Upcoming exhibition: Caleb Reid

auction market musings

 Chopperbie's

Now taking consignments.  
 

So I'm back at uni (last semester hooray) and one of the first week assignments was to respond to the article by Louise Bellamy, published in the SMH in May 

Normally despondent to week one activities, I surprised myself with my enthusiasm for the set topic. The question was to "Comment on one issue raised in the article", which as all about auction houses blah blah blah.

I actually found it raised several issues. As usual I couldn't decide what I liked best so I just said them all. As I'm working with, not for auction hoses I have a  degree of distance that allows me to look at them objectively. They are the cornerstone of the art market, yet tend to receive bad wrap in Australia where the focus (and glory) remains firmly in the primary market. 

Like anything, it comes down to a combination of education and marketing. Buyers need to educated themselves on the secondary market and what auctions houses do what. And auction houses need to market themselves in a more aggressive manor in order to reach a wider buying public, not just the regular clientele. 

Bellamy's article raised a few issues. Mainly that the secondary art market is run by middle-aged men with monosyllabic names. Asides from that, it stated the obvious that has been brewing for years within the top tier auction house. Here are my musings:

Sotheby’s brand is suffering and their clients are literally going underground. Six feet underground. They can’t find the new market to shift the Nolan’s and the McCubbin's because they are going out of flavor with active collectors who are looking for the next thing with a bit more cool factor. Plus the whole Smith/Gould case has left things slightly uneasy around the place. But they have the market share in jewellery and antiques so ease the burden in order to keep the art side ticking. The have also stopped their stand alone Aboriginal art sales. They either need to re-brand the outfit or align themselves more closely with the international franchise.

Bonhams. Probably the most exciting auction house at the top end. Mark Fraser has been spunking the place up since he came back from a stint at MONA. The Grundy sale was a money spinner, well executed and marketed within an inch of its life. It paid off with numerous sales records achieved, an international ‘tour’ and lots of media attention. Plus the fact the AGNSW purchased four works, which are now hanging in the foyer. All the major auction houses pitched for this sale, giving a good indication of pecking order at the moment. Look out for theirContemporary auctions: a Basel art fair in 50 lots.

Menzies Art Brands. They will keep things ticking over thanks to Menzies Other Brands.* But the catalogues are getting leaner. I predict more works will be funneled onto Lawson~Menzies, a much more active market that gets the collectors and punters alike. With a recent staff shift and a jam-packed August sale, expect to see good things come through here at bargain prices. Good place to sell, even better place to buy. As an aside, Lawson's in now in the care of Martin Farrah so expect to see a higher turnover in art and antiques.

deutscher + hackett . A class act. They have the Melbourne set to keep them ticking, plus are diversifying into gallery spaces and primary market. Buyers and sellers love them so they will always get good, reliable and interesting works.

I predict the next few years will see the action shift to the second tier auction houses, with Mossgreen, Leonard Joel and Lawson~Menzies taking up the majority market share. As Bellamy states, all the movement is in the $1,000-5,000 bracket. Other ones to watch are Theodore Bruce who are taking up where Bay East (formally part of Sotheby’s Australian holdings) left off after closing suddenly last year.

What is clear is the need for auction houses to start courting younger collectors. Galleries are doing it. Action houses need to make themselves more open, accessible and informative. Huge potential lies in this zone of GenX/GenY. 

Auctions need to get sexier and louder. And that doesn't mean starting a creepy facebook page. And if obtainable is the new aspirational, then it really is the era of the auction.   

*namely cleaning services, a wonderful company that ensure Menzies Art Brands has the cleanest showrooms in the business.

“I know something and you know something else”

Talk: 

Chris Durcon

Art Gallery of NSW

July 13, 2013

“I know something and you know something else”

This is the maxim of Chris Durcon, Director of Tate Modern, London, who was in Australia this week to talk to Sydney and Melbourne audiences about the lecture title: The 21^st–century museum. Durcon typifies this new breed of the polymathic museum directors with hybrid accents and lucrative personal brands that they bring to their posts. This puts them more into the frame of the ‘roving curator’ than the static directorships of administrations past.  

Thanks to the increasingly powerful arts muscle that is Kaldor Public Art Projects audiences received an intimate presentation from Durcon, free of charge. A sort of BorisGroys meets Richard Branson, he is relaxed, sagacious and infectious in his quest to open up, enliven and activate a public museum model that is fit for the 21^st-century.

The lecture explored what audiences should expect from their museums and what museums shouldn’t give to their audiences. (And by ‘museum’, he means what we would locally refer to as galleries.)   

The 21^st-century audience is the primary stakeholder in these civic-minded spaces. In the Western, secular society the museum is a platform for community congregation. The museum site is meeting place that invites the audience to be part of the experience, shifting the historic model from consumer to contributor. Enabling what Durcon calls the “collective production of memory”.

Durcon also advocates a return to the original meaning of curator, as a person who ‘takes care’. But in this instance they are stewards for the public good rather than public goods. This again reiterates the quickly changing role of the 21^st-century museum from an object-orientated site to an experiential place.

