It’s been a long time between posts on this site and I want to apologise. I have been increasingly absorbed by the experience of painting. My own painting has been moving in difficult directions and has raised all kinds of issues about art itself and the value of “doing it” as against just looking at it, or writing about it. I hope to take this up this up more in future posts. I have also neglected the still undeveloped site at annettehamiltonartist.com which has lain idle in the welter of activities. I have been fortunate to attend a number of classes and workshops with great old-school painters and I have continued work mainly on landscapes focussed on the Seven Valleys of the sandstone mountains. More or less at the same time I have gone back to my paintings based on the desert interior around Broken Hill.
My art site is being updated now, visit there for more of these works and recent reflections on painting.
Stunning light in the Megalong Valley: working on an oil of this scene
The Last of the Bitumen: Mundi Mundi, near Silverton: trying this one in acrylic
John Wilson’s stunning oil of road and trees in the Capertee Valley: I attended his workshop at this site in February 2021
My version of the same scene after rain: so much was wrong with it!
My new collection of short stories, Revolutionary Baby, has now appeared. It is available online from any e-book supplier for any device (Kindle, Kobo, Apple, Nook).
The paperback version was published in early August, and is now available for order from Amazon or other online retailers. Or, visit your local bookshop and put in an order. If it isn’t listed at your local library, ask them to purchase a copy, it is listed for Australian library purchses via Ingram Spark.
For more about the writing side of things visit my writing site annette-hamilton.com
The banner headline above this post is from a remarkable watercolour of the Capertee Valley by Conrad Martens. So many artists have been fascinated by this remarkable place with its strange landforms and brilliant light. I will write more about Marten’s painting in another post.
Toni Collette comes to a gory but artistic end in Velvet Buzzsaw
I love movies about art and artists. There never seem to be enough of them. I know they are often cheesy and the art is fake and the stories are inaccurate or overblown or just plain wrong, but it’s so rare to be able to enter the world of art at a visual level apart from going to galleries or looking at pictures online. Even the good movies can be hard to come by: they often have short releases and disappear completely unless you are old school and collect DVDs.
Mostly they are biopics. A recent unexpected hit was Mr Turner (2015), an interesting attempt to explore the art through the strangeness of the man.
Was Turner really such a sourpuss?
Other titles since 2000 include Frida (2002), Modigliani (2004), El Greco (2007), Shirley (2007), an attempt to bring to literal narrative some of Edward Hopper’s paintings. Probably the most famous movies (and books) are those about Vincent van Gogh, including the recent At Eternity’s Gate, with Daniel Defoe in the role (2018). Haven’t seen it yet, but no doubt will do so soon (and write a review).
Velvet Buzzsaw is something completely different. It is a kind of horror film, a kind of parody, a kind of postmodern fantasy and a trenchant critique of the excesses of today’s art world. A remarkable cast includes Toni Collette styled after a famous (real) museum director, Jake Gyllenhal as the awful but powerful art critic Morf and Rene Russo as the art dealer. It is also a great outing for British actor Zawe Ashton, playing Josephina, the only likeable character in the ménage.
The Variety reviewer calls it “a tarted-up throwback to a certain kind of trashy ‘70s horror movie”. As a dedicated fan of trashy 70s movies, I disagree. While writer-director Dan Gilroy uses some of the tropes and gestures of that genre, he is also offering more than cheap thrills. Just as his creepy and unforgettable film Nightcrawler forced us to focus on what it means to “get the picture” (in that case, video footage of ultra-violent late night events in Los Angeles) VelvetBuzzsaw insists on the bizarre linkage between art, consumption and the ultra-wealthy elites who circulate and control the market in art and who destroy art (and truth) in the process.
Director Dan Gilroy: he doesn’t look happy either.
It is interesting that Gilroy originally wanted to make a film about Weegee, a crime photographer in New York in the 1930s.
