'A stripe painter may not wear stripes'

When criticising a mutual acquaintance's art practice, an artist friend of mine once said in all seriousness: 'I always knew his work wouldn't be up to much when I called round once and saw how he'd decorated his house. No decent artist could have lived with those kitchen cupboards, let alone painted them that colour. I won't even begin to describe the lounge suite.'

I've thought about this a lot over the years when visiting artists of all stripes at home; and actually, it's proved infallible.

I think it's a point of view of which Roger White, author of the best thing I've read for some time, a treatise on 'How Artists Must Dress', would approve.

Here's some of White's utterly indispensable advice:

'The relationship between an artist's work and attire should not take the form of a direct visual analogy. A stripe painter may not wear stripes.'

'Whereas a dealer must signal, in wardrobe, a sympathy to the tastes and tendencies of the collector class, an artist is under no obligation to endorse these.'

'An artist compensates for a limited wardrobe budget by making creative and entertaining clothing choices, much in the way that a dog compensates for a lack of speech through vigorous barking.'

'An artist may dress like a member of the proletariat, but shouldn't imagine he's fooling anyone.'

I am very very tempted indeed to align these sartorial homilies with various members of the New Zealand art world by means of the judicious placement of photographs, but unusually I have restrained myself and you must just imagine to whom they could be applied. However, I very much like White's idea that an artist's 'sartorial choices are subject to the same hermeneutic operations as are his work', and his recommendation that artists should bear in mind while dressing the possibility of a five-paragraph review of his or her outfit 'written by a critic he detests'.

As chance would have it, I once canvassed the idea of writing quite cutting reviews of art critics' clothes which could be published alongside their own reviews, thus enabling everyone else to see whether or not their aesthetic opinions were worth listening to, but it would have been a lot of work and I didn't get round to it.

Click through for White's article: it's completely brilliant.

Dragnet

'Sometimes there's a good feed of whitebait coming through, sometimes nothing comes through for a couple of months -- it doesn't prevent you from going down with your whitebait net and trying to catch a few whitebait.'

Venerable Wellington art dealer Peter McLeavey -- who's seen a few seasons come and go from his Cuba Street stand -- on the vagaries of the art market. Quoted in The Press, 25-6 April 2009.

Cold case: The art detective

In May 2008 the Labour-led New Zealand Government introduced the Copyright (Artists’ Resale Right) Amendment Bill, establishing a mandatory royalty payment for visual artists when their work is resold on the secondary market. It seems to have all gone pretty quiet; I'm not sure who's running the scheme, how's it's going or whether in fact it's even started yet; maybe it's in the process of being canned by the new National-led government, whose arts spokesman wasn't at all keen on it. I was interested to read, however, about the similar visual art resale scheme operated by the Californian state government, whose administrator spends hours trying to track down missing artists in order to send them small cheques, often for amounts under $100.

'The paperwork needed to collect royalties mushrooms from a one-page form to a project that might require wills, drivers' licenses and, sometimes, lists of heirs. It's just not worth it, in some cases. For Mr. [Jerry] Garcia, the payoff for his estate would be $812.50; in Mr. [Robert] De Niro's [Snr] case, $137.50. When one living artist was told he was owed $90, he told Ms. Milich, "Call me when you've got some more money."'

However, painter Rick Stich, who recently received a royalty cheque for $80 after an exhaustive search, commented to the Wall Street Journal that he was glad to have it. "If you found $80 on the ground, would you pick it up?" he asked. "I would."

Gladly.

Recession? What recession?

The guts might have dropped out of the art market in London and New York, but here in Christchurch New Zealand, things are just fine, thanks.

Photographed this afternoon outside the Centre of Contemporary Art, Gloucester Street.

Strengthening their wood

Jean-Antoine Watteau, Departure from Cythera, 1717, oil on canvas

As I've mentioned before, I fundamentally disagree with the notion -- perhaps I should say the ludicrously anachronistic Calvinistic belief -- that lean economic times make for the production of better art. It's essentially a childish, old-fashioned romantic idea which presupposes that the best art is made by a hungry lone wolf of an artist emoting all over the show in his garret before going out to sell another pint of blood to pay for more oil paints. By contrast, too much money washing around the artworld leads inevitably to fat, bloated art and artists pandering to those tasteless overlords, the private collectors. What utter rot.

