Snap shot

Anyone with an interest in the contemporary photography market will have had a fascinating week as the results of the latest Auckland auctions came to hand. Although Webb’s only offered three photographic items they scored with Michael Parekowhai’s large format Elmer Keith. From his series of sparrows and rabbits made in 2000 The Beverly Hills Gun Club, it went for $18,400. A couple of days later another photo of Elmer Keith No 1 (this one made four years later on a slightly different coloured background and pointing the other way) went for $17,600 at Art + Object. And good luck to future researchers trying to work out the titles, sizes and poses of all these sparrows if the original records are ever lost. The original BHGC works were sold for around $3,000 and over the years the prices have climbed steadily (in 2005 one sold for $8,226). Also at Art + Object a couple of Ava Seymour’s large-scale images went for over $15,000 between them.

However, despite the attractions of some large format photography the media continues to struggle to get the attention it deserves. The chance to purchase Peter Peryer's classic paired portraits of Erika Peryer for around $10,000 was passed up (Te Papa and the Auckland Art Gallery both have one each which probably put them out of contention as they were paired at auction). Peryer’s Octopus sold for a healthy $5,976 and sounds like it was purchased by a collector who has dominated the Peryer market at auction over the last few years.

But in spite of these specific examples there's still a great opportunity to build a major photography collection without spending mega dollars. Most of the images on offer, and many of them were classics, would have been hammered down for $2000 a piece. It can’t last.

An addendum to our post on the Friendlander photograph of Ralph Hotere vs the Hotere drawing. Game set and match to photography. The portrait went for $9200 and the drawing failing to get a bid.

Take your pic

Welcome to the land of art auctions where a photograph of Ralph Hotere can be estimated (and probably sell at) at a higher value than a drawing by Ralph Hotere.
Image: Webb’s Important paintings and contemporary art catalogue with Marti Friedlander’s photo est. $4,500 - $7,500 and Ralph Hotere’s drawing Woman with flowers est. $5,000 - $7,000

Hold onto those cleaning rags everyone, don’t throw out that gas axe and polish up the Rolleiflex. It turns out there’s gold in used artist equipment. Well some artists, Francis Bacon to be exact. A butter bean can bristling with eight of Bacon’s brushes is going up for auction at Christie's. 

The Bacon brushes will be fighting it out with other oddities including a bear skeleton, a large bell used in the Titanic movie A night to remember, a stuffed ostrich and a couple of chairs carved with buffalo heads. Christie's are estimating a hammer price of $47,000 for the brush-can combo although that’s peanuts compared to what it might achieve if it were an artwork. 

Jasper Johns himself owns his 1960 sculpture Painted bronze depicting 14 brushes in a Savarin coffee can so its market value probably won't be tested anytime soon. However, if it ever is, you can forget about tens of thousands, we'll be talking millions. Hmmm… maybe those cleaning rags are best left for cleaning after all.
Images: left, the Bacon bushes on the block and right Jasper Johns Painted bronze

Follow the money

When Andy Warhol said, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art,” he might have been thinking of Webb’s recent broadsheet publication outlining where the contemporary art money flows through auction.

The big bucks all go to paintings of course and mostly painted by guys. And so (via the Australian Sales Digest) Webb’s tells us that the 50 most valuable works by Bill Hammond sold at auction raked in $3.7 million at an average of $74,000 each. Remember though that just three of the top 50 went for a combined total of $858,000 including Hammond’s top dollar sale of $293,000.

In the last 20 years Webb’s alone have sold 194 works by Colin McCahon bringing in $12 million. But Ralph Hotere, we hear you ask, what about Hotere? Well, his top 50 sales at auction have attracted $5.9 million with Webb’s best effort bringing in $315,000. The other heavy auction hitter of course is Shane Cotton with $2 million coming in from the top 50 sales and a highest price of $257,000.

The taste test

When they set up shop Art+Object ratcheted the look and feel of the art auction up a few notches. New look catalogues, stylish display of the lots and professional marketing generated fresh excitement pre hammer time. Now they've gone and done it again. Check it out for yourself if the latest Art+Object catalogue comes your way (provocatively published days before the first big Webb’s auction of the year last night).

First up, it's big. It sure won't fit into your post box coming in at 34 x  24 cm. Second, it's ... well, what is it exactly? Part magazine, part coffee table book, part auction catalogue, it's A+O’s idea about how to get differentiated from the competition. The fact is if its just information you’re after this print publication wont have been your first port of call, all that’s been available for a week online at A+O's web site. But, if you pop over to Webb’s site, their online catalogue looks much the same with much the same detail.

