Better than collecting dust

Lately our house has been gripped by collection-mania. The small guy has been furiously eating his way through groaning bowls of cereal, even to the point of regularly asking for Ricies and ice-cream, a dish of his own invention, for dessert. The object of his desire is Weetbix rugby cards, for which he has conceived a rare and burning passion. His conversational starters these days include such gems as "Would you like me to take you through all my cards in the order in which I got them?" and "Mum, I know you said I wasn't to talk about them again today, but I've been thinking, if I swapped Sitiveni Sivivatu..." and the plaintive "I really wish I hadn't swapped Richie McCaw with Edward... Do you think I could get him back?"*

When the big guy was sick the other week it fell to me to take the small one to soccer, which is the nearest I've got to a sportsfield since a regrettable foot-tripping incident on the netball court at high school. I am not generally considered a sporting type, nor I am one of nature's sports'-lovers, though I am married to one. The big guy has an uncanny ability to discover a test match just about to kick off, while seemingly innocently channel hopping: "Oh, look," he says, "Might just watch a few minutes." I open a book, although it's hard to concentrate over the yelling and drumming of feet. (I will admit to a slight relaxing of my usual anti-sports 'tude when Frank Bunce appeared on Dancing with the Stars.)

Buncey: The Samoan Robert de Niro


While the small guy had a terrific time running round after the ball in a mad puffing scrum of muddy little boys, and the other parents roared up and down the sideline barking instructions to their oblivious offspring ("Tackle him! TACKLE HIM! Oh, what's that! They're playing A STRATEGIC GAME! Get off, you showpony! etc), I stood under my brolly listening to art podcasts, giving the small guy an encouraging shout now and then when he hove into view and feeling, not for the first time, like a bit of a tosser. While the big guy is able to balance his enthusiasms for art and sport most effectively, I suspect I may have been born without the requisite gene. The artworld is a comfortable enough habitat, but on the sideline of the soccer field on a wet Saturday lunchtime I am a fish out of water.

The small guy's mania for rugby cards, however, is something I'm quite familar with. It's a look that I've seen in the eye of many art collectors over the years. The collecting bug is one that all public galleries depend on; the expansion of the New Zealand art market in recent years means that galleries are increasingly dependent on loans from private collectors to supplement monographic exhibitions. Many 'museum quality' works, as they used to be called, are now in private hands, and it's the job of public galleries to persuade the collectors to part with their works, temporarily, for public exhibitions.

Art collectors are usually interesting people to speak with, as -- like the small guy, who needs no encouragement whatsoever -- they'll often communicate wild and intemperate enthusiasm for the works they've acquired. They might have started with an anonymous painting bought from the school art auction, and end by waiting in the rain outside a top dealer gallery for an advance preview of an exhibition opening that night: the kind of exhibition which opens with the red dots already appended to the works. Arranging, distributing, and refreshing their collection, as well as acquiring new works, can take up a considerable portion of a serious art collector's time and energy.


The small guy, who is no fool, realised early in the piece that a competitive advantage was inherent in the fact that his little friends were keenest on Crusaders cards. He understood that if he were to collect another team, one less valued by his rabidly red-and-black mates, any Crusader cards he got would be more valuable as swaps. This proved correct: on several occasions, before rugby card trading was banned at school, he was able to negotiate two-for-one deals. He started to put together a collection based around the Highlanders ("Because they're a bit useless, and no one wants them") and the Chiefs, for ancestral reasons. Sentimentality got in the way, a bit: for ages he wouldn't part with George Whitelock ("He's hopeless, hasn't got any points, and I feel sorry for him.") Although not intrinsically different, or even rarer, some cards had a higher value purely because they were more sought after by those in the know. It was just like the art market.

The small guy got serious. He press-ganged his extended family into changing their breakfast-eating habits; found a couple of lost cards on the pavement; ate dozens and dozens of Weetbix; spent hours rearranging the cards and thinking of different taxonomies (positions, teams, cereal types, favourite-to-least-favourite, and so on); and was continually encouraged by his long-suffering mother to please introduce another topic of conversation. The collection steadily grew.

Poor old George Whitelock: we feel a bit sorry for him.