It's amazing how ubiquitous it is as an idea, though. Here's a couple of choice recent quotes on the subject.

"What is absolutely certain is that this recession has come in the nick of time, and that we should welcome it with open arms. The art world has spent a decade and a half metamorphosing into something ugly and worthless. That process has been halted. There is hope."
[...]
"...the whole tottering art-world edifice has grown soft, blubbery, arrogant, self-congratulatory and decadent. I cannot remember the last time I encountered an artist with the kind of fire in their belly that made Damien Hirst so unmissable when he emerged. Or anyone boasting the passions of the early Tracey Emin. British art needs a recession for the same sorts of reasons that those forests in South Africa need the occasional fire: to strengthen their wood, to return to an essence, to get rid of the weeds and to regenerate."
[...]
"So, roll on the recession. It’s all good news. A leaner, meaner, angrier art world that has to fight harder for our attention is exactly what we need."
-- Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times, 11 January 2009

And it seems that design isn't immune either from this rather nasty sense of glee in the face of other's adversity, as well as an oddly moral conviction that poverty should be the hand-maiden of creativity:

"The pain of layoffs notwithstanding, the design world could stand to come down a notch or two — and might actually find a new sense of relevance in the process. That was the case during the Great Depression, when an early wave of modernism flourished in the United States, partly because it efficiently addressed the middle-class need for a pared-down life without servants and other Victorian trappings... Design tends to thrive in hard times. In the scarcity of the 1940s, Charles and Ray Eames produced furniture and other products of enduring appeal from cheap materials like plastic, resin and plywood, and Italian design flowered in the aftermath of World War II."
-- Michael Cannell in the New York Times

Hmmm. Can't see anything wrong with artists and designers making a decent living from their work, myself.

The value of the mark

Artist signature font pack. Available here.

Seems like going after a flea with an elephant gun really -- but Damien Hirst has reportedly demanded that "Cartain", a schoolboy artist who's been selling collages featuring reproductions of images by Hirst juxtaposed with images from food advertising and other photographs, "not only remove the works from sale but 'deliver up' originals, along with any profit made on those sold, or face legal action." According to the Independent, Cartain has since paid Hirst 200 pounds and given him the remaining unsold works.

I guess when you're a global brand, you have to guard your copyright zealously, no matter the microscopic scale of the transgressor. In related news this week in Christchurch, Playboy Enterprises went hard after the owner of a party booze bus who named his fleet after a bunny transfer he found on the side of his first vehicle. The Press reported that the global conglomerate had accused the Bunny Party Bus-man of using Playboy's "world-famous Bunny mark and a confusingly similar Rabbit Head design". Legal action might ensue, etc.

The Press went to Professor Jeremy Finn from the University of Canterbury Law School for comment. "If you have a well-known mark you protect it by being aggressive about the edges, otherwise you end up not being able to stop that same person in the future. For many of these companies the value of the mark is the biggest asset they have," he said.

"It's just bullying," said the disillusioned bus-man, peeling off his stickers.

Meanwhile the consistently informative Canterbury Heritage blog mounts a strong argument this week that a significant early map of the new Christchurch settlement, "alleged" to have been completed by Assistant Surveyor Edward Jollie on 18 March 1850, was in fact a forgery dating from five years later. The evidence marshalled by the blogger includes various street names which didn't exist until 1853, as well as the incorporation of the signature of a Chief Surveyor who had returned to England by the earliest occasion on which the map could have been drawn. The false map, suggests Canterbury Heritage, was designed to "provide legal status in October 1855 for building on the public reserves and also for the subdivision of three of the green belts that surrounded the original city."

A bad business.

Flotsam

I spent most summer holidays as a child at my grandparents' house near the Essex seaside. Although it had passed out of their possession by then, my grandmother's family had once owned the lease of one of the beach huts that flank the east coast of England, coming down from London on the train to spend their holidays sitting out the front of a tiny, uninsulated shed, smoking and knitting and gossiping and watching the grey breakers roll in to the beach front below. You can't sleep in the huts; they don't have toilets or electricity or running water; they're places for boiling up cups of tea and storing buckets and spades and sheltering during the day from the ravages of the British summer. Or at least, the British summer as it used to be; during my childhood I vividly remember one sweltering day when the temperature climbed doggedly to 25 degrees, but when the big guy was in London a couple of years ago it was regularly 36 degrees and people were frolicking in public fountains.