And you have to figure that’s why A+O have gone big and gone glamorous. If online equals information, this jumbo-cat is to wallow in. Big images including a mega fold-out of Peter Robinson’s two by five meter loose canvas Painting, a dabble into the studio assistant as personality (a young guy with paint splattered shorts and unlaced trainers staring at lot number 5) and a fistful of plush ads for wine, fashion and cars. It’s a gutsy move and a big assertion of the A+O brand. Who'd be surprised now if they decided to stamp it on some other forms of art selling. 

Images: Top cover with 50 cent piece thoughtfully added by OTN's photographic team for scale. Middle, Peter Robinson gets the fold out treatment and bottom the strange double spread for Paul Dibble's sculpture The bushman's hop.

Never mind the quality

Art famously sells by size, until it gets to a certain size that is. So when the latest Webb’s catalogue arrived we got out the calculator to work out the cost per centimetre for a selection of items based on a purchase price mid-estimate. 

Here’s the results.

$344.50 A classic C F Goldie portrait

$59.32 A 1982 Tony Fomison painting

$36.00 An Evelyn Page portrait of her husband

$30.90 A classic Michael Illingworth painting

$10.00 A Rita Angus watercolour of irises

$18.00 A Tony Fomison drawing

$16.43 A W D Hammond painting in a gold frame

$16.19 A Pat Hanly painting from 1977

$12.90 A Colin McCahon Northland painting on paper

$8.65 A 1979 Ralph Hotere banner

$8.13 A diptych on board by Dick Frizzell

$7.24 A 2004 Michael Smither cave painting

$6.54 An early Frances Hodgkins watercolour

$5.42 A 1990 W D Hammond painting

$4.44 A 1972 Te Henga painting by Don Binney

$4.24 A very large W D Hammond bird painting

$3.70 A Tosswill Woollaston landscape

$2.58 A 1977 Milan Mrkusich abstract

$2.43 A classic Jeffrey Harris painting from1970

$1.90 A Max Gimblett painting from 2008

$1.68  An early religious painting by Michael Stevenson

$1.01 A Michael Parekowhai flower photograph

Image: catalogue image of approximately $4.24 worth of the large W D Hammond as estimated by Webb’s (detail)

Spam

unvarnished facts, reckless guesswork, insinuations and possible inventions that have landed in our email: te papa has advertised four art curator positions to help them 'enter a bold new phase' and 're-organise for the future' • dealers and auction houses report a stampede of hotere resales being offered to the market just days after the artist’s death • want to know where the money goes? this year cnz has announced when grants will be published on their web site and next up are the quick response grants on 14 march at 5 pm • the aag search team for a new director is thought to be jenny gibbs deputy chair of regional facilities, robert domm chief executive of regional facilities and an ex art museum director from australia (edmund capon?) • peter robinson and fiona connor have been selected for the 2013 instanbul biennale • a nielsen quality of life survey found only 7 percent of aucklanders ‘agreed strongly’ that their city had a culturally rich and diverse arts scene • starting work on the len lye centre will be further delayed to later this year as the tender winning construction company finishes the new plymouth police station • webb’s are following art + auction’s temp exhib at 30 upstairs in wellington last year with their own temp exhib at the new the young • any missed details, indignant denials or additions gratefully received, and any that makes us go into ‘wish we’d thought of it’ mode will be rewarded with an overthenet painting horse badge.

Buying up small

You don’t have to talk to art museum people long to hear a familiar complaint: they can't afford to participate in the world of art collecting any more. The prices, they will tell you, have gone way beyond their budgets. And if you’re talking about classic Hammond, Robinson or Smither they are probably right. Apart from Te Papa which found just under a million to be the über buyer at the Les and Milly Paris auction and Auckland Art Gallery which was able to shell out hundreds of thousands for an Andreas Gursky photograph recently, many of the institutions have been diverted from their collections. Their priorities now lie more in buildings, staff and marketing than in purchasing art.

We were reminded of this when Webb’s first catalogue of the year A2 Art (the A is for affordable) arrived.  With around $15,000, possibly a little more, probably a little less (based on the middle of Webb's estimates) here’s our pick of ten works we reckon would do any of our art institutions proud. 

WHAT: No. 13 Jeffrey Harris Girl with flower (1970) and No 60 Couple (1970) for $2,400.

WHY: Harris's prices are all over the place but his superb works on paper (especially the early ones) are consistently low. When institutions say 'great art is beyond our budgets' they're telling fibs.