And then one day Charles came round for a playdate, with a bulging bag of swaps. Charles is a big maths brain; while the small guy, more language-orientated, is confident pronouncing tricky names like Mils Muliaina, Charles refers to all his cards by their number. Listening to their conversation was like watching a debate at the UN through the medium of simultaneous translation. A brisk session of horse trading ensued after afternoon tea. "Do you need Corey Flynn, Charles? Because I might be prepared to trade him for someone good." "Flynn, Flynn. Number 21. Yes. OK. What are you thinking?"

But something was amiss. It slowly dawned on the small guy that the enormous pile in front of Charles only represented his trading cards: his real collection was at home. It was essentially very dispriting. The cards are due to stop being issued in early June; it would be impossible for the small guy ever to catch up. (In vain we told him that Charles's parents teach at a boys' boarding school, where they must go through three hundred packets of Weetbix a week: no wonder he can hardly lift his bag of cards. It would be like comparing the collection of a public gallery to the works pinned up on one's fridge. No consolation, though, for the serious collector.)

The small guy put his collection away for a few days until an envelope arrived from his uncle with a few more cards (new ones! no double ups!), and his enthusiasm was rekindled. But it's been an interesting thing, watching the collecting bug develop in the small guy, and his knowledge of rugby consequently grow exponentially, in the way that an art collector's does, when they start getting serious about their subject. (As well as his intuitive feel for the 'market' in the cards. Terrible. Capitalism 101, for six-year-olds.) What's been most interesting for me, with no wish to further my own very limited knowledge of sporting heroes, is to discover that the kinds of behaviour that I'd previously put down to the specific enthusiasms of art collectors are in fact those of collectors in general. Whether it's the holy grail of a McCahon or of Richie McCaw's face on a Weetbix rugby card, it's the thrill of the chase that's the point.

*["No."]

A short guide to flatting in 1968

Another installment from the Playdate archives.


In 1968 you could get a one-bedder "personalized pad" in Herne Bay for under $10 a week, or an ultra-modern furnished three bedroom flat in Mount Eden, complete with low coffee tables, divan beds, shiny copper light shades and "ceilings of sprayed-on asbestos" -- evidently a desirable feature forty years ago -- for only $26.

Like many of the articles in Playdate, this guide to four typical Auckland flats is an amazing time-capsule; but what caught my attention here is this fabulous photograph of the lounge in a converted Herne Bay villa with its Toss Woollaston painting hanging over the fireplace, and a brushy gestural abstract work next to the "gas caliphont" over the bath. (Ahem. Art gallery registrars all over the country would be having a fit.)


The article reads:

"The whiteness of the room itself accentuates objects. Colours seem brighter, form clearer. The few paintings (McCahon, Angus, Woollaston etc.) read as clearly as type on a page. There are books everywhere--on a desk, on a writing bureau, on bookshelves, mantlepiece and floor. Bessie Smith is singing."

While the various advantages of the flat included briar roses and nasturtiums in the garden and a "first-rate fireplace", the downside was that it was a bit dark and damp: "The light isn't good enough for painting."

Anyone recognise the tenant? (The clue may well be hanging in the bathroom.)

On another matter, Season 5 of Dancing with the Stars has started. (I promised myself that this time I wouldn't watch it, but regrettably as ever found myself glued to every cheesy spangled moment.) This one's harder than most to pick, but I suspect reality-TV veteran (oh, and ex-All Black) Josh Kronfeld will be in the final hunt. Wonder how many series to go before they have a visual artist among the line-up of celebs, and gulp -- who would it be?

Playdate at Ringo's

In the mid-1980s, I lived in a flat down by the river in central Christchurch. When I walked into town to catch the bus to university, I'd pass by Ringo's secondhand bookshop on Manchester Street. If I wasn't too late coming home, I'd pop in for a quick browse.

Ringo's long gone now -- he packed up shop sometime in the fifteen years I was away, and no one I'm in touch with now seems to know what became of him -- but in his time he was a legend. Friends told me he'd been in the book trade since the 1960s, when, presumably, he also got his name: if the fourth Beatle were tiny, ferrety-faced, wore a greasy cheese-cutter cap, and spent his days listening to the races on a transistor radio with an evil-smelling roll-your-own permanently stuck to his lower lip, they were dead ringers. Back then I was a Camel smoker, but the odour of Ringo's cigarettes was too much even for me. With undertones of damp and old chip fat, the musty fug of twenty years of cheap tobacco hit you in a dense greyish-brown miasma as soon as you opened the door. ("The smell of death," said a friend.) It took a decade or more for the books I bought there to lose the odour.