One summer during my childhood there was an enormous storm along the east coast, and dozens of the brightly coloured beach huts along the Clacton-Frinton-Walton-on-the-Naze strip were overturned and swept out to sea. For weeks afterwards the contents of the huts were washed up each day by the tide. On our morning walks along the beach we would see knives and forks, unbroken china plates, picture frames, chair legs, scraps of curtains, shrimping nets and door knobs lying in drifts on the sand, while flowered cushions bobbed on the outgoing tide. Men sweeping metal detectors in great fluid arcs were the unspoken lords of the beach: kids and idle walkers got hastily out of their purposeful way. I was fascinated by what the sea took, and what it gave back, and what might still be out there, caught in underwater currents. I was desperate to claim some of its treasures. My grandmother, however, forbade us to bring any of the booty home. "It belongs to someone else," she said severely.


In recent years, beach huts have become ridiculously fashionable and regularly command the kind of exorbitant prices which would have made my grandmother's family require a stiff cup of tea and a lie-down. Keith Richards owns one, as does PD James; the royal family have hung on to theirs at Holkingham Beach for more than 70 years. Yet for all their cultural resonance in Britain, the only artwork I know of concerned with beach huts is Tracey Emin's The Last Thing I Said to You was Don't Leave Me Here (2000), which consists of the tumble-down blue hut at Whitstable in Kent she bought with her friend the artist Sarah Lucas. It was originally exhibited in its entirety alongside two enigmatic photographs of Emin naked inside the hut, in which she seems to be dealing with some restless memory.

Tracey Emin, The Last Thing I Said to You was Don't Leave Me Here II, 2000, Tate Gallery

(The hut was subsequently bought by Charles Saatchi for $75 000, and along with Emin's infamous tent on which she appliqued the names of everyone she'd ever slept with, was destroyed in the massive warehouse fire in which many of the key artworks of the YBA generation were lost.)

The thin blue line

Saturday's post about art history and its discontents pointed to Charles M Rosenberg's handy list of alternative careers for art historians. Now there's another option: Scotland Yard has been recruiting part-time volunteer constables to its art and antiquities division. The catch is that you already need an art-history related job.

So far 13 special art constables (who receive a month's basic police training, wear a police uniform, and have the power to make arrests) have been recruited to the ArtBeat scheme, recovering stolen art and working on fraud and forgery cases. The special constables work two days a month on police art business, while their salaries continue to be paid by their employers, the major British museums and galleries who effectively sponsor the scheme. Zoe Jackman, whose regular job is booking school groups at the V&A, tracked down and arrested an art thief only a month after starting her job.

Given that some sources suggest that art-related crime represents the third highest-grossing organised criminal trade over the past 40 years, maybe it's something for New Zealand to look into? Though on reflection, a liberal application of turps might be the most effective solution for many of the art crimes perpetrated here ...

Fame, please. And more cash.

It's official. Art historians are a disaffected bunch, much put-upon, ignored by colleagues from other disciplines, working for peanuts without the respect they deserve, battling both rampant anti-intellectualism and the high cost of international air travel. At least, that's according to the results of a survey by the College Art Association of America (CAA), which recently asked its members to list the most pressing issues they face in their profession.

While the CAA divided their responses into 10 categories, the Art History Newsletter blog suggests they can be boiled down to just two:

• “I deserve more money and/or fame” (91% of respondents)
• “We should do better work” (9%).

Disillusioned respondents could do worse than consult Charles M Rosenberg's list of career alternatives for art historians. Regrettably, however, most of his suggestions also require a "high tolerance for economic uncertainty" -- which on the strength of the CAA survey would seem to render art historians temperamentally unsuited.

Oh well. Back to the disaffection it is, then.

Treat 'em mean and keep 'em keen?

Dorothea Lange, Tulare County, California. Cheap auto camp housing for citrus workers, 1930s. Image from The History Place.