Durcon also assigns new responsibilities to audiences, as they must learn how to make decisions for themselves in order to become part of the new museum experience. He also raised the point of imposed “self-denial”, by not showing audiences what they want to see. I assume this comment is directed at the marathon, tea towel merchandise-friendly exhibitions that finance the briefer, edgier shows. I found Durcon’s analogy “you know what happens to a sponge that stays wet for more than a month” rather helpful to summarise that insight.

In light of Durcon’s lecture, what I think we all know is that the Art Gallery of NSW is an institution on the move. Given that the ‘existingbuilding is ill-equipped to meet the needs of the 21st century’ and ‘stifles the Gallery’s ability to attract visitors, stage major exhibitions and fulfil its role as the principal art museum serving Australia’s global city’, the plans for the Sydney Modern expansion seem suddenly very pressing. While the expansion’s main emphasis is on increasing the gallery’s physical space, Sydney Modern will allow Australia to participate on the global, shared platform of cultural production.

#thefutureofthecritic

The presence of the critic is becoming increasingly fainter in the cultural landscape. Once an authority to the masses, the masses have now become the authority. We know that the future is social and that we increasingly define ourselves by our networks and accumulated “like” capital. We’re sharing, posting, publishing and pining with fervor, allowing our chosen platforms to project all the 140 character long, photogenic square-shaped things we like. Amazeballs.

But what’s being forgotten with all this awesome totes cool positivity is the importance and rightful place of the critical voice. “Like”-ism has replaced criticism as the qualitative signifier. Traditionally the place of the critic in the arts has always been supported; while the modes and methods have evolved, there has always a mutual agreement between the creator and critic that their existence is codependent.

But as we know history is quickly becoming what we refer to as yesterday’s news feed. In this age of instantaneous content production and consumption, quality criticism is quickly being replaced with impulsive comment and motley sharing. What have now is the ‘critical courier’ who embedded and invisible the broadcast.

Smart devices have become our phantom limbs, allowing us to fulfill the Zuccerbergian goal of Frictionless Sharing and instant endorsement (BTW when did ‘Zuccerbergian’ become an adjective?) What we have now is criticism by omission. If you are not part of the shared narrative, then your relevance is questioned. Reputation banks are what dictate quality in this like-economy, where identity is currency and image is wealth. 

Meta-armies of cultural couriers that dictate taste and fashion are increasingly replacing considered critique with a bricolage of short thoughts. Audiences and cultural consumers only receive what is in the feed, or at best a tarted-up press release adorned with a few hybrid words ending in "…ence". In the quest to be liked and followed we seem to have developed a phobia to expressing and discussing critical views.  Criticism isn’t the same as schadenfreude; it’s very different from the sad cat diary. At its core is the ability to think for oneself, which is on the verge of wipeout from networked intelligence.

If the late art critic Robert Hughes is right and the ‘new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive’, then perhaps the new role of criticism is to sit on the pleasant fence and get more vapid. An observant, art critic friend of mine pointed out that the best criticism around today is Fashion Police. This E! Entertainment is show devoted to learned, considered and wonderfully candid sartorial criticism that makes Joan Rivers to fashion what Hughes was to visual arts. Okay perhaps that’s pushing it, but can you imagine those two on the couch together? It would be brilliant!

But until NBC does a posthumous pilot for the Hughes and Rivers Show, critical thought and response can’t just be swallowed and softly regurgitated by the networked vernacular. Things don’t evolve to greatness through shares and likes, they evolve through vigorous thought and frank discussion. Fashion Police, you have a new pupil.

Artists | Art works | Art’s work | Arts workers

they have the right idea

Artists

Art works

Art’s work

Arts workers

These are the main operators of a sprawling, complex and fragile web that is know as the visual arts. And while it may appear to the onlooker that as an industry we are united by the gossamer of passion and creative spirit, the reality is that we are all eking out a strained and increasing leaner livelihood trying to do the things that justify our existence (read funding).

Some of you may of read Saturday’s SMH article on the ‘Tit-Farm’, featuring a bohemian rundown house filled with artistic demi-goddesses in sheer vintage skirts, nursing kittens and babes under a warm, dream catcher diffused light (in art, even a bad news story is aesthetically pleasing…). Tit-Farm was used to highlight the how difficult it has become to be an artist in Sydney with the spiraling costs of living matched with uncertain and irregular income streams.

A proposed solution is to provide sibsidised housing and work spaces for artists by classifying them as ‘key workers’ who are entitled to affordable, inner-city rents and other benefits or concessions would make their existence much more secure. The plan proposed by Saint Clover (aka Lord Mayor) aims to have some positive affect on the thousands of artists that are struggling to survive and maintain artistic output in this brutally expensive city. And it’s not just the cliché of the emerging artist starving in the garret, I know prize winning, gallery represented artists that are only just hanging on.

And I also know a huge amount of highly educated, over qualified and extremely experienced arts workers have to live and work in the city, just scraping by and making very consequential sacrifices in order to remain working in this field. There aren’t articles written about them or policies dedicated to assisting their profession. There is no gallery assistant grant or subsidized housing for arts administrators. And the other alarming, but not surprising fact is that they are mostly women, quietly persevering and taking on more and more work without any extra remuneration or time in lieu to compensate.