If you discounted the stench -- no easy task -- I loved popping in to Ringo's. You never knew what you might come across. The books were displayed on trestle tables, wedged together with their spines upwards; new items were stored in cardboard boxes on the floor, waiting for their turn on the table. The odd treasure floated up from a motley soup comprised of a dozen dog-eared copies of Papillon and Jaws, Hillman Imp repair manuals, countless light pink 1970s Mills and Boon hospital romances, and several unwanted volumes of Pam Ayres's poetry. At the time, probably as an antidote to my university studies, I was collecting paperback bodice-rippers. Over a few years I gradually accumulated everything Georgette Heyer ever wrote, as well as the lurid and increasingly improbable adventures of 18th-century French aristocrat Angelique, by Sergeanne Golon (a gallic husband and wife team), in thirteen fat volumes including Angelique: The Road to Versailles, Angelique and the Sultan, Angelique in Revolt, etc etc. (I needn't go on. You get the idea.)


One afternoon, rummaging through one of the boxes under the table, I found a couple of old issues of Playdate. As usual on the cover of Ringo's books, there was a sticker with a dual price written in magic marker: 50c/25c, which meant if you brought it back after you'd read it he'd give you 25c for it as long as you bought something else, in a kind of homegrown book pawning scheme. Initially attracted by the design of its advertising, I paid $1 for the two copies and took them home, whereupon I became completely enraptured by the content: Playdate was an entertainment and popular culture magazine aimed at 'teens to twenty-sixers', published in New Zealand between 1960 and 1972. It featured items on fashion, popular music, movies, and occasionally art. There were also horoscopes, advice columns, interviews with pop culture celebrities and the most fantastic adverts for bri-nylon negligees, pancake makeup and stretch slacks. Pure Mad Men. Maybe a touch of Austin Powers. It was New Zealand, after all.


Over the next fortnight or so, each time I called into Ringo's I picked up another few copies. Initially I found the Playdates in the boxes (maybe a job lot?), then they were up on the table with the 'current' books. On about the fourth occasion I was in, I noticed that the price had increased. They were now $2/$1. Plonking a pile down on the counter I mentioned the increase to Ringo.

"Well, the thing is," he said apologetically, fag bobbing up and down, taking a whistly indrawn breath like a mechanic just about to tell you the bad news about your car, "They've become very popular. Just flying out the door. I've had to put the price up."

But it's just me buying them, I said. If I wasn't buying them no one would be.

I paid up, with bad grace. It wasn't until a while afterwards that I realised Ringo's argument held up either way.

The other day I got the big pile of Playdates out again. They've been with me over twenty years, through seven house removals and four cities; they're such a fantastic record of popular culture in New Zealand that I've never wanted to get rid of them, and in the end I'll probably give them to a library collection as they should be in the public domain (I note that even the National Library doesn't have the whole run). Flicking through them, it was the big guy who first noticed a photo taken by Marti Friedlander (though the caption said Marty). Looking through the magazines again more carefully, I realised that the New Zealand art world of the 1960s features in them frequently in various overt and covert ways. There are painters, photographers, film-makers, art collectors and assorted art groupies... some surprising names.

To this end, I thought that I might post a few pages here over the next few weeks. (Please excuse, as ever, the shoddy re-photography.)

Here for your viewing pleasure is Dick Frizzell's serigraphed Warhol-esque illustration for a short story by Peter John Wheatley entitled 'Blue Capsule', from June 1969.


And Marti Friedlander's terrific photos of The Satirists, a university review from August 1965:



More to come. They still whiff, a bit.

The perils of collecting

Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper 1971

"I don't spend a lot. Most of my art collection I got by trading it or through knowing the artist. I got Andy Warhol's first soup can painting for $75. I lost it to my first wife."