Do tough economic times make for good art? That's what critic Mark Amery intimated the other day when interviewed by Radio NZ's Kim Hill.

I've heard him say similar things before, and my impulse was then, as now, to strongly disagree with him. I refuse to countenance the idea that hardship is a virtue (blame it on a devoutly atheist upbringing). The notion of the artist as financial outsider belongs back in the gloomy garret, along with the palette knife and the severed ear. I think it's a great thing that the New Zealand art market has grown to a point where it's possible for some of this country's most prominent artists to make a decent living from their work: it's not something that happened for artists of McCahon's generation, the prices of whose work rose sharply only after their deaths. In my observation, it's not the case that strong sales of artwork automatically equate to an artist who's sold out artistically. And perhaps most critically, I just don't believe the inevitable corollary of Amery's argument, that times of plenty produce worse art than lean times do (though I'll accept there's more of a market for rubbish of any sort when economic indicators are good).

Most successful artists of my acquaintance are completely aware of the dangerous seduction of their market, and the balancing act required to simultaneously feed it while keeping one's distance from it. If you want to make a living as an artist, you need to make saleable works; but if you want to make really good work and achieve critical acclaim and industry recognition, you need to experiment and take risks. (Pull both off at once, however, and you're made.) It's a dangerous game, and the most successful artists understand on which side of the fence they need to stay. Damien Hirst -- whose overall subject is arguably the art market itself -- puts it best, in the apocryphal remark originally attributed to his manager, Frank Dunphy: "Money should chase art. If art starts chasing money, the whole thing is fucked."

In my experience, financial hardship is not in the slightest conducive to creativity. The opposite, in fact. If you're worried about paying bills, or eating, or keeping warm, the last thing on your mind is making art. At that point you're interested in making money. Boredom, on the other hand, is what's always driven me to do anything new, and it tends to surface more readily in times of plenty.

The current straightened economic times, however, will undoubtedly reshape the artworld in various ways, as collectors tighten their belts and sponsors pull back on their commitments. Jerry Saltz, reporting recently on the impact of financial troubles on London's Frieze art fair, made the following predictions:

"If the art economy is as bad as it looks—if worse comes to worst—40 to 50 New York galleries will close. Around the same number of European galleries will, too. An art magazine will cease publishing. A major fair will call it quits—possibly the Armory Show, because so many dealers hate the conditions on the piers, or maybe Art Basel Miami Beach, because although it’s fun, it’s also ridiculous. Museums will cancel shows because they can’t raise funds. Art advisers will be out of work. Alternative spaces will become more important for shaping the discourse, although they’ll have a hard time making ends meet."

Most importantly, suggests Saltz, money will stop being the only measure of success in the artworld. This seems like quite a good thing, athough maybe more relevant to parts of the world with larger markets for art than New Zealand's. But while the recession might clear out some of the deadwood from the edges of the art market (as well as from other sectors), I would doubt that it will be the catalyst for the production of noticeably better art than in the good times.

Kiss my asset

Jake and Dinos Chapman, from Frieze Art Fair, 2007

The relationship between artists and their patrons is never straightforward. The money gets in the way. And beyond the "owning a piece of you"/"biting the hand that feeds" patron/artist conundrum, there's the sheer incommensurability of the life choices involved. In his review of Marjorie Garber's just-published study of arts patronage, Patronizing the Arts, Joseph Epstein puts it like this:

When patron meets artist, artist patron, what does each think? Does the patron, if only to himself, ask, "If you're so smart, how come you're not rich?" And does the artist, in his turn, ask, "If you're so rich, how come you're not smart?"

It wasn't a question Mark Rothko, the "great thundercloud of 20th century American painting", bothered with when he painted his famous Seagram murals (currently on display at the Tate Modern) for the swanky Four Seasons restaurant, the watering hole of money-men and socialites in the heart of Manhattan. Instead he muttered darkly: "I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room." Rothko probably accepted the commission as it came through his friend, the architect and art patron Philip Johnson: but it involved a difficult personal compromise, making paintings for the "place where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off". In the end, though, Rothko couldn't go through with it, withdrawing from the commission and returning the money.