Weegee was known as “The Father of Crime Scene Photography” and after being considered a weird outsider for decades he is now being recognized for his major innovations in photography, documentary and journalism. What he has in common with Gilroy is that he shows the kind of horror which everyone wants to see – a desire they can’t admit to. This would have made a fine follow-on from Nightcrawler but the logistics of recreating the era which calls for a brutalist noir approach would have been difficult and the result might have been too much altogether for the contemporary movie audience.
What matters to me in Gilroy’s work to date is that he is exploring the consumption of images, art, photography and the unconscious. He is tracking something about the hidden (or not-so-hidden) truths behind the emergent forces created by contemporary excess-capitalism. Art and media representation collide along a continuum of cruelty and inequality. The viewers want the gore: the super-saturated world of elite wealth and good taste masks a limitless violence against art in its deepest meaning. Although elements of the film jarred somewhat and the idea of a dead artist’s works having a kind of demonic intention is a bit OTT, see the film for its inventive depictions and wonder how much further the art world can go with its exuberant destruction of the concept of value and its embrace of very expensive cheap thrills. For Netflix fans, Velvet Buzzsaw is streaming now (February 2019).
Film Still used to advertise Never Look Away, 2019 release in the US
Gerhard Richter is the towering figure of contemporary European art. You’d never know it in Australia though. Apart from the brave retrospective at the GOMA in Brisbane (October 2017-February 2018) Richter’s art and reputation barely registers here. One can speculate about the reasons: his early art was weird (he painted full-scale black and white oils which were blurry copies of old photographs), his landscapes were almost abstracts and then when he started painting abstracts they looked like landscapes) but quite apart from the art, he has never comported himself like a suitably glamorous and dramatic/exotic figure and of course there is the contemporary sticking point, he is an old white male and a German at that.
Richter was born in 1932 and spent his boyhood in obscure Lower Silesia, now Bogatynia, Poland, and in the Lusitian countryside. The family moved to Dresden where his father, a teacher, struggled under the emerging Nazi education system. He was forced finally to join the Nazi party. Gerhard aged 10 was conscripted into the Hitler Youth but was too young to be an official member. Somehow the worst effects of the war passed the family by, and Gerhard was able to study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where his first application was rejected because his work was too “bourgeois”. Now he was living under the DDR, but managed to escape to the West two months before the building of the Berlin wall.
So, an early life under the shadow of the Nazis and the Commies, then freedom in the West and a dazzlingly successful career in art. So has gone the accepted story. Richter has been extremely protective of his privacy and although he has given many interviews and written his own books (wonderfully stimulating books) he has never strutted the stage as the kind of glamour boy which the art world so adores. He hasn’t been a drug addict or murdered anybody and he has nurtured his reputation by judicious management and with a quiet sincerity which is so against the grain these days.
Perhaps this reticence has aided his growing reputation. As the international art scene became big business in the new millennium a strange phenomenon occurred: the older and quieter Richter became, the greater and greater were the sums being paid for his work. Richter has become beyond collectible. In 2012 one of his Abstraktes Bilde set an auction record for a living artist at $34 million US. In 2013 his 1968 piece, Domplatz, Mailand sold for $37.1 million and in 2015 another Abstraktes Bild sold for $44.52 million.
Richter himself has watched this bizarre development with no little distress. These staggering prices do not go to him, of course, but to whoever had the foresight to buy his work earlier. He has described the situation as “absurd” and “daft” in 2011.
As this huge and unstoppable process continues, he has been saying less and less about it.
But now everything has changed. In this age of self-curation and self-revelation, everyone has to have a narrative and they have to share it with the world and if it contains a lot of bad stuff so much the better. For some unknown reason Richter permitted famous German film director and Oscar winner Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others, 2006) into his life and thoughts. For weeks they met and Donnersmarck recorded candid conversations with Richter about his life, on the understanding that the resulting screenplay would be “fictionalized”. The film, titled in German Werk Ohne Autor (Work WithoutAuthor) was released in Germany in 2017 and while its central character is not called Gerhard Richter and none of his actual paintings are shown (one of his assistants was hired to paint pictures like them for the movie) everyone is referring to it as the biopic about Richter. Now it is about to be released in the US, although at this date (January 2019) there has been no release planned for the UK or Australia.