The five-times married third-generation abstract expressionist, photographer, actor and art collector Dennis Hopper, interviewed recently by Rosanna Greenstreet. Hopper also lost Roy Lichtenstein's Sinking Sun, which he'd bought for $1100, in a divorce. (A year and a half ago it sold for $17,870,000.)

Mr Clean's bazooka

Paul Swedlow's collection of vintage carpet cleaning equipment, Aronson’s Floor Covering, NYC. photo Ruby Washington/The New York Times.


If I had to name my single favourite thing about my contemporary digital life -- as opposed to the analogue history of the early 1990s I described yesterday -- it would be the ability to read the New York Times online. It's one of the first things I do in the morning, after I have spooned apricot porridge into the baby's mouth and slapped out rounds of vegemite-and-chippie sandwiches for school lunches.* What I read there sets me up for the whole day.

I bought a Sunday edition in Manhattan once. It was the size of a paving slab and had the heft of a brick. Too thick to fold, too slippery to clamp safely under my arm, it made my arm ache carrying it home. You could lounge around reading it in bed all day and still not get to the end. It felt like an artefact. I wanted to bring it home with me but it would have half-filled my suitcase. Proper newspapers like that -- with long investigative articles, international correspondents, fat arts sections crammed with incisive criticism, intelligent letters to the editor, and book reviews by notable authors and world-famous academics -- are to my mind one of the hallmarks of civilisation. The Press and the Herald look like the North West Suburbs Bugle and Shoppers Guide by comparison.

This morning I came across one of the nicest (most interesting, most endearing, most immediately making me wish I was there to see for myself) articles I've ever read in the NY Times. It describes the collection of vintage cleaning equipment amassed over 40 years by a neighbourhood businessman called Paul Swedlow, who until recently owned a carpet shop on West 17th Street. He's trawled flea markets and thrift shops to pick up dozens of rug-beaters, wooden carpet sweepers and old metal suckers which he displays in the shop, yet considers his collection unfinished as he still does not have the original Hoover, the Model O with cloth bag, patented in 1908, which he terms 'the missing link' of vacuum evolution. (The reporter notes that Mr Swedlow doesn't use the internet to look for his collection items; you get the impression that to a man like this, that would be cheating.) The picture above shows a primitive metal vacuum cleaner given to him by an arms dealer who mistook it for a bazooka. Or that's how he tells the story, anyway.

I think you have to have confidence in both your craft as a journalist and in the sophistication of your readership to run a story like this without trivialising the subject or patronising the interviewee. Most papers wouldn't go near it. It's neither news nor fodder for the gracious living pages. It's just a little local, human-interest, 'odd spot' kind of story, yet they run it perfectly straight and send a photographer to produce a portfolio of beautiful shots. A picture of one man's gentle lifelong obsession emerges, as well as his own take on an idiosyncratic taxonomy of display which is enormously appealing. And above all, Mr Swedlow's belief -- spoken and acted upon -- that these outmoded objects from earlier technological worlds are worthy of preservation, is something that's worth reading, and thinking about.


*Just a quick aside here. The big guy assures me that it's normal -- in fact obligatory -- to butter bread before you spread vegemite or peanut butter or whatever in sandwiches. I argue that that's two spreads, one on top of the other, fat on fat, and as such is manifestly unnecessary, wasteful, and in fact wrong; you only use butter or marge in sandwiches in order to prevent the ham or other solid filling from falling out. This has been a point of contention between us for more than a decade now. Your thoughts gratefully received.

Museum merch

It's not very widely known, but Canterbury Museum has quite a good art collection. (The bulk of Christchurch's art collection is housed at its public gallery.) Most of the Museum's art holdings are historical, of course, and relate to the early days of the Canterbury settlement; but there are also some great contemporary New Zealand works tucked away, including a silver epergne by Tony de Lautour and a series of Michael Parekowhai's kowhaiwhai lightboxes permanently hung in the research library.

When Canterbury Museum's rebuilding project was put on hold in 2006 after being declined resource consent (the plans involved architectural changes made to the A-listed historic building designed by Benjamin Mountfort), its proposal to take over the old Robert McDougall Art Gallery building next door, which had recently fallen vacant due to the building of the new gallery, also foundered. The plan, as I understand it, was to use the beautiful old neo-classical gallery building for temporary and touring exhibitions, and also to exhibit what the museum until quite recently quaintly referred to as its "Picture Collection". (Can't find any reference to that on its website -- but then there's hardly reference to anything much at all. Time for an upgrade, chaps.)