And in another piece of recent art-and-money news, I note that InTrade, a Dublin-based trading exchange, has launched the world's first futures contracts based on the price of the art market. If the credit crunch hasn't left you completely strapped, you can bet your small change on the rise or fall of the global art market using the Mei Moses Art Index as a basis -- without even having to go to the bother of collecting the pesky art yourself. The Financial Times comments that "the move is part of a trend for art to be viewed as an asset class, with the development of art funds and art prices indices."

Chad Rigetti, vicepresident of business development at Intrade, said: "The idea to create a price-transparent, liquid tradable art-based derivative occurred to me after reading about hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin's purchase of Jasper Johns' 'False Start' for $80m in the fall of 2006 . . . Creating a product that would bridge two circles - collectors and financiers - seemed obvious."

Beautiful inside my wallet forever

So the Damien Hirst auction at Sotheby's is over, and the artist -- already Britain's wealthiest, apparently -- has walked away squillions of dollars richer: although we don't know how much richer exactly, as the terms of Hirst's financial arrangements with Sotheby's are a closely-guarded secret. The media coverage has been intensive, and Hirst has been skilled at whipping up a feeding frenzy of publicity around the sale, tossing out throwaway one-liners like chum in the water.

Thus we know that last week, for example, Hirst had a bad dream that everything turned to crap and no one bid: "I imagine it going: 'Lot 9 — no bids. Lot 10 — still no bids?'" he said. "But, whether it works or not cash-wise, the door will stay open."


In the event, Damien Hirst's fear of failure proved unfounded -- or perhaps simply another shrewd piece of positioning. Some commentators have suggested that the risk of a huge public flop was minimal, if any, given the heavyweight calibre of the players.

No one knows for sure how it all stacked up, though the tactics speculated about variously include minimum price guarantees from the auction house, buy-ins by his dealers, and possible incentives paid to dealers by the auction house. Hirst disclosed to Bloomberg's Scott Reyburn that he wouldn't be paying a seller's commission on the auction. (Reyburn suggests that on the hammer total of 95.7 million pounds, Hirst is set to pocket about 50 million pounds, after deducting his manager Frank Dunphy's commission and his own production costs.)

The day before the sale, the Financial Times suggested it didn't really matter which works sold: that the auction, Beautiful inside my head forever, was a cultural extravaganza that in the final count wasn't so much about the art as about the art market, an event which represented "the apogee of [contemporary] art's collusion with greed and bling".

"With Mr Hirst's open-mouthed shark and glittery-banal skull and bull its emblems, art history of the past 20 years is distinguished not by a dominant movement or style - that is impossible with the new global pluralism - but by the unprecedented, unstoppable, absurd, obscene rise of the art market itself. "

Not for the first time, I wish for a little more collusion with greed and bling by contemporary New Zealand art's promoters.

Slow local

Edward Hopper, Highland Light, 1930, watercolour over graphite on rough white wove paper, Collection of Harvard College


I've written before about the way in which certain artists come to "own" the views which inspire their work, to a point where it's almost impossible to see a particular landscape except through their eyes. Think of Edward Hopper's Cape Cod landscapes; Ed Ruscha's LA; Arthur Boyd's Wimmera. There are dozens of New Zealand examples: Toss Woollaston's high vantage point across Wellington Harbour, which he experienced in a sort of muddy atmospheric cubist frenzy, and accordingly now so do I; McCahon's tablet-like clifs at Muriwai; the slight edge of craziness in the swirling skies of Bill Sutton's rural Canterbury churchyards; the surprising delicacy of Bill Hammond's Boulder Bay in Lyttelton Harbour, with its whispy birds and plumes of spray; the doughty resoluteness of Michael Smither's stony Taranaki beaches banking up his glimpse of the mountain.

Years ago I was driving through Provence when I saw a familiar landscape appear like a mirage in the distance. "It's Mont Sainte-Victoire!" I said excitedly. "You know, that mountain Cezanne painted a lot." Until I saw it I'd had no idea where it was, or even, stupidly, that it was a real place: I'd never thought about it. I felt ridiculously pleased: seeing the view framed in the windscreen was like owning my own personal version of the paintings, until the road turned a corner and it was out of sight.