Director Donnersmarck, 2018
What did he imagine would happen? Perhaps it speaks to the naivety of an older person about the operations of the new technologies of knowing (of knowing everything about everybody all the time whether they like it or not) or perhaps he trusted Donnersmarck as a fellow-artist. But the resulting film has resulted in a scandal of a horrible kind. No, it’s not allegations of sexual impropriety or dirty secrets, it’s somehow worse than that.
It turns out that between 1937 and 1967, while Richter was consolidating his art practice and developing his early career in East Germany he was benefiting from the support and patronage of his first wife’s father, a former Nazi officer who worked in the euthanasia program. One of Richter’s most famous early monochrome blurred photo-paintings “Aunt Marianne” is based on an image of his aunt, who was herself captured, sterilized and executed as part of the euthanasia program.
Tante Marianne, 1965: Oil on canvas 100 x 115 cm
Richter is very angry and upset about these revelations. He rightly judges that the fictionalization will become the truth. He has repudiated both film and director, although Donnersmarck says he hasn’t even seen the film yet, only the trailer. Never Look Away has been nominated for an Oscar and for the Golden Globes, and will be released in the US shortly, so everyone will be seeing it soon.
Donnersmarck’s film is an act of provocation, both to the art world itself and to the continuing German reluctance, or refusal, to face up to the realities of the twentieth century past. More and more films focusing on this issue have been emerging lately, and this can be seen as just another in the series. By putting this world-famous artist’s story, even in disguise, at the centre of an ethical demand it creates a compelling focus for the kind of coming-to-terms with the past which every Western nation needs to undertake. The role of art in collective self-recognition, and its role in the revelation of trauma under the unfolding of historical events, has never been more compelling. In a way Donnersmarck’s films make the psychoanalytic demand: live in the register of Truth!
Has Richter’s famous privacy been an effort to cover up or disguise his entanglements with German history? If so, why has he made these revelations to a film director famous for his work in disrobing historical disguises? Did he really think such a film would not be “about” him? Or is there some inner compulsion at work, where his own reality is demanding a release? In some ways the whole situation reminds me of what happened when Martin Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” were published recently. Right-wing critics and philosophical conservatives went through them line by line, trumpeting “See we told you all along he was a Nazi” as if this disproves the validity of his writing and hence the whole of contemporary leftist philosophy.
Is this about to happen to Richter and the “value” of his art? Or will it only make it more valuable?
But there are more profound questions here. Is everybody always responsible for decisions they made in the distant past when everything was different including the meaning of behavior? Was Richter wrong not to denounce his wife’s father? How much did he in reality accept from her family, to what extent is his present success the result of these murky antecedents? Has his whole life been a kind of cover-up? And isn’t everybody’s?
Poster advertisement for the German release
In the poster for the German film (above) we are confronted with a beautiful young man who seems to be hiding behind his own blurry hands. This is the director’s message, perhaps. I haven’t seen the film and I look forward to it. At over three hours long it probably won’t receive a release in Australia but who knows, maybe SBS will get some cojones after the next election and go back to its original mandate.
Was broken-hearted (and as everyone now says, blind-sided) to discover that we had to vacate Glenrowan after a scant six months and so say farewell to the beautiful new studio space I was so looking forward to using. I have to report that I never painted one single picture in it. That was in part due to health reasons, but have been thinking that maybe it was just too perfect to work in. And also too small. Strangely I don’t seem to have any photographs of it.
It is so difficult to find a great studio, or even just a satisfactory one. I now have the use of a good-sized room in my daughter’s new house round the corner from here. It is a good space, but right near the living and cooking areas of the house and I don’t want to use solvents there. This has led to a surprising decision: have decided to start working in acrylics for a while.
Also thinking about doing a lot more large-scale drawing/mixed media work – great for bushland scenes – and maybe exploring the water-based wax paint further. In my last post I put up some of the gorgeous flower photographs I took in spring last year. These may be worth trying in both acrylics and wax-paints. Again, though, I need the studio set up properly with good light and furnishings.
