Bull whip around

The great American art collector Eli Broad once said "philanthropy is activism" and there is certainly a big push to make it more active in New Zealand at the moment. But it's tough out there. Old school corporate sponsors are hard to entice, the public dollar is being spread thinner and thinner and the tertiary education sector restricts its funding to its own community.

The Government's call for arts organizations to eat the rich has come in synch with crowd sourced funding. Now more modest earners can get involved with supporting arts projects. We've already posted on the Arts Foundation's Boosted but yesterday there was a new twist as the Christchurch Art Gallery Trust launched its appeal Back the Bull. The goal - to buy Michael Parekowhai’s bull on a piano Chapman’s Homer for Christchurch.

It's interesting to see that the Trust has chosen the funding platform PledgeMe rather than Boosted for its latest $200,000 stump-up. And this despite the Christchurch Art Gallery having successfully funded its $25,000 project Populate on Boosted earlier this year. Maybe they felt that Boosted's assumption that tax credits would be a killer draw card for donors hasn't quite proved to have quite the clout expected. In general the amounts now requested on Boosted are more modest that at the outset. The average now stands at around $6,500 with $76,000 currently being requested across 12 projects. Around 24 percent of this has been donated so far.

Now because of the way the funding platform PledgeMe has been set up, donors can be offered all sorts of specific rewards (they can also offer tax deductions if the project has tax deductible status). When you see the packages offered by Christchurch's Back the Bull campaign, you can feel the attraction. They range from a thank-you in the Christchurch Press to party time with the Parekowhai himself. These giftettes are fun and appealing enticements whereas tax credits, not so much. OK, it's probably not very rational, and Boosted has brought in some valuable funding, but looking across the range of successful crowd sourcing sites emotional experience is the key driver rather than rational accounting advantages.

Back the Bull is only one day into its 48-day campaign with $15,350 pledged already and, thanks to the gifts and its feisty approach, it feels like fun. Hopefully it is also going to be a winner.

You can pledge for Back the Bull here and explore Boosted projects to donate to here.
 
Images: Top left Chapman's Homer in Auckland, right in Venice and below Christchurch

Putting the fun into funding

The government's drive for new sources of cultural funding has a poster child in Boosted, the Arts Foundation’s crowd sourcing site. It’s been up for a couple of months now, so how's it going?

OTN joined up and in March chose to support the Christchurch Art Gallery’s effort to fund an outreach programme. The goal was $25,000 in 35 days. The first surprise (ok, we didn’t read the fine print) was that unlike other crowd sourcing sites Boosted banked our contribution a day or so after it was pledged. On other funding systems our dollars were claimed when and if the project reached its target. Of course the big difference with Boosted is that in reality you are donating to the Arts Foundation and not the project. It is the Foundation that decides whether or not to pass the money on to your selected project. OK they are almost certain to do so, but it is not guaranteed. As the Foundation has also undertaken to refund donations when projects don't reach their goal, it must be bracing for the heavy admin job of contacting hundreds of contributors (one unsuccessful project alone had over 55) when this happens. That's on top of providing tax receipts to the 600 plus donors (the average donation, not including Christchurch, is around $100) to successful projects

Back to Christchurch. By the middle of April nothing much had happened. Our project was only five percent funded and its prospects were looking grim. Suddenly a contribution of around $12,000 landed in the kitty via insurance company IAG. Hmmm, that was convenient. Then with three days to go, magic. Another $12,000 popped up, this time from the Christchurch Casino, and game over. It's hard to believe that the Christchurch Art Gallery didn't already have those large donations in its back pocket and was participating as an act of support to the Boosted concept. The downside was the danger of making the other smaller contributors feel rather surplus to requirements.

Tracking projects is definitely an issue for Boosted. There is nothing on the site we could find listing successful projects and unsuccessful ones just vanish in the night although you can cobble some information together from Facebook. We've been through the site but we're not quite sure what happens if a project is over-subscribed. There is some stuff about projects maybe being given more if the AF thinks they would do even better good things with it but it's wrapped in a lot of lawyer language.

And then there's the way the Boosted site stresses that projects have a limited time to raise their funds. Sure, it adds drama, but it's a little ingenuous as a number of 30-day time extensions have been allowed to projects that have only excited the smallest flutter of donor interest.

At the 50-day mark the Arts Foundation announced the funding of six successful projects. “We're thrilled to announce that, since launching, Boosted has raised over $50,000 for the arts! “ (this amount is now $70,000).  While Boosted certainly had raised $50,000 what was not mentioned was that over half of it came from two donations for one project.

A site like Boosted that gathers good art projects that need funding and manages donations is a great idea. But it probably needs some fine tuning to make it a little more donor friendly given that increased philanthropy is the aim. For example a clearer connections between the projects and the cash (not every donor is just in it for the tax deductions), better tracking to show what happens to every project, a cumulative list of past projects and results that stays up for easy reference (at the moment Google seems to be the only way to old projects, so a search box might be good too) and a FAQ that answers potential contributor questions.