The extraordinary thing was that what I saw from the car looked just like the paintings, an arrangement of angles and planes and edges softened by a golden haze. I wasn't long out of university and had "done" Post-Impressionism twice, once as part of a stage one French culture course and again as part of Art History (bet it doesn't feature much in either today). Of course everything was taught by slides: there were no real works of art to look at. Driving through the French countryside I realised that my understanding was completely at fault, and that Cezanne, at least, was much more of a realist than I'd hitherto assumed. (Ditto Hammond, when I took a walk down to Boulder Bay.)

On a visit to Christchurch once, I had a similar experience of encountering a landscape I was already familar with from a painting. I was driving through the old streets of the eastern central suburbs, trying to find an acquaintance's studio, hopelessly lost. Going through an intersection, I looked to the right towards the hills, and suddenly saw Doris Lusk's Pumping Station. It looked exactly like the painting. Just as suddenly, it was gone, and I've never seen it again.

Doris Lusk, The Pumping Station, 1958, oil on board, Collection of Auckland Art Gallery

Built in 1882, the Christchurch Pumping Station (it pumps the city's sewage along the pipes out to Bromley) is now a protected building. The city council with the poorest record in the country of granting non-notifiable resource consents (effectively letting developers knock stately old buildings down before anyone else finds out about it) couldn't knock it down, even if it wanted to: Lusk's view is safe. (Now, if only I could find it again!)

But not so Edward Hopper's view of Highland Light and the keeper's house at Truro, Cape Cod, which inspired so many of his works. The NY Times has a piece about the zoning consent which has just been granted to owners of the section next door to the house once owned (and designed) by Hopper and his wife Josephine, to allow them to build a 6,500-square-foot trophy house, which will effectively block the barren view made into one of the iconic images of American art by Hopper. It's being done in the teeth of opposition from local residents, who say there are two types of people that traditionally live in Truro: fishing people and artists, and landmarks are important to both.

It's a vain hope, I guess, to suggest that landscapes which artists have made famous should be protected from development. But in this instance, it does seem a bit of a pity.


Hopper used to drive around the Cape a lot to find locations to paint; he often painted from his car, a two-tone Buick sedan, in which he had had the green-tinted windshield and windows replaced with clear glass. An article in Time magazine in December 1956 in which he was interviewed at his Truro home commented that his paintings look as if the viewer is travelling, somehow:

"By suppressing all details that would not be noticed in a passing glance, and arranging his compositions to suggest that the scene extends far beyond the frame, he puts his picture window in motion. Seeing a Hopper exhibition is like floating through people's backyards on a slow local, in a state of awed awareness."

Unlike the new neighbours, one of the current owners of a house painted by Hopper says she feels an obligation to keep the house as it was, given the numbers of people who come to photograph and paint it themselves, following Hopper's trail around Truro. You can compare the paintings with the locations as they are today in this New York Times feature: or click here for an interactive 360 degree video view from the Hopper house. Might not look like this for much longer.

Thinking of me

"They write 500 words, put me down, get their pay packets, pay off their credit cards, pay their mortgages, shag their wives - and when they do it's me they're thinking of."

Tracey Emin, speaking about journalists in 2002. For more from Her Emin-ence, click here.

Spoils to the victors

Richard Prince, Untitled (cowboy), 1989, Ektacolor photograph

Described in a recent interview by British novelist and frequent visitor to New Zealand Hari Kunzru as one of the "victors of the art boom" (a phrase I'm still mulling over), American artist Richard Prince has been spending up large recently. His works have been fetching big prices: a couple of years ago, a cowboy image by Prince became the first art photo to sell for over a million dollars US, a figure quickly surpassed by another of his iconic re-photographed Marlboro Men images, which sold for US$3.4m in January this year.

No stranger to the big bucks himself, Kunzru, who secured an advance of 1.25 million pounds for his first novel, The Impressionist, comments that Prince now has the financial muscle to compete with libraries and institutions to fuel the acquisition of another of his passions -- rare 20th century books. Prince's book collection, which now fills a two-storey building he owns in upstate New York, begins in 1949, the year of his birth, and ends with books published no later than 1984.

