bazillion dollars one day. I don’t hear anybody complaining about all the other things that were cleaned off Hosier Lane. Because they weren’t worth anything, cash-wise.
Oh, and to the denizens of the good city of Melbourne? You plan to “implement retrospective legal street art permits to ensure other famous or significant street artworks are protected”? Er – the point is that you won’t know it’s famous or significant until long after it’s made. By which time, at this rate, it will have been painted over or removed. Catch-22, I’m afraid.
Rats.
(Image: Michael Clayton-Jones via The Age online)
But is it still ‘My Sotheby’s'? Hmm. And news just in – the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has launched an informal review through its mergers register seeking ‘comments’ from ‘interested parties’ concerning the proposed acquisition of Sotheby’s Australia by First East Auction Holdings P/L.
I won’t be saying anything. But I wonder whether Goodman’s competitors will be able to resist the opportunity to shoot one across his bow. Better hurry, chaps. You’ve only got a week!
Auctioneer Tim Goodman (picture: Anthony Geernaert via news.com.au)
Well, if anything was going to waken me from my interweb slumber, this would be it.
Down here downunder, we pride ourselves on our audacious and irreverent approach to most things. And so… now we have locally-born Monsignor Tim Goodman – formerly of Goodman’s Auctions, more recently of Bonhams and Goodman, giving Robert Brooks, chairman of British powerhouse Bonhams, the ol’ heave ho. It seems that Tim got a better offer. Bonhams who?
He may just be scraping up the slops, but Tim Goodman (pictured) has successfully wooed the floundering British auction house Sotheby’s and orchestrated a deal by which he will use the Sotheby’s name here in Australia. This in itself is rather surprising. Many in the industry suspected that Sotheby’s might follow its arch-rival Christie’s, which closed its Australian branch in 2006, and withdraw from the local market. But Sotheby’s has been disinclined to dilute the brand thus far, and has chosen to close under-performing branches rather than pass franchises onto enthusiastic locals. Seems that Tim was very convincing.
My immediate concern? Upwards of 50% of Sotheby’s Aboriginal art sales by value went to international collectors. Whereto from here in the absence of Sotheby’s self-appointed Aboriginal maestro Tim Klingender? There’s a glittering but fragile network of collectors throughout the world who have looked to Sotheby’s for an indication of what is the best/only Aboriginal art to buy.
Will Goodmans/Sotheby’s be able to stoke the same fires?
‘For the Love of God’, indeed.
What to do if one’s much-vaunted, publicity-heat-seeking work of art fails to attract the £50m asking price? Easy. Get together with one’s business manager and art dealer, and buy it yourself. Which poses a rather existential conundrum – if an artwork falls in a distant gallery, and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Or – if you purchase a work of art from yourself, does the price you paid for it represent a ‘real’ price?
After artpreneur (ooo – think I just coined a new word) Damien Hirst’s diamond-studded, platinum coated skull was unveiled with much fanfare in 2007, rather embarrassingly no buyer was prepared to pony up the cash. Rather than sell it at a discount (according to The Art Newspaper, dealer Alberto Mugrabi offered to buy it for £35m), Hirst, along with his dealer, Jay Jopling, and business manager, Frank Dunphy , and Russian neo-oligarch Viktor Pinchuk, all ‘chipped in’ and ‘bought’ the skull together.
Ah, the ins and outs of the art market. Such fun.
I had me a little flashback last night watching Four Corners’ fascinating report on fakes and forgeries in the Australian art market. In the course of the program, a painting by Sidney Nolan was displayed that played a key role in reporter Quentin McDermott’s coverage of the Ron Coles scandal. But more of that in a minute. Back to my flashback… the painting in question brought back some very funny memories for me. It’s an old friend. Indulge me here as I take a little trip down memory lane.