Finders keepers

Today on its very entertaining blog Bunker Notes the Christchurch Art Gallery put up a quiz. Showing details of works that feature smoking (cigarette variety), you're asked to identify the complete art work. Most art savvy people could easily identify three, even four, of the works but the two drawings are pretty mysterious. Now there's a solution. Thanks to Google image recognition all you need to do to win competitions like this is to pop the image into the Google Image search box. All the details came back with pics of the full image, although one of them needed the words Christchurch as a kicker. This is going to revolutionise (maybe it already has) art history research.
LATER (08-03-03): Since posting this the Christchurch Art Gallery has taken their quiz post down for copyright reasons. Kind of ironic given that all the images are out there on the internet anyway, but there you go.

Images: the Christchurch details, even when significantly further reduced still picked up their originals via Google image

Good work

One thing has changed in the presentation of NZ at Venice. This time round there is a constant flow of information and insight coming through about the artist and the context of his work. The heavy lifting is being done by curator Justin Paton who is finally answering the often-asked question, “what the hell does a curator do when an artist is making a solo project at the VB?”  Follow the trail here

Image: Bill Culbert's Pacific Flotsam in the collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery

"All I'm asking you for when you walk out the door is to be my baby, baby"

Babies are big in sculpture, especially if you are Marc Quinn. The YBA has just installed his floating baby in Singapore and for anyone who dreams of having an über infant floating above them, that’s the place to be. And in NZ we’re not dropping behind on the big baby boom. Christchurch of course had Ron Mueck’s Big Baby front and centre in their crowd-pulling exhibition. In fact Mueck has done a range of baby sculptures but, you will be pleased to hear, Christchurch scored the biggest one. So here’s a range of what’s around if you’ve a mind to do the big baby tour anytime soon.

Images: the Marc Quinn baby that has been recently installed in Singapore, random giant red baby, Nina Levy’s baby sculpture at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Burning Man baby on the way home, Tank baby somewhere in China, big bronze babies by David Černý in Prague, Max Streicher, blow-up babies in Canada, Ron Mueck’s Big baby and big talking Big Baby in Spain

Parkinson's Law

Saturday at the movies

This music video featuring a crumbling ‘sculpture’ of US singer Annie Erin Clark will probably give the Christchurch Art Gallery people pause. It's obviously based on the sculpture of Ron Mueck whose exhibition drew huge crowds to the Gallery between the two destructive quakes. You can watch the video here.

Friends and neighbours

Since earthquakes obliterated Christchurch Art Gallery’s ability to operate normally, it has been very busy taking itself in new ways to the city and the country via outreach and the web. It’s been an impressive effort but it must have been depressing for them not to be able to continue with the large scale, big production value shows they were becoming known by. Given that, how did the large exhibition of Shane Cotton’s work curated by Christchurch’s indefatigable Justin Paton avoid becoming another casualty of the disaster and instead open this weekend? Through collegial cooperation, that’s how.

Brisbane’s IMA gallery has always been a strong supporter of New Zealand artists thanks to its director Robert Leonard. He got to Brisbane via head curating jobs at the Auckland Art Gallery and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and has never lost his commitment to the art of his own country. Since he took over in 2005 Brisbane has had a pretty good taste of what’s on offer from NZ.

By agreeing to partner up with the Christchurch Art Gallery on Shane Cotton’s The hanging sky and launch it from the IMA, Leonard has not only made it available to Brisbane but has also ensured that with the grunt work done it will be shown in NZ too. Perhaps this Australian gesture will serve as a prompt to some of our own art museums. A partnership with Christchurch would be pretty helpful given their continuing lack of a building and a few exhibition posters with the line ‘in association with the Christchurch Art Gallery’ would be good for all of us.

You can see a sample of Shane Cotton’s paintings for the Christchurch Art Gallery/IMA exhibition here and some beautiful shots taken during the installation here.

Image: Australians loving Shane Cotton at the IMA opening in Brisbane

The waiting game

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The Walters Prize certainly continues to bring up a lot of issues around how national our contemporary visual arts culture is. For instance, the commentary from Christchurch that the Prize is Auckland-based and Auckland-centric is mirrored by the fact that none of the four finalists (Simon Denny, Alicia Frankovich, Kate Newby, Sriwhana Spong) have a dealer gallery in the South Island or in Wellington and only one of them is in the collection of a South Island public art museum as a gift to the Christchurch Art Gallery (as listed in the online catalogues at any rate.)

Geographically speaking, people tend to keep to their own (in the beginning stages of careers at least) which has resulted in the move-North-or-vanish effect for Southern artists.

The patterns of public institutional collecting of the four Walters Prize finalists are also interesting and also Auckland-centric. The Auckland Art Gallery has relied on Rob and Sue Gardiner to select most of their collection of the four via the Chartwell Trust. It has an impressive 19 works but only three (all by Spong) were purchased by the Auckland Art Gallery itself. The rest are on loan from Chartwell. Te Papa has two works by Spong, none by Frankovich or Newby and two by Denny (rather optimistically registered as four with one work having each component part recorded as a separate work). By the time you get down to the Christchurch Art Gallery it is just one work by Simon Denny (a gift).

Auckland is relying heavily on the Chartwell Collection to tell its story of contemporary New Zealand art but the others will probably have to pay a premium for waiting.

12 September: The Auckland Art Gallery has corrected our post on their collection of Walters Prize artists. In fact not all of the 13 Simon Denny's registered on their online catalogue were purchased by the Chartwell Collection. One of them, a photograph, was purchased by the gallery. Sorry about that.