"Here are some cool things Richard Prince owns," writes Kunzru:

"Nabokov's desk copy of the Olympia Press first edition of Lolita, heavily corrected and annotated; a letter written by Sylvia Plath the day before she killed herself; the only known copy of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key to retain its original dust cover ($175,000 to you, sir); Jimi Hendrix's letters to his dad; Neal Cassady's copy of On the Road; Kerouac's previously unknown original scroll manuscript of Big Sur (twice as long as the published book); the manuscript of The Godfather as well as the letter in which the editor suggested changing the title from The Mafia to The Godfather; and letters by Thomas Pynchon written in the late sixties, while he was at work on Gravity's Rainbow."

Most artists I know -- the ones dealing with images anyway, the abstract ones tend to be a bit more Zen and minimal in their personal habits -- are, like Richard Prince, voracious collectors. They collect old New Zealand books, kitsch examples of Maoriana, taxidermied animals, images clipped from newspapers and magazines, and other artists' works. In one sense, their collections provide source material for the artist's own works: in another, both the works and the collections speak to our society's compulsion to accumulate objects and images as part of the construction of our personal identities. Or something like that.

In other recent news about art collectors, it seems there's been a run on the Sunco brand inflatable lobsters which Jeff Koons has used as an inspiration for monumental sculptures. Works like Koons's Bike Rack (2004) have created a "halo effect", vastly increasing the value of the original swimming pool inflatable, which until recently has retailed for a mere US$14.99. The five-foot-high toy lobsters have sold out in the stores, bought up by canny speculators including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; one sold recently on eBay for US$736.58.

Lobster Rider, from Athlete Director Dave's Blog

"It's like one of Koons's sculptures, but you don't have to pay $5 million for it," said the happy seller, clutching his copy of The Complete Works of Walter Benjamin.

Supply and demand

Charles Giuliano, Maverick Arts blogger, isn't impressed with the way the art world has burgeoned in recent years beyond all comprehension. It seems that any parvenu can now be a player:

"A decade or more ago when it came to art the super rich had no taste. But now their kids have gone to art school or earned degrees in arts administration. In the past bored socialites became interior decorators but now they are private dealers or art consultants."

Giuliano reminisces about a simpler (yet somehow more glamorous) time when the weekly list of dealer gallery openings in New York City was brief enough to be published in the Sunday paper. Back in the day, the New York art scene was a community:

"On any given evening you could see most of the "serious" New York artists at Max's Kansas City. During Happy Hour Mickey Ruskin would put out the free chicken wings. That, and a seventy five cent glass of wine, made an evening meal. If you hung around long enough you got to enjoy the midnight parade of Andy's factory gang into the back room under Dan Flavin's light sculpture."

Giuliano suggests that there may be up to 100,000 artists resident in the NY area today, although only a fraction of them can now afford to live in Manhattan. He blames the rampant growth of the artworld on two main factors: firstly "the unquenchable hunger [of] the rich to fill their luxury condos, villas, and warehouses with art"; and secondly the "cranking out" of studio degrees by colleges and universities. "Bottom line, there are just too many artists".

Although our domestic art market could probably do with an injection of super-rich (though tasteless) collectors, there's a similar issue of artist oversupply in New Zealand. I feel for all those public gallery curators and art dealers confronted by yet another hopeful just out of art school popping their head round the door and sheepishly clutching a CD of their work, desperately angling for a studio visit. (Of course I also feel deeply sorry for all the hopeful, but ultimately sadly disillusioned, fledgling artists.)

Amazingly, there are now a whopping 22 New Zealand tertiary organisations accredited to dispense fine arts qualifications, many of them at a degree level. There must be literally hundreds of artists graduating every year from organisations as diverse as the University of Auckland and the Hungry Creek School of Art and Craft, not insignificant in a country of New Zealand's puny size. The percentage of graduates who actually pick up a good dealer, or ever show in a public gallery, or an artists' run space, or for that matter manage to even sell their work in a cafe, must be absolutely miniscule.

