Record prices

Earlier this month fans of The Chills were able to pick up a copy of the live album Somewhere Beautiful for $6,000. Ok, it’s three double-sided vinyl disks but still, that’s $1,000 a side, even if it is at 45 rpm. The real reason for the real money is not music but art, in this case art by Shane Cotton who has supplied hand-modified prints along with input into the package design. You can get a list of the most valuable records on vinyl here.

Artists have had a long association with the music industry though not usually leveraging the price quite as high as the Cotton Chills - you can get an original Warhol cover for the Rolling Stones for around $190 here on eBay.

Images: Top, Shane Cotton’s work for The Chills already separated from the music and on sale as visual art. Next row and following left to right, top to bottom, Urs Fischer for Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ It’s Blitz!, Raymond Pettibon for Sonic Youth, Ronnie van Hout’s cover for the Pin Group's Ambivalence, Japanese photographer Araki’s image for Björk’s 1996 album Telegram, Andy Warhol’s famous ready-to-peel cover for the Velvet Underground, the Red Hot Chili Peppers reach for Damien Hirst, Patti Smith uses Robert Mapplethorpe portrait of her for Horses, and the Beatles' White Album as designed by British Pop artist Richard Hamilton.

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.

Limited

Much has changed in the six years OTN has been publishing. Back in 2006 the idea of a serious artist who wasn’t Andy Warhol putting his or her name on a product was unusual whereas now artist brands fill every corner of the what-will-we-buy-someone-who-has-everything (i.e. super-rich) market. 

Still, we couldn't let this one pass without mention. Yes, a limited edition Tequila with Gabriel Orozco’s signature and signature patterned skull going for $2,250 a bottle. If you think half a dozen or so of these will help fill your Christmas gift needs you'd better get going. Orozco's tequila is in the inevitable ‘limited edition’, this one of 400 signed bottles.

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Someone at Pataka, Porirua's art museum, has a long memory and a wicked sense of humour. The marketing campaign for their exhibition Wild at Heart includes a poster under a mock Porirua Standard masthead with the arresting headline “Oxen charge patrons…” 

Anyone who was in Wellington in the late seventies and early eighties will fondly recall The Double Standard. To the delight and horror of the morning’s commuters these mock newspaper posters were put up around the city late at night by an anonymous feminist group. The most famous took a poke at then-Prime Minister Robert Muldoon (known to his enemies as Piggy Muldoon). 

As was its want The Double Standard mashed up two events: one real and one rumoured. This time it was the reported shooting of a wild pig in the bush in Ngaio mixed with rumours that the PM had a mistress who lived in the suburb. The Double Standard gleefully announced, “Rooting pig shot in Ngaio. PM safe.”

That’s the spirit

In our continuing quest to track art museum tie-ins designed by marketers to attract audiences, how about this effort from the Denver Museum? The exhibition coming up was BecomingVan Gogh. What do you think the team came up with to get more cash in the till?

Who guessed a specially brewed beer along with a name-the-beer competition offering a prize of free tickets, a Van Gogh t-shirt and discount voucher? Very Vincent.

Still could have been worse, they might have teamed up with Mademan.com and had their absinthe-based cocktail Van Gogh’s ear (fill a Collins glass with ice and dribble two oz. of absinthe slowly into the glass. Add a slice of lemon and pour grapefruit juice into the glass. Swirl in an oz. of grenadine) on offer at the door.

… and change

Those of you who were as surprised as we were by Te Papa’s intention to monetise the curatorial functions of the museum and use the collection’s artefacts to turn a bob can rest easy. The job description for the new Associate Director Enterprise has been severely modified to dial back these commercial expectations. 

Some time between our post on Wednesday morning and that afternoon the editors were hard at work cutting and pasting. The most startling bits in the job description (the stuff about having Te Papa operate "commercially when curating exhibitions” and having responsibility for "commercialising artefacts”) are gone. They've been replaced by more conventional expectations to "ensure commercial opportunities are generated around our collections…”

There's nothing to indicate these changes have been made but any marketing thrusters who were looking forward to cash in on curation will be disappointed. For the rest of us it's a matter of remembering that somewhere in that building someone pretty senior thought it was a good idea.