Grey Day

It’s a bit overcast in Auckland today. How is it in your neck of the woods?

The Poorer Cousin

On 18 May the sale of two of Fiona Pardington's works at Art + Object in Auckland attracted the highest price paid at auction for a photograph in New Zealand. The previous record of $30,000 was shattered when Fiona's Quai Branly suite of nine Heitiki realised $64,275, and her single image Ake Ake Huia sold for $30,385.

Photography has shed its reputation in New Zealand as the poorer cousin of painting and sculpture.

New Lid

And I thought the art of service was lost in Auckland. Well you have your Crane Brothers, but I have never had a particularly good time there. Treat me like I look, poor. Does anyone still read Murray’s blog any more? I thought not.

No I thought the art of service was lost in Auckland. Until recently that is when I decided it was time for a new lid.

I was not returning to Leo O’Malley’s on the Karangahape ridge. For the last lid purchase I basically had to order the lid from Hills, get them to deliver to Leo’s, call to check it had arrived, go and collect it. Sorry besides your margin what was your part in the transaction again Leo? Smith & Caughey and the word service used in the same sentence, not in my tenure in Auckland.

Seems I had ticked off all the old school stores or stores with old school beliefs.

Until a walk down the high street had me stumble across RJB Design. An unassuming store, I entered assuming nothing. I was met by a portly gentleman who greeted me with sincerity and informed me that he would be right with me as soon as he was finished with the other lone customer in the store. This other lone customer (also of portly stature and not so lone as he was with his wife (well I assumed it was his wife (she seemed to know rather intimate details of his measurements))) was after the Richie Benaud look. I think that statement there sets the scene of the type of store I had found myself in. This man with the Benaud yearning and his suspected wife looked like they had just walked off the cruise liner that was currently docked at the Auckland foreshore. Further eavesdropping into their conversation in formed me it was at the case. The dribble that was coming out of this mans mouth was enough to stain an expensive looking beige suit. But the store clerk showed the utmost patience and continued to provide this man with a level of service I thought was restricted to south of the Bombay’s.

As Benaud took to the dressing cubical it was my turn to experience this first class service first hand. I was given full range of the available lids, offered advice to where on my head the lid should actually sit, complemented and finally given a nice friendly pat on the tush. He didn’t really I was just checking that you were still reading my blog.

End result was I left the shop happy and with a new lid.

So the art of service was alive and thriving in A Town. Well that was what I thought. Until I decided I needed a box to keep my lid in….

Adam & Annie's Art Finance Company Adventures

In 2003 ex Black Cap Adam Parore established an art finance company, which came “from the fact that when-ever Sally [Ridge] and I bought a painting we didn’t want to pay for it … Mr Parore saw art dealers struggling to make money and thought that if he put the money in, art dealers would get paid immediately.” Hooray!

Circa 2004 Mr Parore was seen skulking out the back door of a very flat Webb’s sale. He was later dished in the media for ‘dismantling’ a Bill Hammond painted umbrella so that it could be hung on the wall and appreciated in two dimensions. Enter the recession and seemingly the end of Adam’s Art Adventure. Sadly no one else in New Zealand has managed to pull off anything similar.

One of the intriguing things about the New Zealand art market is that it’s still relatively young. The better artists of this era will inevitably feature in future art history texts and related media and their artwork must appreciate over time as a result. Any dealer worth a fraction of his or her weight in art can place their better artists’ work with public institutions, secure features for those artists in magazines and so on. This is then a passport for future sales. So someone in New Zealand (with sufficient vulture-like tendencies) should be out there offering to finance clients into decent artwork, and lending against good artwork. Surely there is money to be made!

New York based Art Capital Group offers a product that works in a similar way to transactions (and I use that word loosely) undertaken by the likes of Cash Convertors and the Pawn Shop in New Zealand. Some would say tragically, many high profile artists and collectors have had to pawn their artworks during the last three years as a result of finding themselves financially stretched.

A classic case is the celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz who narrowly avoided bankruptcy recently after she bought back control of her photographs and homes following a renegotiation of a US$24 million loan from Art Capital Group. As well as generating what one would imagine to be a hell of a good profit, Art Capital's chief executive, also acknowledged that his company was pleased to "assist Ms Leibovitz to achieve financial stability and proud to have been of such value to her at this juncture in her life and career".

Bring back Adam.

Pictured: Obama Family Portrait by Annie Leibovitz (October 2009).

JOCKSTRAP BOMBER HARBINGER of FAILED-ARTIST-MASSACRES-TO-COME?

For God’s Sake - and For the Sake of Western Civilization - Buy, Buy, Buy, For All You’re Worth, When the New Art Season Opens.

Why? Hey, I’ll tell you why. Because Failed Artists are an Historically Established Menace of Major Proportions.

Seems this week’s big, too-good-to-be-true, international story - The Jock-Strap Bomber – involved, as usual, the visual arts. When are we going learn people? Support the arts, or suffer the historically established consequences.

Case in point:

al Qaeda Yemen’s claim for the Christmas ‘undie’ attack on Northwest flight 253, was followed by well documented reports that the (now scorch-balled) bomber’s handlers included two ex Guantanamo Bay prisoners - freed in 2007 and sent back to Saudi Arabia. Muhamad Attik al-Harbi (known now by his nom de guerre Muhamad al-Awfi) and Said Ali Shari appear later (2009) in Yemen-based Qaeda propaganda videos.