And most of the graduates will carry significant debt as a result of their studies, but will be unable to use their "qualification" to make any money to repay their student loan. The irony in all this is that's still the fine arts graduates of the "proper" universities (Auckland, Canterbury, at a squeak Massey) who are most likely to be able make a viable career as artists, although universities are traditionally places to learn rather than to train. On the other hand, fine arts graduates of what used to be the polytechnics (which once ran entirely industry-orientated vocational courses) are much less likely to show in the big public galleries or with the major dealers, and hence to come to the attention of the big collectors. (The only real exception to this extremely snobbish -- but pretty accurate -- rule of academic thumb is AUT, which is producing some significant players in the New Zealand art scene, largely due to its faculty of practising artists of the calibre of Stella Brennan, Liyen Chong, Paul Cullen, Saskia Leek, Fiona Amundsen etc.)

The relatively recent expansion of the NZ art world is a great thing for its most prominent artists (the ones Hamish Keith reckons will benefit almost solely from the Labour Government's resale royalties programme), as it has increased demand for their works to a point where you no longer need to be dead to make a decent living. But for every market success story, there must be 50 would-be artists pumping coffee or waiting tables -- and at the rate our tertiary institutions are churning them out, that number's only going to increase.

Legal tender

Liyen Chong, Hero, 2008, embroidered hair on cotton, 65 x 140mm, 64zero3

Lately we've seen the rise of New Zealand auctioneers acting increasingly like art dealers, working directly with artists as the first point of sale. Whereas once an auctioneer needed to wait until the collector decided to part with the work, now they're plucking the works directly from studio walls. It's something that's always happened, of course; and it works particularly well for artists with an established reputation but without a dealer, as it provides them with high profile marketing of their works, reproductions in a catalogue, access to a pool of collectors, and sometimes a short essay commissioned from a decent art writer. And they don't have to chip in for invitations, advertising, or drinks at the opening.

Recently the practice has become more obvious, due perhaps in part to the increased competition for sales among Auckland's auction houses; it seems the art auction game's working increasingly like real estate, with the ability to secure listings being just as important as the ability to close a big sale.

Adopting another strategy from real estate, now the tables are being turned -- sort of -- on the auctioneers with Christchurch art dealer 64zero3 offering a work for sale by closed tender. Liyen Chong's Hero, pictured above, is one of her characteristic intricate works made with her own hair. Her works look like very precise line drawings until you view them in extreme close-up, when you realise they're actually embroidered. They take more than a week each to make, and collectors quite understandably line up for them.

This tender is being offered in a good cause -- the proceeds from the sale of the work will be donated by the artist and her dealer to Edmund Hillary's Himalayan Trust -- so it's a one-off. But I wonder if there's legs in the idea for future sales? Perhaps, like real estate, there are some popular properties it would work well for, while others would need to wait for the next speculation boom.

A piece of yourself

Tracey Emin's name today is synonymous with contemporary art's crossover into showbiz -- she's commonly photographed hanging out with Madonna, David Bowie, Ronnie Wood, air-kissing Elle MacPherson at parties, etc. -- but life wasn't always a lot of fun for the girl from Margate. Now famous for exposing the often traumatic events of her private life in her work, Emin describes in her memoir Strangeland the strategy she came up with to get back on her feet after her "return from failure".

"I knew I could be good at something, and to celebrate this, I sent out eighty letters: a subscription form, inviting people to invest ten pounds in my creative potential. For this, they would receive four letters: three official ones, and one marked personal. Within the first month, I received sixteen replies and soon I had forty subscribers."

One of Emin's subscribers was gallerist Jay Jopling: the rest is history.

Reading this reminded me of Dean Martin's similar (but far less competent) early tactics for raising money. Sick of being called the "schnozzola Sinatra" by the newspapers, aged 27 Dean Martin booked in for rhinoplasty to "undo what the lord of snouts had done", according to his best biographer, Nick Tosches. Already in huge debt and having sold 95% of his future earnings to his record company and various managers and impresarios in exchange for cash advances (which meant that he only received $50 out of every $1000 he earned), he was lent the money for his nose-job by a friend, who, aware of Dino's hopelessness with money, insisted on paying the doctor directly.

Immediately afterwards, Dean Martin's radio show -- fifteen minutes of live songs each weeknight -- premiered. He needed a musical arranger, and hired band leader Jerry Sears, promising him a further 10% of his income. As Nick Tosches has it: "He had now done the impossible. He had sold more of himself than there was."