WHAT: No. 45 Alan Maddox Untitled (1975) for $1,500

WHY: Maddox puts the idea of what drawing (and composition) are about to the test and that’s a good thing for art institutions to do too.

WHAT: No. 79 Melvin Day Study of a bull No (c. 1950s?)  for $2,500

WHY: What's not to love about the fact that there were New Zealanders living in Rotorua and struggling with Cubism in the fifties.

WHAT: No. 99. Ian Scott Lattice No 78 (1983) for $1,300

WHY: Ian Scott’s Lattices are the confident eighties personified and make his reticent mentor Gordon Walters all the more interesting

WHAT: No. 85 Colin McCahon North Otago landscape (1961) for $4,000

WHY: This drawing was made at the same time as the Gates and before Necessary Protection. All the iconography is there staring straight at you. A piece of the true cross for under $5,000? Come on.

WHAT: No. 168 Adele Younghusband Still life composition (1963) for $800

WHY: You need to show there were good women painters apart from Rita Angus in the sixties. Oh, and wouldn't you know it, women are always cheaper.

WHAT: No. 177 and 178 Para Matchitt Te Kooti series 3 and 4 (1967) for $3,000

WHY: Because this would be the super-bargain of the night price vs quality wise.

WHAT: No. 234 William Reid Warships in the South Pacific for $1,500

WHY: It’s a nice work that speaks eloquently to our history and our place in the Pacific – well one aspect of it anyway

OK. Go for it.

COMMENT: Andrew Paul Wood: It is particularly interesting that Ian Scott's lattices coincide with the period that Petar Velutic was his dealer. Before and after it's pop, pretty girls and ironic references to art history.

Image: Webb’s catalogue featuring a detail of Jeffrey Harris’s 1970 drawing Couple

Light headed

“If I want drama, I’ll go to Broadway.”

Art dealer Richard Feigen commenting on a New York consumer affairs commissioner’s view that auctioneers taking bids from the chandelier added a bit of theatre for the clients

Gilty

Webb’s has always done a bit of it, Art+Object in general resisted, Hotere was always a sitter for as was Fomison, and as for Goldie, it’s impossible to imagine one without it. We’re talking the frame here, not just on paintings, but in the photographs of paintings.

The latest Art+Object catalogue (Tuesday 6.30 pm) looks like a push into having the frame become an essential part of presenting paintings for auction. This time 32 percent of the works in the catalogue have been photographed with their frames included, that’s twice as many as in the Les and Milly Paris auction back in September.

Webb’s latest catalogue (Wednesday, 6.30 pm) only has 15 percent of its entries photographed with frames, but back in March it was only eight percent so maybe the increase is a trend. If anyone can be bothered going back through a hundred or so auction catalogues they might be able to confirm this but, in the mean time, we’ll settle for it being a cluster. Still it isa truism that many dealers and collectors play the frame game. People might not understand the value of a work but whack an expensive or exotic frame round it and there's not many who don't get the message.

In case you’ve drifted off, here's a guessing game. The frames in this post’s image are all from the Art+Object catalogue. Can you name the artists they enhanced? Answers here.

By the way, if you’re after work by women artists at either of these two auctions, forget it. Artworks by women at A+O are 8.3 percent of the 84 lots and Webb’s 11.5 percent of their 87.

Family jewels or excess baggage?

Should art museums sell off works in their collections to streamline their collecting efforts or, even more controversially, to raise funds? All art museums have works (often gifted) that sit in their store rooms like bumps on a log with no real ties to anything else, but it's rare that they're subjected to the D word. That’s de-accessioning (the wonderfully distancing name museums give to flogging off works from the collection).

In fact high value works are sold out of public collections every year all around the world. In the US, for instance four high-end works have recently being talked up and sold at auction. The Cleveland Museum of Art has just let go Monet’s Cornfield which was gifted to them just after the Second World War (they got just shy of $15 million for it), the Virginia Museum of Art put Renoir’s Vase of Roses and Dahlias on the block ($1.2 million) and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington decided to sell a 1967 Picasso Musketeer With a Hat ($5.2 million at auction earlier this week). So together the four lots accrued around $21.5 million.

Announcing that works are to be removed from an art museum's collection often results in an explosion of public indignation. Ironically this reaction often mirrors the indignation expressed when public money was used to get the item into the collection in the first place. For this reason museums here often border on the furtive about any sales although the Govett-Brewster ran a model process we’ve mentioned before that involved getting past directors together to discuss each item proposed.