Unfortuately I really want to finish my K-Town series, and as it is in oils unless I work on it in the dark and cold garage. There are several unfinished canvases, and a couple I hadn’t yet started. Together they would make a great series or show, but I need the right space to finish them in.
Scenic World, 2015. Annette Hamilton from the K-Town Series.
I could write the history of my frustrated artistic efforts through a memoir of my studios. The Petersham studio was by far the best of all and I did good work there, but even so it was noisy and the oily dust from Parramatta Road got all over everything. Still, I was sorry to leave it. Hard to believe that whole space is no longer inhabited by any of us who were there for so many years.
The Petersham studio: packed up, ready to say farewell, 2017.
Heroic works and heroic spaces:
Eric Fischl’s studio: height, space, light, the life sized mannequins.
Gerhard Richter’s Dusseldorf studio: the Abstrakts
And, in contrast, the quiet domestic intimacy of Elisabeth Cummings’ studio at Wedderburn:
Elisabth’s studio at Wedderburn: after lunch (Photo; AH).
It’s been a long silence I know. I closed up my Sydney studio and stopped painting, and writing about painting, while I focussed on getting some creative writing out into the ebook world. Two down and two to go in the next couple of months, I hope. Visit the Writing Zone for more on that.
So looking forward to the Gerhard Richter at QAGOMA in a few weeks. Was too late to get tickets to the one day seminar. It looks like a great program overall, although some seriously important work is missing. Apparently it was not possible to get the Baader-Meinhof works, and not sure how much of the 60s monochrome will make it either. It is going to be interesting going back to my earlier thoughts on Richter in the light of the exhibition. Every possible thanks and gratitude to the curators at Queensland, may they receive all praise for actually getting this to happen. More on Richter-related matters soon.
Meanwhile, spring has brought the most stunning sights to our gardens. I’ve always been fascinated by flower painting, but cringed sometimes at the way it so easily becomes twee and decorative. The formalism of the Dutch flower painters is fascinating but so close to mortuary in its stillness. What I saw in the gardens this year was vivid activity and movement, bees sweeping in and out of the trees, wind blowing tiny blossoms everywhere so they covered the grey concrete paths. Maybe I should experiment. These are all photographs taken casually in one or other of our gardens in the Blue Mountains, just in the past couple of weeks. Another Mountains project? Colour? Contrast? Form? Very different from the bush monochromes I was beginning to work on.
READERS PLEASE NOTE: IN THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF THIS BLOG POST I INCLUDED IMAGES OF THE RICHARD PRINCE PHOTOGRAPHS AT THE CENTRE OF THE CASE. These are widely published and included in many discussions of the appropriation issue. However, the images were all removed from the post. I find it very interesting that it is not possible to discuss the issue using the examples of the images which caused the problem in the first place.
In the discussion which follows, a small icon appears at the points where I reproduced the images, with a brief reference attached. However the icon does not lead to anything. The use of these images should be regarded as Fair Dealing for the purposes of review and analysis – see the discussion below. However … if you want to know more about what Prince actually did, you’ll have to search through the many online images which are freely available, though many are without context or explanatory discussion. For reproduction of the main images at issue go to: https://hyperallergic.com/107150/the-art-of-art-lawsuits/
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Appropriation art takes a piece of existing art work, borrows and transforms it. The end product is obviously not a copy, since the purpose of the artist is to create something new and notably different. No-one would mistake the new piece for the original although it will be obvious what it is. All those famous comic pictures of the Mona Lisa with a moustache, or in disguise, are a commonplace example. How far can appropriation art go and still stay within the boundaries of the law? This question has been tested recently especially with regard to the works of Richard Prince.
In US copyright law a Fair Use test exists to determine the legitimate re-use of someone else’s works including photographic works. It consists of a number of elements which singly or in combination can give protection to someone wishing to re-use another’s work.
There are four factors in the test. Only a Federal Court judge can give a definitive answer on whether a particular use meets that test. The four factors are:
The purpose and character of the use
The nature of the copyrighted work
The amount and substantiality of the portion taken
In 2000 French photographer Patrick Cariou published a book, Yes Rasta (Powerhouse) about the lives of Rastafarians. His striking photographs were the main element of the book.