Anyway, in conjunction with the Ellerslie Flower Show in Hagley Park later in the year, the Museum is using the old gallery building to exhibit the complete set of Banks' Florilegium, the engravings made from the botanical specimens collected by botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander on James Cook's voyages of exploration, including from the Endeavour's landfalls in New Zealand. Painter Bill Sutton donated funds to the Macmillan Brown Library at the University of Canterbury to purchase the set of prints, one of only 100 in the world: the university has a short article about the collection here. (The festival publicity about the show suggests that it's the first time they've been publicly exhibited in Christchurch, but that's rot: I saw them in the 80s. Won't stop me going along to see them again, though.)

I very rarely make impulse buys from the supermarket, but when I saw these vegetable chips the other day, I had to have them. In a triumph of the copywriter's art, the manufacturers note: "We have drawn inspiration from Sir Joe and his insatiable appetite for adventure to develop our range of incredible taste experiences." Excellent stuff. Perhaps the Museum could snap up a caseload for the gallery shop.

Through the art window

Walking home from the hairdresser's last night, I was reminded of the truism that there are actually many different artworlds, and rarely do they intersect. Here's a portal into an alternative artworld in which smudgy stockmen and unfeasibly plump-buttocked Modigliani-esque girlies are king.

Steely

Richard Serra, The matter of time, an installation of 8 sculptures, completed 2005, weatherproof steel, at the Arcelor Gallery, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.


Think of steel as a medium for making art, and perhaps more than any other artist, sculptor Richard Serra immediately comes to mind: over the last three decades his work has explored the physical properties of the metal, in epic-scaled sculptures which dramatically alter your perceptions of the internal and external spaces they're installed in. (Serra had steel in the blood: his father worked in a shipyard, and the artist supported himself by working in a steel mill while he studied at Yale.) His massive sculptures seem both beautiful and physically intimidating, as if by comparison to the sheer heft and torque of the steel walls that soar above the spectator you're unavoidably confronted by your own relative puniness and fragility. (It's much like the experience, actually, of standing on a dock next to a gigantic ship.)

As New Zealand art historian Anthony Byrt writes in the latest ArtForum, reviewing a show of Serra's at Gagosian Gallery in New York City:

"The thrill induced by Richard Serra’s sculptures doesn’t come from the sense that they might crash down at any moment. As this exhibition proves, it occurs due to the delicate manner in which they stay up, and the subtle way Serra manages to bend our experience around them."

One of the best art films I've ever seen, Alberta Chu’s 2003 documentary Seeing the Landscape documents the five-year long installation process of Serra's monumental Te Tuhirangi Contour, commissioned for New Zealand businessman Alan Gibbs's farm out of Helensville, and one of Serra's largest works. There are many seemingly dangerous moments in the film, provided not only by the enormous sheets of steel used to make the work (875 feet by 20 feet of 650-ton steel) but by the evolving relationship between the equally strong-minded collector and artist.

In a recent interview with the Art Newspaper's Louisa Buck, Serra -- who expresses surprise that an audience has developed for his work -- discusses his feeling for his chosen medium in a statement which is bound to be much-quoted:

"When I first started working in New York I was working with molten lead and I was working with rubber and I didn’t want to go to steel, not because I didn’t know enough about it, but because it really had been the traditional material of the 20th century in terms of sculpture. But for the most part no-one was using steel in the way that I understood it. It had not been used for its weight, its counterbalance, not for its cantilever nor its stasis or gravitational load. It had not been used in the way that it had been used in the industrial revolution in terms of building processes and procedures.

"Instead what they had done was to cut and fold it and use it as kind of three dimensional surrogate for painting. It was hung out in space and painted to have a 3-D planar look so its basic fundamental balance was untrue. It was either bolted into the ground or welded up in the air, then held with a staff and painted green, blue, pink or purple or whatever, so that its inherent properties of gravity were being denied in favour of its visual image readout. But although that was very, very successful for years it was also a limitation and it always remained the handmaiden of painting. I think [Ad] Reinhardt said that sculpture was something that you bumped into when you were backing up from looking at a painting."