What the wider community must also realize is that the arts, outside of publicly funded institutions, is largely unregulated and unchecked. If it were held to other industry standards such as paid overtime, defined roles and monitored work loads the fact is that this country would not have a visual arts sector. The visual arts could not afford to exist. Arts workers are just as ‘key’ as the artists they work tirelessly to support and promote.

This is not an argument of us-and-them, artists and arts workers are utterly codependent. What is required is a broadening of the assistance and support networks that are in place for artists in order for arts workers to gain some benefits as well. We’re all part of the same equation working for the same outcomes, therefore if is crucial that artists and art workers are given the same support and opportunities to thrive.

How to create a hipster art collection

 

I came across this piece of satirical gold the other day and while it could be retail’s version of Portlandia, it got me thinking about the ideas behind it. I have always maintained that art needs to look at the retail sector in much more detail and realize that what is happening in retail now will be happening in art galleries in three to five years time. For example, we all know that physical shops are a species in decline and retail is going through a Darwinian style evolution which will result in online ‘experiences’ that will mimic the bricks and mortar encounter.

We also know that galleries are closing in waves due to a combination of consecutive years of economic downturn, reduced investment in art and a more restrained collecting mentality. Whereas retail has shifted and adapted to the market, commercial art still seems to be stuck in a Queen Street fantasy, thinking that the market will hop in their German made cars and come to them. While this is still mostly true, what commercial art isn’t addressing and Freedom Furniture is, is that in five to ten years the collector will be a different species that has been raised on a diet of accessibility, availability and visibility.

So scorn as much as you like (or laugh, because it is brilliant), but Freedom Furniture knows that their future market will be the ‘hipsters’ and they must speak their language, understand their psychology and most importantly come to them. Commercial galleries need to study their future buyers, start to foster a collecting culture amongst them and take the gallery experience to them; be it physical, online, pop-up, pop-down or pop-corn, whatever it takes to engage with the next generation of collectors.

Can You Tell Me How To Get To Eveleigh Street? An interview with Reko Rennie

 

 

Can You Tell Me How To Get To Eveleigh Street?

an interview with Reko Rennie 

I caught up with Rennie between coats of paint on the last day of his project for the Eora Journey, a City of Sydney project that aims to communicate local indigenous stories through a series of public artworks. Rennie’s work distinct work, Welcome to Redfern, was made possible through the energy, ideas and enthusiasm of a select group of young Redfern locals, now budding street artists in their own right.   

MG: Your background is in graffiti and street art, how has this helped with stuff you’ve doing here in Redfern with these kids?

RR: They can see someone who has come from a similar background to them expressing themself in contemporary mediums like stencil, markers and spray paint, which they love. I came from a place that was just like this, the Western suburbs of Melbourne used to be really dodgy, everyone was working class and poor, and it had huge issues with drugs and crime. I didn’t go to art school, New York graffiti got me inspired in the Eighties and as a teen I started tagging and doing graff. These kids see an Aboriginal dude expressing himself in mediums they relate and using imagery that isn’t necessarily what everyone thinks you should be doing.

A lot of the time there is the authenticity bullshit in Aboriginal art, that artists should be doing dots or a particular style to be considered authentic. That is just one region and there are 260 different language groups each with their own cultural and artistic practices, so not every community does dots. 

MG: And often the urban story is neglected, being seen as not as valid?

RR: That’s right, so part of this process has been about raising awareness and educating these kids about what is their contemporary identity and how they can use contemporary mediums to express this. They can see that this is just as authentic as any other Aboriginal art.

MG: Artists like Richard Bell and Vernon Ah Kee come to mind.

RR: Exactly, and that you can get away with saying stuff by using art as a powerful voice to inform and raise awareness.

MG: Especially for teenagers, from all walks, there can be hesitation about articulating what they’re feeling.

RR: We workshopped the imagery all together to come up with a contemporary representation of Aboriginal youth by these future leaders, so this is their vision of Redfern and the community now.

MG: The also artwork references what has gone before, like the paintings up at the train station and the flag on the gym wall, both local icons.

RR: Of course, so we never set out to replicate or replace anything that is already here because everything has its place and they are all beautiful. This work is a representation of these kid’s lives now, in the 21^st century.

MG: And importantly, the kids are developing technical skills and their own aesthetic?

RR: They are all stenciling, spraying and marking, they are learning to express themselves through different mediums and they have this visual voice now. It’s been an honor for me to be part of it; it’s really not my artwork, I’m just the vehicle to show them how.

MG: The role of art is to express and communicate, how does this public work continue this conversation?

RR: Art gives you voice and in particular with issues relating to us there are so many things to talk about, positive and negative and art is a great medium to raise these issues in a public environment. That is also why I love working outdoors, because you’re not limited to a particular clientele. I don’t call myself a street artist because I’m not active in the scene anymore, but that is where I came from and public artwork is a beautiful thing.