Googling on

So you have a yen to know what art works the public finds most interesting. As is so often the case, try Google. Drifting through some searches the other day a band of images appeared on the top of the screen with the header “Artworks frequently mentioned on the web”. OK, not the most sophisticated way to track public taste but there were some surprises. For instance were they all pictures of cows or cottages by that Kinkaid guy? No, they were not. 

For a start Marcel Duchamp topped the list coming in with three of the 20 selected images (Fountain, Bicycle wheel and Nude descending a staircase). Of the rest over 50 per cent (11) were from the twentieth century though none from the twenty-first. Predictably just one was by a woman (Judy Chicago’s The dinner party) and only one by a non-European (Hokusai’s The great wave off Kanagawa). Painting as usual ruled the roost but Shepard Fairey provided a nice graphic touch. As for the Southern Hemisphere, it didn't feature.

We stumbled on this heuristic by simply putting the word 'art' into the Google search box. Now the trick will be to see if tastes change over time.
Images: Google's top twenty

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

Big

Apart from photographing your friends posing in front of works in art museums (we've recently watched a ten minute set of mimic-poses in front of Andy Warhol’s painting Ethel Scull 36 times that would have done a professional model shoot proud) there’s a new kind of photography in town. Museum visitors are starting to use the zoom feature on their phone cameras to record those illusive details you miss. A whole new micro world of art is coming into focus - and with an iPad of course the experience is hugely magnified.

How will the museums respond? Well if people can have an intimate close-up view of works their experience will be very different and they'll have different kinds of questions. There's not much point blandly announcing on a label that a knife is richly illustrated with animal figures if the visitor via a few camera shots has already discovered that the animals all have human heads and they seem to have weapons drawn. As they say in Starshiptroopers, "Do you want to know more?" This is a different way of looking that will demand different ways of presentation and interpretation. Good luck with that.

Images: top left to right, James Ensor Masks confronting death,  Henri Matisse The goldfish bowl, Caesar captive before Shopur II, Seal ring in the name of Hajji Muhammad Mahmud, El Anatsui's Dusasa II and Alberto Giacometti's City square (Details follow in the same order).

Bit of a stretch

Come on, this does fit into the weird-use-of-the-artist’s-palette theme that OTN has discerned is of great interest to you all. And it does give us the chance to post these photos (completely unrelated to art) taken at the Colorado National Monument using the iPhone 5’s incredible - and perhaps overused - panorama function.

Looking at old photographs...

... and thinking about Peter Robinson.

Pic of the crop

Back in the late seventies and early eighties we went round the country in our holiday breaks interviewing artists for the book Contemporary New Zealand painters. The photographs had already been taken by Marti Friedlander who had been committed to recording NZ artists for many, many years but we also took the odd pic ourselves. And it’s something we’ve kept up over the years. 

Rather than have our photos lying around in files we’re now going to make them available to anyone who wants to use them. Just add our credit line and we can follow up with bigger files if anyone wants them in the future. We’ll get in touch with the artists first of course and eventually put as many as we can up on Flickr. In the meantime we’ll give you a taste from time to time.

These first two shots were taken in Toss Woollaston’s Riwaka studio in 1980. Our son Pippin was about eight months old and was put to work cleaning studio floors while we talked with the artists.

Image: M. T. Woollaston 1980. Photo: Jim Barr and Mary Barr

Two’s company

Most of you will know that a great art-in-the-movies-moments was when the creepy Grady twins (played by Lisa and Louise Burns) popped up in front of Danny as he raced around the corridors of the Overlook hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. “Come play with us Danny, for ever and ever.” The two girls were based on the Diane Arbus photograph Identical twins Roselle, N.J. Kubrick in fact studied photography under Arbus but always denied any relationship between his twins and the Arbus pair (good luck with that one).

Arbus photographed the twins (Cathleen and Colleen Wade) in 1967 when they were seven years old and attending a Christmas party for twins and triplets. They have since been tracked down and still live in New York. More about them and other who-are-they? revelations including one Arbus's famous baby shots being of ace TV reporter Anderson Cooper here.

Images: Top left,  Diane Arbus Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. and right Cathleen Mulcahy and Colleen Yorke (the Wade twins). Bottom, the Grady twins (Lisa and Louise Burns) before and after. 

You can read another OTN Arbus post here

Feather weights

Four years ago we spotted David Lynch doing the Peter Peryer thing with a chook. This time it’s more bird/artist action with Leonardo DiCaprio photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

Images: Peryer Self portrait with rooster 1977, Leonardo Dicaprio by Annie Leibovitz 1997 and Andrzei Dragan's portrait of David Lynch 2007.

Munchkins

In a new museum photo craze many visitors have traded in taking pics of the paintings to taking pics of themselves mugging the paintings. One of our favourite sites Hyperallergic trawled up a good range of examples from MoMA's Twitter stream featuring some ‘Screamers’ in action. They also pointed their readers to this nice Scream animation.

Stand up and be counted

We've posted before about the millions of photographs taken of artworks in museums every day and how the Mona Lisa and other destination paintings are almost impossible to see for the hordes of point-and-pressers crowded around them. Now the latest iteration of art-photography is gathering steam: snap a photo in front of your own special artwork. Two for one - an artwork and a friend.

Less endearing are the photos of the rich and the powerful standing in front of paintings they own or control.  It's a modern day version of the tradition by which landowners have their estates oiled in behind them by the likes of Thomas Gainsborough and the rest. As John Berger said of Gainsborough’s famous landed gentry painting Mr and Mrs Andrews, “their proprietary attitude towards what surrounds them is visible in their stance and their expression.” So too with modern day portraits of high flyers and their art.

We were reminded of all this when we saw these pics of businesswomen before art in a Next magazine (who knows what issue, we’re talking doctor’s waiting room here). Inevitably the two paintings are by men, but then you can’t have everything.

Images: Top to bottom, Thomas Gainsborough Mr and Mrs Andrews, snapping at the Mona Lisa, peace-signs and Pollock and what comes in Next

Bathing beauty

"They saw it and said 'oh, that's art'." 

Danu Sefton in the Dominion Post describing the police’s reaction and lack of interest when they came to her house to check on whether or not a photo she took of her daughter in the bath depicted child abuse