Not much chance of that with a work by Serra.

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.)

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."

Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler?

The day before Britain declared war on Germany, the last shipment of treasures from the National Gallery left London secretly for Wales. More than 1800 paintings were evacuated in just 11 days: the image above shows the enormous Equestrian Portrait of Charles I by Van Dyck being manoeuvred under a low railway bridge. (In the final instance the truck's tyres were deflated to let it through.)

Initially the paintings were placed in stately homes which had been quietly scoped out by the Gallery's Assistant Keeper during the Munich Crisis of September 1938. He made extensive notes on his findings: "The owner is nice, ruled by his wife, a tartar, anxious to have NG pictures instead of refugees or worse," and, "Owner not inspected but seems obliging in a haughty way."

Conditions in the paintings' temporary accommodations were not always ideal: Susanne Bosman, whose book about how the British National Gallery weathered World War II has just been published, notes:

At Crosswood, where 70 paintings were stored, the hot-water pipes of the antiquated heating system ran under the floor of the library, where the pictures were kept, seriously lowering the relative humidity, with potentially disastrous consequences for paintings on panel and canvas. As the heating could not be turned off without affecting the rest of the house, blankets and felt had to be soaked in a nearby stream and hung in the library until the humidity reached acceptable levels.

By May 1940, as hostilities escalated, a plan was devised to send the works to Canada for safe-keeping. Winston Churchill refused, however, to let them leave the country: National Gallery Director Kenneth Clark wrote that the PM's actual words had been "Hide them in caves and cellars, but not one picture shall leave this island." The collection was instead transferred to Manod Quarry, a slate mine in the Welsh mountains, beneath 200 feet of solid rock. Free-standing brick buildings were constructed in the massive chambers of the mine to protect the paintings from slate dust, and a narrow gauge railway was laid to transport them between buildings.

Hit several times by bombs during the Blitz, the Gallery itself remained open throughout the War in order to keep up the morale of Londoners. In 1941 the sculptor Charles Wheeler wrote to the Times, expressing a wish to see Rembrandt's Portrait of Margaretha de Geer which had just been acquired by the National Gallery. Kenneth Clark immediately brought it back from the quarry in Wales and put it on display, instigating the "Picture of the Month" scheme, in which a single painting was removed from Manod and exhibited to the general public in the National Gallery each month.

We don't have a history written of New Zealand's galleries and museums during war-time: we should.

A view of the lily pond and Peacock Fountain with the McDougall Art Gallery in the background, Botanic Gardens, Christchurch, 1935. From the Christchurch City Libraries website.

Liberté! Fraternité! (But hold the egalité...)

Jeff Koons, Rabbit, 1986, currently being exhibited in the Salon de l’Abondance at Versailles. Image from ArtDaily.com.

I've been thinking about the sheer perplexing magnificence of this photograph all morning. Don't know what to say about it really. An outrage? An important intellectual enquiry? An upholder of tradition, a usurper, or a circuit breaker? Probably all of the above, all at once.

More photos here.

Here's what Koons has to say about his show in the Sun King's palace at Versailles, his first exhibition in a French museum.

"Contemporary art is so imprisoned in the present that juxtaposing new works with old ones allows you to rediscover a connection between history and the history of art."

and

"The baroque is the ideal context for me to highlight the philosophical nature of my work."

In other Marie Antoinette moments this week, the Guardian's Ian Jack suggests sending snobby gallerinas to the tumbrels (and then letting Damien Hirst break out the formaldehyde). Democracy, Jack suggests, is everywhere in the artworld's rarified air right now, though looking at the prices works are commanding it's not to be confused with equality. Nonetheless, it's time for a revolutionary shake-up of the old hierarchies. All comers are welcome to Hirst's auction of his art at Sotheby's later this month: any old spare parts baron or dodgy oligarch from what is euphemistically termed the artworld's "emerging markets" can wave a saleroom paddle without the ignominy of being vetted first by gallerists. The only qualification is deep pockets.


