the art life

"Hello friends,

This is to notify everybody about the upcoming (2009) auction of my whole art collection of contemporary Australian and international art. There’s a website devoted to the collection at Mossgreen, an auction house in Melbourne that are conducting it.

If you go to the site, you have a few options to proceed: you could start with clicking the Highlights link, or the link taking you to the listing of all the artists in the collection - just follow the links and (hopefully) enjoy the finds.

I’ve decided to let the collection go for various reasons, one being the physical constraint of having 180+ artworks in a suburban house in Sydney: the impressive works demanding an audience just get buried there.

I’ll miss them all, and if they don’t sell, I’ll welcome them back with both arms...

Anyway, enjoy browsing through the works, should you be interested.

Warm regards,
Esa"

Labels: auction market, collections, secondary market

Everyone wants to get paid. That's the bottom line of making and selling art in the Australian art world. If you're not interested in the vicissitudes of representation, of dealers, of markets and sales, if you're only interested in making art for yourself or for the ages untroubled by fashion and external pressures of needing to make a living from what you do - that's fine. But for anyone else who wants to make a living from their work, getting paid shouldn't be too much to expect.

The circulation of money in the Australian art market tends to make some people jealous of other people's commercial success. The talk - and God know's there so much of it - is that artist's who make money are undeserving, untalented, middle of the road and maybe even sell outs. Well, that's just the usual art world talk that you hear - and in some cases maybe its even true - but the very fact of being comercially successful should not in itself be a reason to damn someone. If you can separate hype from talent, a financially successful art career is one of the best things that an artist can ask for - to be self supporting in what you do, beholden to no funding body - and their expectations that you should do a certain kind of art to get a certain amount of money - free to express yourself.




On July 5, the Sydney Morning Herald ran an article by Alexa Moses called Embarrassment of Riches. The article was, to say the least, a little confused and posited the arguments that a) there's a lot more money in the art world than there used to be, b) some artists aren't sharing in the dividends and c) it's middle of the road art that's the most popular. What was confusing was not that any of those statements are untrue, it was just that the tone of the article reflected bitter art world bullshit more accurately than any other recent article. It also left out perhaps the most important part of the argument. Wrote Moses:

Over the past decade, the contemporary art market in Australia has exploded, and it's not only corporations who are buying. An art market analyst, Michael Reid, says 1.3 per cent of the population were buying art 10 years ago - now roughly 5 per cent are purchasing.

Buying art can go hand in hand with art appreciation but can also be motivated by aspiration, prestige, home renovations and decorating.

While a burgeoning market can be an enormously positive thing, in that it encourages diversity in the art market and introduces Australians to art, the dollars do not necessarily trickle down to the majority of artists, especially riskier, less-marketable artists. Visual art needs the corporate dollar; it also needs the secondary [market] dollar, as well as investment, sponsorship and media attention. But critics say that with the influence of these forces comes the threat of contemporary art being dumbed down.

The assumption that art money "trickles down' is an unnerving reminder of Reagan-era Voodoo Economics and the concept that money being spent at the top of a market will make its way down to the grass roots. The truth has always been that money stays where it is spent unless its being reinvested elsewhere. Money going into the primary or secondary art markets goes to gallery owners, their employees and to artists, and usually in that order.

Moses turned to the recent visit of of New York critic Dore Ashton for the claim that contemporary visual art has been "dumbed down" for a mass audience. Although there were no actual examples given, the claim is also made that "art is a commodity for which one is sold a ticket." Unless you can afford to buy art, that is exactly what art is for the punters - a Sunday afternoon at the gallery, the cover price of a magazine or a subscription fee for Ovation. Looking for some back up to these claims, Moses quoted Ewen McDonald, the curator of the corporate law firm collection at Allens Arthur Robinson.

McDonald, believes he even saw a slide at the usually cutting-edge Venice Biennale, which he attended last month.

"Venice was almost too much like an art fair; it's almost subsumed by the commodity," he says. "A lot of the art looked like it had come from dealer galleries. Usually the two curated exhibitions beside the thing [main exhibition] are stronger or more chaotic, but they were tamer."

Were we alone in thinking this is the very definition of the pot calling the kettle black? Here is a corporate art adviser art adviser to a corporate collection lamenting the fact that, in his opinion, the Venice Biennale is not cutting edge anymore.

There is no doubt Australians are buying - the secondary art market is booming.[...…] In 1994, the turnover through Australian auction houses was more than $26 million. In 2004, it swelled to more than $86 million. Unlike many European artists, Australian artists get nothing from these secondary sales, although the secondary market sets the price of an artwork and thus the desirability of an artist. Australian artists such as photographers Tracey Moffatt and Bill Henson, painter Tim Maguire and sculptor Ricky Swallow command higher prices on the secondary market, and are therefore sought after.

The auction houses don't "set" prices anymore than real estate agents "set" house prices. Auction sale estimates are just that - estimates of what the auction houses think the market is willing to pay. It may be that Moffatt and Henson and all the others have [comparatively] high prices but an auction house couldn't "set" a high price on an unpopular artist. The punters just wouldn't fork out big money for something that isn't backed up by precedent or desirability.

