Yes – things have been busy. Very busy. Exhaustion and sleeplessness have kicked in. But no fungus infections as yet, I’m happy to say (note to the repulsed – I’m referencing Roy Lichtenstein at left).
(Image: Roy Lichtenstein, ‘Takka Takka’, via www.artchive.com).
On top of the symposium I’m co-convening at the University of Melbourne next week, with speeches by the Minister for the Arts, Peter Garrett, 2010 Archibald and Wynne winner Sam Leach, and other venerable members of the visual art community, I’ve also been writing an article, ‘Joining the dots: analysing the sustainability of the Australian Aboriginal art market’, for publication in UNESCO’s humanities journal, Diogenes. Yes, I know. Enough of the self-serving plugs, already. But at the moment I’m so busy I don’t have anything else for you.
So here’s the pre-publication version of the paper, which looks at the sustainability of the Aboriginal art market using empirical evidence drawn from auction figures. My conclusion is that Aboriginal art, rightly or wrongly, is treated by the market as anthropological, rather than fine, art, and that this has implications for the mid- to long-term sustainability of the market. There are charts, tables and everything.
Please note, it’s the pre-publication form, and will be edited and formatted differently when it appears in Diogenes. It’s also a necessarily ponderous academic piece of writing. And long. (I’m a good salesman, aren’t I?) But there are some interesting bits and pieces in there that should be useful. I hope. It’s a formal version of a paper I delivered at the 2009 Art Association of Australia and New Zealand conference, and it attracted a fair bit of interest from a number of luminaries at said event. Then again, perhaps they were just being polite.
Anyways, here it is – the abstract first, to whet your appetite, and the rest of the article after the jump. Please take heed of the requisite copyright notice from Diogenes and Sage Publications. Because this is all original research put together by me and to be published exclusively in their lovely publication. And if you copy any of it and use it without requisite acknowledgment, they’ll have your proverbial guts for garters.
Enjoy.
“This paper has been accepted for publication in Diogenes and the final (edited, revised and typeset) version of this paper will be published in Diogenes Vol/Issue, Month/2010 by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. © ICPHS. For more information please visit: www.sagepub.com .”
Title:
Joining the dots: analysing the sustainability of the Australian Aboriginal art market
Abstract:
Sotheby’s estimates between fifty and seventy percent of the Aboriginal art it sells at auction is bought by international collectors. How do those buyers view their acquistions? On the Sotheby’s website, you will not find Aboriginal art listed with ‘Australian’ and ‘Contemporary Art’ under the ‘Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture’ department. Rather, it is classified as one of the ‘Ancient and Ethnographic Arts’, alongside ‘Antiquities’ and ‘Pre-Columbian Art’.
This paper will show that the promotion and perception of Aboriginal art as ethnographic rather than contemporary in nature is but one of a number of important aspects of the market that have implications for the industry’s long-term sustainability. This distinction has a significant effect on the way Aboriginal art is distributed, promoted and received by buyers and sellers. Collectors measure the value of ethnographic material by assessing its proximity to a culturally immaculate source. An object has the greatest ethnographic integrity if it emanates from a primitive, isolated community.
Author’s biography:
Dr. Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios is a researcher and sessional lecturer at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include art price formation and how and why economic superstars emerge in the auction market. Part of her research was the focus of a Four Corners program, Art for Art’s Sake, aired on ABC television. Meaghan co-authored a paper with Professor Neil de Marchi of Duke University for the Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art: ‘The impact of unscrupulous dealers on sustainability in the Australian Aboriginal desert paintings market’. She is a registered art valuer and has seventeen years’ art-industry experience in public and commercial art institutions. Read the rest of this entry »
Look! Sad-eyed puppy!
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?
Ever since Marcel Duchamp signed a (thankfully, factory-fresh) urinal ‘R.Mutt’ and presented it at the 1917 Society of Independent Artists’ exhibition in New York (illustrated at left), art has been as much about ideas as it has been about the objects that artists make. For many contemporary artists, the object itself is a by-product of the artistic process, and far less important, if not virtually irrelevant, to the action of making the artwork which for many artists is the principal artistic activity.
‘For the Love of God’, indeed.
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.