If popular revolution is the artworld's new black, New Zealand's most successful fashionista Karen Walker is all ready to share a little cake with the peasants, having just brought out a new diffusion line sold through Myers in Australia with a price point of under $150, coming soon to this country. The world of international fashion isn't for the faint-hearted, though: when quizzed recently by a Press journo [not yet online] about whether it wasn't a bit tiring flying round the world all the time to launch new ranges, Walker quipped, "If you don't want jet lag, get a job at Pak 'n Save."

Gracious living

I am a nosy beggar, as well as a bit of a cheapskate, so when the latest editions of Urbis or NZ Home or NZ House and Garden are out, I pop into our local newsagent to have a quick read. I scan the contents page to see if I vaguely know anyone featured (tragic behaviour, I'm well aware), and then I flick through the magazine to have a quick shufti at the art.

Following this highly scientific research methodology, I've identified four kinds of art collection featured in lifestyle magazines. There's the "decor collection", which features coloured rectangles chosen by interior designers from affordable art shows and the kind of galleries which, as John Hurrell says, also specialise in framing; these works look like art, but aren't at all. Then there's the "generic Auckland collection", which includes a work on paper by Gretchen Albrecht, a small Bambury and perhaps a Gimblett, with a bronze by Paul Dibble or Terry Stringer on the window sill.

There's a figurative variant found throughout the country which includes a Fomison painting, probably a Frizzell or two, maybe a Richard McWhannell; possibly also, depending on the age of the collector, either a Shane Cotton and a Tony de Lautour or a Maddox and a Clairmont. (In last month's NZ House and Garden I admired Hamish Keith and Ngila Dickson's Fomison and Frizzell paintings, as well as their extensive collection of art cushions.) Finally there's the sort of top-end collection that includes a free-standing figure by Ronnie van Hout, a bulbous excrescence of paint by Rohan Weallans, and an installation by et al featuring tape hiss and a tangle of speaker wire.


I've had several friends and acquaintances over the years who've had their homes "done" by design magazines. As a consequence, I know that houses featured in design mags are to real life as the catwalk is to gardening clobber. I have stored dodgy furniture and cardboard boxes full of crap and knicknacks for a neighbour who was going for an uncharacteristically minimal look in her spread; I also helped her move in the flash new furniture she had borrowed for the occasion. Her place was unrecogisable when the the magazine came out. Other friends have appeared to entirely lose the enormous TV that habitually dominates their lounge, or to have acquired several tasteful pieces of Scandinavian furniture immediately prior to the shoot.

It's similar, I suppose, to the kind of massive clear-out and smarten-up that you do when you put your house on the market. (We rented -- and entirely filled -- a storage unit with objects removed from our last house in order to sell it.) Oh yes, I always live with all surfaces completely bare of objects and an enormous vase of tulips in the kitchen... it's gracious living all day everyday round at our house.


For the nosy beggar, real estate listings can also provide a means of checking out other people's art collections, though you're more likely to see a faded print of The Haywain than a previously unexhibited Donald Judd. Real estate listings also supply another extremely guilty pleasure likewise provided by interior design mags: the opportunity to marvel at the extreme foulness of other people's taste.

Imagine, then, my great joy at coming across It's Lovely! I'll Take It!, a blog which deals solely with unfortunate real estate photographs. (The photos above are borrowed from it. Rather than being taken at my house, in case you were wondering.) Not much art hanging on the walls at It's Lovely!, but in a way, each image is a work of art in its own right. Great stuff.


*I got to It's Lovely! I'll Take It!, courtesy of Christchurch journalist and photographer Adrienne Rewi. It's one of her favourites, too.

Perfectly Frances II

"I fluttered my eyelashes. I behaved appallingly," said Auckland Art Gallery curator Mary Kisler, recounting to Sunday Star Times journalist Kim Knight [article not yet online] her visit to Mathieu Néouze, the Parisian art dealer (spécialités: Dessins anciens / Sculpture / Tableaux anciens) who recently sold the Gallery 20 previously unknown watercolours by Frances Hodgkins. The works have apparently been stored in an attic in France since they were painted in the early years of last century.

"I nearly had a heart attack when he sent the images... you know what it's like," said Mary. "Women and shopping. I just thought: we have to have these."

Well yes.

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.