In the print version of this story there was no mention of "droit de suite" a.k.a resale royalty. Perhaps cut for the newspaper, the online version of this story includes a handy paragraph explaining what this proposed tax/levy on secondary market sales of conetmporary art is all about:

Britain is in the process of introducing the royalty, while Canada, the United States and Asian countries do not legislate this right. The Australian Government is considering the royalty. The resale royalty, which is sworkre between 3 and 5 per cent of the work's sale price, is an attempt to allow artists to have a share in the increased value of their own work. It lasts while a work is in copyright, so the artist and their heirs benefit.

The rest of the article ropes in more dubious quotes from McDonald ["I see artists and farmers and miners as primary producers," McDonald says. "I think there's a drought in the cultural sector. No one wants to support the arts and artists don't get subsidies."], Nick Vickers from the Sir Hermann Black Gallery at the University of Sydney [to lamet conservatism in art buyers taste and the possible closure of the gallery] and Felicity Fenner makes an appearance to lament the conservative nature of the secondary market ["The art market is subject to fashion," she says. "Yes, there is good art and bad art, but I'm more cynical. Good work doesn't always come through in the art market and the less interesting work gets through because it's fashionable."] Zuza Zochowski, an artist [and, it turns out, editorial assistant at Art Almanac], who rounds off the article with tales of her struggle to make art financially viable.

It's true that mainstream tastes are conservative and it'd would be a travesty if the abolition of student union fees meant the end of University galleries, but these are separate issues from the main thrust of the article. If artists want to benefit from the money that is coming into the secondary market, then they should get behind the resale royalty proposal.

There is no real reason that auction houses should introduce resale royalty - there is no binding legal reason to do so. But resale royalty is a moral rights issue and there is a raft of precedent here and overseas for just such a levy. European auction houses already pay the royalty and in Australia Lawson Menzies has put together a fund for Indigenous artists who had not benefited from the profit being made from their art. It's interesting to note that the auction market in this country only really started to kick off in the mid 1990s after the NSW State Government changed the law that prohibited them from charging both a buyers and a sellers fee - they charge from both ends of a sale. Once this was in place, it meant that Christie's and Sotheby's could start to do serious business in Sydney and ramp up their take from the city's well-heeled art buyers.

The question that artists need to ask themselves is whether they want to be in the market at all? Do they want to make big money if their talent and luck converge and they get to live in New York and build their dream houses in Noosa? Or do they want to live on Government mandated hand outs for non commercial work? These are fair questions that acknowledge the reality of the market - that there is a living to be made but it has to be based on a equitable arrangement. Organisations such as the Sydney Art Seen Society and their campaign to set a standard fee for artists participation in public museum shows has come to a halt because the Federal Government, the museums and public galleries don't see it as a priority. The auction houses are instead a very soft, vulnerable target. They make a lot of money from the work of a lot of artists and at the moment almost none of it is going back into the pockets of artists. If you really want to see a "trickle down" get behind resale royalty - but that would probably mean campaigning for someone else's ability to make money. And that's not what the art world is all about.

Labels: art politics, auction market, old media

John Opit owned $67 million worth of art that he kept in his studio in the town of Limpinwood, 80 kilometers from Murwillimbah. He had a painting by Paul Cezanne, called Paul Cezanne’s Son in A High Chair. He also had pictures by Winslow Homer, John Peter Russell, Arthur Streeton, Norman Lindsay and John Glover. Some thieves broke in a stole them. According to Opit, the thieves “knew what they were doing”.

You may have read the story, it was on TV and in all the papers – it made the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian and it was on NineMSN as a breaking story – although at first, the website just printed the AAP wire copy and reported that the alleged Cezanne painting was bona fide. Hastily reposted 20 minutes later, NineMSN were then saying that “doubts had emerged” over the painting’s authenticity:

Police said the theft occurred between 9pm (AEDT) on Saturday and 1.30am (AEDT) on Thursday, when the thief or thieves knew the owner or residents were going to be away for a number of days.

This allowed them to do that (steal the works) with some success. Certainly at this stage it would appear as though it's a reasonably professional job," Sergeant David Rose told Sky News.

"An entry was forced to the property. I understand that a security system there had been disabled, again an indication that these people probably knew what they were after."

Our favourite part of the Sydney Morning Herald’s coverage was some priceless quotes from Opit when confronted with experts who were saying the painting was a phony:

And last night, after spending the day avoiding the media, an angry John Opit hit back at the art world’s skepticism in an interview with the Herald.

"Who are these so-called experts?" he said. "Of course the painting has no provenance; it was a painting of his child. I can prove it’s real; it has an insignia. Ask them about that."

"It was absolute bullshit if they say they can tell from a photograph whether the painting is real."

How did he judge its value at $50 million? "Check the Sotheby’s records. See what a Cezanne canvas three feet by two and a half is worth. It’s worth $50 million."