When I was running the art department at Leonard Joel down here in Melbourne, without prior warning in the early ‘naughties, the upper management of the business decided to suddenly and rather dramatically slice and dice the staff in my department. Just two of us were left. As is the way of things in the art auction trade, the cycle of life continued. The end of year auction rolled around and with it, the all-important decision of which artwork to use on the catalogue cover. With my great work-mate, Rick Merrie, we chose the aforementioned Sidney Nolan painting – a deliberately subversive choice on our part (the cover is reproduced here). Our aims were two-fold – the gesture of the figure in the painting, standing alone and signalling up-river, struck us as a poignant and hilarious comment on the status of the art department.
“Excuse me, sir – have you seen the Leonard Joel art department?” “Yes. They went that way.”
Oh – the second aim? To get a penis on the front cover. Childish, yes. Unprofessional? Possibly, but also very amusing to us at the time. Yes, yes. I know. I did need to get out a little more often back then. All work and no play, and all that.
Back to Ron Coles. According to the Four Corners report, it seems Coles wasn’t as enamoured of our man with his dangling junk as were Rick and I. Sometime between its sale at Leonard Joel, and it turning up at Ron Coles’ gallery, our friend had been castrated, his proud man bits painted out. Which makes me sad, because I’ve always had fond memories of him. Although it does confirm what I’ve always told my students studying the art market at University – penises and portraits are the hardest things to sell. So to speak.
At least I will always have my catalogue to remember him by.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Michelangelo. Think of it as a schoolgirl crush which germinated when I fell head over heels in love with David at the age of fourteen or so. No matter that his splendour was somewhat tarnished by the fly-spotted, discoloured slide projected in art history class in high school. Since then, I’ve developed an abiding passion for the art of printmaking. And in the meantime, I’ve been intrigued by images of the Torment of St. Anthony… Martin Schongauer’s is one of my favourites. His demons always remind me of the Hindu/Buddhist divinity, Garuda (image right). 
So, imagine my joy when I discovered that all three things may well be combined in a single image (pictured above). Kimbell Art Gallery in Fort Worth, Texas, picked it up for a song – they believe that it was painted by Michelangelo at the age of 12 or 13 after Schongauer’s print (around 1487 or so). Adam Williams, an art dealer, bought it from Sotheby’s where it was catalogued as ‘Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio’ – where Michelangelo served his apprenticeship. It is believed that the Kimbell then bought it for about $6 million. Although the authorship is disputed, it’s a stunning painting.
Oh, please let it be true, art-world pixies. I want to believe!
Images: The Torment of St. Anthony – The New York Times; Garuda – blog.baliwww.com
Uh oh. Seems some overly zealous council workers have painted over one of Banksy’s Paddington Bear stencils in Glastonbury during an anti-graffiti blitz.
This wouldn’t be the first time one of Banksy’s works met such a fate. In Melbourne, we had a little Banksy of our own, ‘Little Diver’. The owners of the building whose wall the artist tackled with his spray-can covered said stencil with a sheet of perspex to protect and preserve it. But, in a perverse twist of fate, another, rather more prosaic, practitioner of wall defacement poured silver paint behind the sheet of perspex and scribbled ‘Banksy Woz Ere’ across the face of it.
Could this be the inevitable fate of much stencil art? I mean, it’s a curator’s worst nightmare… an artwork, exposed in a public space, indistinguishable for all intents and purposes from the colourful tags that surround it. Besides which, given that street art began as what amounts to a guerrilla movement, disseminated under cover of dark and anonymity, should it be left to its fate? Purists would probably argue yes. But that’s unlikely once the market gets its hands on it. Once an example of street art has a tangible financial value placed upon it, there’s no way it will be left to deteriorate and succumb to destructive environmental elements. This is exactly what happened here in Melbourne, where a massive mural painted by Keith Haring on an exterior wall of the Collingwood Technical School in 1984 has been listed with Heritage Victoria to ensure its preservation, despite much debate about the artist’s intention. Painting it in such an exposed location, Haring would have known that it would deteriorate over the years. Was that as important a facet of the artwork as its actual execution? Or would he have wished to see it restored and preserved? Impossible to say – Haring died in 1990.