Now here’s the meat…..after their release, the two former Gitmo prisoners entered an Art Therapy Program underwritten by the Saudi Arabian government. A program wherein jihadists are supposedly weaned away from violence by red yellow and blue.

The two men, having decided to become fulltime artists and unable thereafter to secure dealer representation, exhibitions in alternative mosques, or sales of any significance - reportedly grew despondent at the failure of their newly chosen lifestyle/careers and are believed to have backslid into renewed jihadism. The two failed artists then migrated to Yemen where they joined a growing network of al Qaeda affiliated terrorist organizations. One insensitive U.S. diplomat said Saudi Arabia's "so-called art-rehabilitation programs are a joke." Considering that sort of critical reception is it any wonder our two nascent artists became disillusioned and returned to their old jobs of fashioning IED’s (improvised explosive devices) instead of artworks?

Here’s the proof-of-life YouTube Video for the Doubters Among You





The two failed al Qaeda lads are just small potatoes, in the bigger scheme of things, when it comes to failed artists wreaking havoc when careers go Phhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhht*

Take for example famously failed artist Mr. Adolf Hitler. According to a former friend of mine - failed Austrian conceptualist Ludwig Redl - as soon as Adolf (who’d often idle by the Danube indulging reveries of becoming a famous artist) seized real power he had the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts Professors – academics who’d rejected his application portfolio – summarily shot. Fuggedaboutit!

Here’s a YouTube portfolio of der Fuehrer’s artwork. Now, just think what might NOT have happened if dewy young Adolf had had a sold-out show of his landscapes.




O.K., O.K., I can’t blame you for being skeptical ‘bout my thesis, but wait, there’s more. Now, as everyone knows, our boy Hitler is firmly ensconced in history’s Big Three of mass murderers. But he’s only #3. Stalin – bringing it home (30 million victims) at #2 was also an artist. Of sorts.

See image heading this post for an example of Stalin-Readymade

He liked to get his dictatorial mitts on (ready-made) nude prints & drawings, and, get this, add his own sardonic textual marginalia. Talk about ahead of its time! Image and Text works from the 1940’s. And ironic to boot.

Here’s a sample of some of textual addendums that Stalin used to fortify his nudes.

“Ginger bastard Radek, if he hadn’t pissed against the wind, if he hadn’t been angry, he would be alive,” Papa scrawled across the leg of a rotund male nude.

"Don't sit with a bare arse on stones," Stalin pens on a drawing of a man on a pedestal. "Give the boy some pants."

"Stalin and naked guys: what’s Going on Here?" headlined a story in a recent issue of the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Consider if, famously vain, Uncle Joe, had gotten the sort of critical success afforded prominent image-ironists such as Sherrie if-I-had-a-nickle-for-every-word Levine. Would the "Father of Nations," have spent more time reading his reviews than force-collectivizing Georgian and Ukranian farms.

A show of Stalin’s handiwork was recently mounted at the leading Marat Guelman gallery in central Moscow.

The moral sub-text of these stories?

Fuggedaboutit!

The Art Season's Sargasso Sea

WE are heading into the artworld equivalent of mariner doldrums. becalmed in a sargasso sea of cultural disinterest. An orgy of commerce has already commenced in this 'holy' season but the commerce ain't, as a rule, intangible objects.More's the pity.

In order to ready all you art dealers out there, for the new upcoming art season, I present here, for your edification, Alec Baldwin's infamous motivational speaking scene from David Mamet's Glenn Garry Glenn Ross.

What follows is a tough-love tutorial from a well-appointed super-salesman to a group of down-at-the heels and demoralized second-raters of the selling game.

As Alec would say - LISTEN and Learn!



Merry-Effing-Xmas, Y'all.

By the way if you aren't familiar with Ivan Karp (director of Leo Castelli 10 years and the the Pope of Soho for decades afterwards - where he was proprietor of his own art-schlock supermarket(OK Harris) Ivan was an old-school salesman & he had the meritocratic habit of looking at the work of all comers. There'd be a line of young out-of-town hopefuls trailing out the door onto the street ( like some kind of penitent snake ) looking to have Ivan pass or advise on their work. Woe to the artists he took into the gallery ( he had too many ) as his 'taint', thereafter, was always upon them. Ivan had a flamboyant habit of carrying a pistol (complete with a concealed weapon permit) in the waistband of his sans-a-belt slacks...which when in a particularly ebullient or choleric mood he'd pull out and show-off to the assembled. Ivan swept his gallery's own diamond-metal stoop every morning that he was open for trade. Whatever can be badly said (and plenty was) about the man...there was no doubt about his ability to leave a lasting impression and close a sale.

Artists' Brains - An Off-Colour Joke

So, Victor Frankenstein sends his assistant down to Ingolstadt to buy fresh brains for his final procedure.

The assistant, walking into the town’s best abbatoir, inquires about the trays of un-priced brains. The butcher informs him, as they stroll past the displayed merchandise, that the first tray - teachers’ brains are $299.99 a kilo, the second tray at $599.99 are bankers’ brains, lawyers’ brains at 799.99, scientists' brains at $999.99, politicians' brains at $1599.99, and so on.

The two arrive at the final tray of brains where Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant, for thoroughness sake , asks… how much?

$5,999.99 a kilo, replies the butcher.

Catching his breath, at the dramatic increase in price, the doctor’s assistant whispers “why so much”

The butcher, drawing himself up, declares – Why, those are artists’ brains, do you have any idea how many of those it takes to make up a kilo?”

Badda-bing.