Now call us cynical, but a possible give away that the Cezanne picture was a fraud may be the fact that it is called Paul Cezanne’s Son in A High Chair? Wouldn’t Cezanne have called it something else? Like My Son In His High Chair or even This Painting Was Done By Me, Paul Cezanne of Tahiti! ???

The Herald also unearthed an art 'expert' named Lou Kelpac who described finding an unknown Cezanne in some bloke’s studio as like “finding a crocodile in the Antarctic.”

Oh, how we laughed. Then we had a chill – it’s not entirely impossible that a painting by Cezanne could turn up in Australia (although you would be hard pressed to believe that Opit’s painting is the real deal – unless it comes from Cezanne’s notorious Shit Period paintings). Just going by the laws of probability, it’s not impossible that there’s a Cezanne lurking somewhere, just very, very improbable.

As Kelpac told NineMSN:

Mr Klepac suggested if the painting did not appear in a comprehensive catalogue by Cezanne scholar John Rewald, who died in 1994, then it was unlikely a true Cezanne.

"But again you never know, there are things that have slipped through the net and people find works by Van Gogh and so on still," Mr Klepac said.

"There are still a few things to be found, and this could be one of them."

He said the 1873 date of the painting fitted because Cezanne's child, Paul, was born in 1872.

The fact is, we may never know if it was real or not because the chances of Opit’s paintings being found again are virtually zero. Back in 1999 Justice Murray Wilcox’s country house was burgled by art thieves who took off with (real) paintings by John Coburn, Leon Pericles and Norman Lindsay. In 1998, Tom Mathieson Gallery had its doors busted down and a Norman Lindsay sketch and painting taken. They are all still missing. The Australian Federal Police don’t even have the power to investigate run–of-the-mill art theft, only “national treasures” like Aboriginal artifacts coming under their remit.

It’s a pity Opit didn’t have the money to insure his treasure trove of paintings – there’s no way the cops are ever going to find them.

Labels: art theft, auction market

Lawson-Menzies announced last Thursday that they would break with the solidarity of other auction houses and begin paying royalties to artists on the resale of their artworks.

"We are delighted to combine a commercial venture with a tangible community benefit," Lawson Menzies chief executive Paul Sumner said yesterday.

But before artists start rejoicing in the streets over the news that they’re going to see cheques and cash flowing into their bank accounts from the multimillion dollar secondary market, the money is only going to Aboriginal artists and then not actually to them, but to a “foundation” who will administer Lawson-Menzies donation of 2 per cent per sale item.

Mr Sumner, who expects to raise $100,000 from the first four auctions, said a foundation would ensure money was delivered "not just back to a single artist, but back to the community at large.

He said the resale royalty scheme proposed by the Government last year would be "a highly unsuccessful arrangement" if money was paid to individual creators.

"There is a big gap between the haves and the have-nots - the introduction of a back-to-the-artist system will further broaden that breach," Mr. Sumner said.

"We are taking a lead because we want to introduce a model that actually has a benefit, rather than a politically created system which simply won't work and might cause more problems than it solves."

Putting aside the tangled and complicated argument over whether artists actually deserve a resale royalty at all, the questions raised by this announcement are many. While money going “back to the community” sounds like a good idea, The Art Life wonders why the artists just can’t get paid? Sumner claims it would be "a highly unsuccessful arrangement" to give the artists the benefit of their own creative efforts, deciding instead to hand over the cash to a foundation that will make the decision of what to do with the money rather than trusting the artist to do it themselves.

How a foundation would address the “gap between the haves and the have-nots” is unclear, but it’s hardly a secret that Aboriginal artists who have made real money from their work have disbursed it as they saw fit, usually to extended families and friends. As to what the artists, their families and their friends then do with the money is entirely up to them.

The underlying sentiment of the Lawson-Menzies announcement is that Aboriginal people are unable to make a decision for themselves and have to be helped with the onerous job of spending their own money. The Australian’s story concludes that “Sotheby's has invested in dialysis programs for Aborigines in remote Australia and encourages its clients to donate a portion of art proceeds to indigenous charities.” Well, good on you Sotheby’s for recognising the continuing embarrassment of a multinational corporation profiting from the most disenfranchised section of the Australian community.

While no one would sensibly criticise donations for good causes, the real problem is how Aboriginal artists get paid in the first place. Only a minority of Aboriginal artists enjoy anything like the normal artist-gallery relationship and accept cash-in-hand (or in-kind) payments instead.

And why would Aboriginal artists accept money upfront? For the simple reason that on the remote communities where the majority of the Aboriginal artists live, there are no facilities and there is no employment. Under those circumstances, taking cash is the best option. While it's understood that there are social problems associated with rural poverty, taking the decision-making power out of the hands of the people with the least amount of say in the way their lives are run already is not going to help. Until the root causes of the disparity between black and white Australia are seriously addressed, schemes like Lawson-Menzies are little more than an insult, a PR-led band aid that just happens to assuage corporate guilt. Can you imagine the outcry if Roslyn Oxley decided she would put Tracey Moffatt and Destiny Deacon's incomes into trust rather than let them spend it themselves? It would be outrageous - but no more outrageous than this porposal.

Labels: art politics, auction market, Indigenous art