In a previous post we pointed to Te Papa's works by Natalia Goncherova as prospects for sale. These stand outside the rest of the collection but have an extraordinarily high value in the market. Dunedin’s Monet is another example. Is local pride a good enough reason to hold onto them? As the collections of public art museums in NZ grow year by year and demand more resources to care for them, you can bet deaccessioning will be a conversation that funders will want to have with our museums before too long. Maybe the museums should start it themselves and head them off at the pass.

Slice of heaven

As expected New Zealand dealer galleries are starting to up their commission on sales to 50 percent. At least one major Auckland dealer has already done the deed so the others won't be far behind.

Of course that's not to say that top-selling artists won't be able to negotiate down, even below the 40 percent currently changed by most dealers.

Meanwhile down South there's the Dunedin School of Arts. Not content with simply hauling in government funding, private sector grants and student fees, this educational institution has informed fine arts students that it intends to raise its commission (yes, they charge commission on student sales) to 25 percent on their end of year exhibitions. The unconvincing argument for the increase is that the art school “subsidised the exhibition” and that “they made a loss.”

Then, in auction land, a new way of structuring commission based on performance is starting to appear internationally. Sotheby’s now have the following clause inserted in their contracts with sellers: “Sotheby’s performance related commission will be equal to the lower of (i) 2.00% of the hammer price achieved for that lot and (ii) the difference between the hammer price achieved for the lot and its final high presale estimate”.

In NZ where vendors of top-line items are managing to push auction sales commissions down or remove them completely, there is unlikely to be any shift in the short term, but the incentives for Sotheby’s are clear. They conclude almost 40 percent of their sales above the high estimate. Now that's not something that happens in NZ very often. 

The morning after the day before

This morning’s Dominion Post announced “A Grahame Sydney painting has sold for a record price at an auction in Wellington.” Well, not really at auction. At auction the Sydney painting stalled at $125,000. It was the following day in an art dealer type negotiation that the work was sold for $160,000. Given the commissions involved it looks like the auctioneers extracted a further $24,000 from the top bidder who had already got up to $136,000 on the night (who knows if Sloanes took a further commission hit to sweeten the final sale).

No wonder most auction houses are easing their way into art dealer territory with what they call (in a kind of Victorian way) private treaty sales sales outside the auction process. It’s a rock and a hard place: lower estimates (the sellers don’t like that) or cut-price deals when the public auction is over. Given the high demand for fresh-to-market items and risk that a work can become badly tainted if it doesn't sell at auction the first time round the choices are not easy.

The wrong stuff

More jokes than sales at last night’s Dunbar Sloane auction in Wellington. Even a big push by local media when they came down from planet WTF to up-talk the saleability of Hammonds and Sydneys didn’t help. Stuff/Dominion Post even hauled out one of the owners giving him free range to promote works he had in the sale as “bullet-proof investments” (not for him as it transpired) and to claim that one of his Sydneys was “one of his most significant works”(not really) and that “All the rest are owned by institutions now” (unlikely). The reporter seemed too stunned by this boosterism to bother with questioning whether it’s “rare for significant Sydney and Hammond works to come up for auction” (no).

So how did all this enthusiasm and spruiking pan out at the rostrum? Not so good. Contemporary art took a beating to the sound of Dunbar Sloane’s good-natured-stroke-weird commentary: Hotere “It’s not totally black, it’s got some little red lines there… but you’d need the light on.” The eponymous auctioneer even paused to ask the audience whether or not he should write a book and then called out for a ghost-writer. But one by one the big-ticket items fell under their low estimates (Hammond, Hanly, Hotere and Sydney) often by yawning margins.

Of 26 contemporary lots the bidding reached a total of $544,000 against low estimates totalling $768,000 with 16 of the 26 lots being hammered down, often hopefully, as ‘subject’. A few bargains in Peryer and Fomison but if Dunbar Sloane was to get a smile out of the evening it was going have to be from the long line of traditional landscapes that followed.

Image: Hammond and Maddox wait their turn

Spam

unvarnished facts, reckless guesswork, insinuations and possible inventions that have arrived at overthenet.blog@gmail.com snakepit closes mid show as bulldozers circle • word on the street puts the price of the gursky photo purchased by the auckland art gallery at around $800,000 • as the sole agency battles heat up ivan anthony instructs peter mcleavey to stop selling liz maw and andrew mcleod and to return their unsold works to him in auckland • in the meantime derek cowie has returned from london to front the peter mcleavey gallery for a while • the building that used to house the aag’s new gallery is going food court on the ground floor • hopkinson cundy have nailed a berth at frieze new york in 2013 • te papa also stumps up $86,000 for allen maddox’s painting ‘wanker’ at the les and milly paris auction • any missed details, indignant denials or additions gratefully received, and any that makes us laugh out loud rewarded.