Interesting conundrum, though.
Image: Banksy ‘Little Diver’, before and after: ‘The Age’
Firstly, you need to be an artist with the celebrity status of Japan’s Takashi Murakami. Secondly, you need to join forces with French luxury goods manufacturer, Louis Vuitton, whose hilariously expensive handbags and clutches adorn the pretzel-thin arms of the world’s most watched fashionistas and celebutards. Thirdly, you need to get yourself exposure – and preferably a retail outlet – in one of America’s biggest contemporary art galleries. OK. That’s the hard part. Now comes the easy bit. Whip up a design for Vuitton to print onto some fabric, out of which the company will craft some of aforementioned exclusive fripperies. Said process will leave quite a few remainders and off-cuts. Take those off-cuts, grab a few timber stretchers, attach off-cuts to stretchers, sign and number them on the reverse, then sell in shop set up in large contemporary art gallery. Easy. But where does this leave the people who snap up your ‘limited edition prints’, if they bought them thinking they were acquiring ‘original’ works of art?
According to LA-based art collector and gourmet butter retailer (!), Clint Arthur, this is what happened to him (that’s a visibly cranky Arthur pictured with his prints above). And he’s more than a little miffed. And, if as reported in the LA Times, up to $US 4 million worth of Murakami ‘prints’ were sold at a Louis Vuitton boutique that had been set up inside a retrospective at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, there were many other collectors who were also happy to pony up the cash to buy these ‘artworks’. Now, Murakami, along with peers such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, uses his practice to challenge the traditional boundaries between art and commerce. He has established a multimedia collaborative relationship with Vuitton, extending to the construction of a manga candyland cartoon clip featuring Vuiton’s ‘Superflat Monogram’ (really worth a look) in which Murakami acknowledges the ‘brilliant guidance’ of Vuitton’s artistic designer, Marc Jacobs.
In this, Murakami et al are Andy Warhol’s cultural heirs. All of which is fine. But, art theory aside, the aggrieved Arthur is suing Louis Vuitton for fraud, alleging that the luxury goods manufacturer did not disclose that the ‘prints’ were contrived from bits left over from the manufacture of the Murakami-designed handbags and other natty be-tassled goodies also for sale in the boutique.
The prints were described in the boutique as “canvasses revisited by Takashi Murakami”. “Revisited”? Now that there is some of the best and most creative use of art sales lingo I’ve yet to see. Louis Vuitton argues that, as an experienced art collector, Arthur should have known what he was getting. Moot point. But the devil is in the detail. And where things may get sticky for the French company is with California’s ‘Fine Prints Act’.
The purpose of the act is to ensure that buyers are given all the information they need about the nature of a print at the point of purchase. To avoid, I’d imagine, the sort of debacle that saw collectors fleeced out of millions of dollars by the ‘printmaking’ process set up around the elderly Salvador Dali. At their best, original prints are exquisite – I’m a nut for them. But for anyone other than an expert, the processes used to make prints can be pretty obscure. And the difference between an original, fine print and a mass-produced, ‘limited edition’ print… well, think a cubic zirconia and a diamond. Mr. Arthur believes he’s been landed with a couple of cubic zirconias. And where it might get difficult for Louis Vuitton is that the Fine Prints Act (1744(4)) makes it very clear that an art seller must tell a buyer when the “multiple or the image on or in the master” is “of an image produced in a different medium, for a purpose other than the creation of the multiple being described”. In short – if the fabric was made for the bags, and the prints were an afterthought, then there could be a problem. Then again, Vuitton might just say that the fabric was made with the express intention of producing prints, and the bags were the afterthought. Chickens and eggs.
Point being – fine art prints? One very large, squirming can of very slippery worms.
Images: Clint Arthur: Los Angeles Times; Takashi Murakami, DNA images: BBC