McCahon sat here

Colin McCahon once famously wrote on a drawing of the cliffs at Muriwai: “McLeavey sat here”. But where did McCahon sit? If Trade Me is anything to go by for at least some of the time it was on a Scandinavian-style couch with a small bench end that doubled as storage space. And yes, this piece of furniture refurbished has now ended up online with an ‘opening bid’ of $1000. 

According to the seller it was purchased from descendents of Colin McCahon who said that it had originally been used by him but when it became tatty, it had been given to them for a flat. After being passed around the family for a number of years, the current seller purchased it with its original “faded blue weave” (for any McCahon obsessives out there).

You can bid for the couch which is now “covered in a very expensive linen” here. 
(Thanks for the heads-up P)

Mark it

Where would we be without the art market? As regular readers will know it's worth about two posts a week (bless it) for OTN. But in the UK art writer Sarah Thornton (Seven days in the art world) is as mad as hell and won’t take any more of it. She's stomped off leaving these ten reasons for not writing about the art market behind her.

1. It gives too much exposure to artists who attain high prices.

2. It enables manipulators to publicize the artists whose prices they spike at auction.

3. It never seems to lead to regulation.

4. The most interesting stories are libelous.

5. Oligarchs and dictators are not cool.

6. Writing about the art market is painfully repetitive.

7. People send you unbelievably stupid press releases.

8. It implies that money is the most important thing about art.

9. It amplifies the influence of the art market.

10. The pay is appalling.

OK, fair enough. Now here's our ten reasons why OTN still finds the art market totally entertaining:

1. You usually get it wrong (which is good medicine for show-offs).

2. In NZ at least the art market is one of the few areas where people are happy to express strong opinions about art

3. It gives a big group of university funded artists something to not participate in

4. It is run by dealers and auction people who have opinions, know a lot, and are better dressed than your average reporter.

5. It brings to the world of one of its most mysterious processes: the pricing of art.

6. Drama and excitement.

7. It’s a world free of wall texts, computer graphics and labels.

8. It is going into a time of fundamental change with bets off as auction houses compete directly with dealers and both try to work online

9. The “what’s it worth” conversation.

10. The chance to bet on how long it will be before Sarah Thornton writes on the market again.

You can get Sarah Thornton’s list with her annotations here

Taken as read

“…this is the most vibrant and the one with the most amount of red in it. Red is a very successful colour these days.”

Auctioneer Tobias Meyer describing the Gerhard Richter painting Abstraktes Bild (804-9) sold on Eric Clapton’s behalf at Sotheby’s

Vanishing Wellington sub station

If you were ever lucky enough to sit down for a meal with Les and Milly Paris, chances are you would have been seated with your back to a big Don Peebles canvas and board work with a Don Driver framed sack next to it. Over the table on the opposite wall next to a painting by Colin McCahon with a fat cream cloud hovering above a green hill would have been Don Binney’s Vanishing Wellington bird. 

The vanishing bird was the Stitchbird and the small building below it a sub station on the road that winds up from Aro Street. It’s not a road we take very often so when we saw the A+O video of Hamish Coney talking about the painting we went up to get a photo of the sub station. Gone. Probably vanished years back but there you go. 

It’s the same story as the other painting by Binney that was also hung in the Paris’s dining room for many years. That one was Old Wellington synagogue and was commissioned by the Parises to commemorate the old Beth El Synagogue on 222 the Terrace that was pulled down to make way fro the Wellington motorway. 

You can See Hamish Coney and Ben Plumbly talking about the Les and Milly Paris collection and Vanishing Wellington bird here. OTN will be at the auction tonight to tweet the action from around 6.30 on. The coverage will appear on the right hand side of the blog. 

Image: Top, out with the old and (on the right of the picture) in with the new sub station. Bottom, Hamish Coney with Don Binney’s Vanishing Wellington bird

Having a cow

“It’s ridiculous—they have a great product, and they’re pushing it out into the market like cattle.”

Alberto Mugrabi, a New York dealer and owner of the largest collection of Warhol's work commenting on the Warhol Foundation putting the remainder of its holdings of  20,000 Warhol paintings, prints and photographs to auction.

Image: Warhol Cow wallpaper (detail)