Portrait, from “Yes Rasta”. Republished in the NY Times, from Cariou’s blog.
In 2008 artist Richard Prince created a series of 30 art works which were based on Cariou’s paintings for a show, “Canal Zone”, at New York’s prestigious Gargosian Gallery. In 2009 Cariou brought a copyright infringement suit against Prince, his gallerist and the publisher of the exhibition catalogue. In March 2011 US District Judge Deborah Batts ruled against Prince and ordered the defendants to destroy remaining copies of the catalogue and the unsold paintings which were closely based on Cariou’s photographs.
Cariou’s original photograph at left; Prince’s modification at right.
The decision was overturned on appeal in 2013, except for five paintings which were referred for further evaluation of claims of Fair Use.
The argument in favour of Prince was supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Along with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation they argued that the intellectual content and aesthetic meaning of a work of art is not always visible outside of art-historical context. The court decided that the case would depend on whether or not a reasonable observer would find Prince’s works to have been transformative, and thus protected under Fair Use. Because the case for the five paintings was settled out of court there was no legal ruling on them which has been seen as a loss for those seeking clarity in the operation of the law with regard to appropriation art.
In the latest copyright suit against Prince, photographer Donald Graham has claimed that Prince used a photograph of a Rastafarian which he took. The photograph was used in Prince’s 2014 Gargosian exhibition “New Portraits” which present prints of other people’s Instagram posts with comments.
Grahamn’s original at left: Prince’s version at rightPart of Prince’s “New Portraints” exhibition: the Graham photograph in context.
This case differs from Cariou’s in several respects. In terms of the fourth element, the market infringement test, Cariou had made no fine art prints of his work and had not exhibited them as prints. But in the Graham case, the photographer has ONLY sold his work as prints and has never licenced the copyrighted photograph or made it available for any commercial purpose other than sale to fine art collectors. Another element of Fair Use relates to whether or not it has been used for commentary. In the present case the new photographs may be thought to be commenting on the way social media is intersecting with photography.
Another factor is the amount of copyrighted work taken. In this case, the photograph uses almost all of Graham’s image. There is a change in the framing and presentation. Moreover, the image, and the others appropriated for the show, is a striking and compelling image. It is not just the random snappings of amateurs.
However others disagree. Conceptual and appropriation art cannot be judged only on its formal and aesthetic qualities. One NYU law professor says it is “the art-law equivalent of Zombie Formalism”.
The rise and rise of Zombie Formalism – or is it just The Blur?
[Zombie Formalism is a new art movement based on the long discarded principles of Clement Greenberg. For a discussion see an upcoming post].
Also the market test is different because Graham has a track record as a fine art and commercial photographer and makes his living from those photographic activities. If the court finds in favour of Prince, it profoundly affects the concept of copyright in photography and maybe other forms of art.
CONCLUSION: Appropriation art has increased in the Fine Art field at a rapid pace in recent years. Cases such as those of Richard Prince described above serve to highlight the extremely uncertain situation of current copyright law and tests of Fair Use. The fact that each nation has its own Copyright law makes it even more complicated when cross-national jurisdictions must decide what is legal and what is not and even then cannot necessarily impose any penalties.
UPDATE: I am doing some research at present regarding the Australian law regarding the use of others’ photographs/paintings in fine art. This is a difficult issue given the increasing popularity of original paintings referencing other Australian artists and their work. It is estimated that there are hundreds (or more) of such paintings now in circulation in the secondary market. Some of these may be deliberate fakes, but others are works done using the styles and techniques of well-know contemporary artists. The question of what constitutes a “copy” is very unclear.
Recently a Victorian court quashed the conviction of two painters who were said to have created imitation Brett Whiteleys, for instance.
In reproducing an image of this allegedly “fake” painting here, without permission, I may also be offending against copyright law. If the painting in question is indeed a deliberate fake, is it nonetheless covered by existing copyright law?
Big Blue, Lavender Bay: Allegedly a fake Brett Whitely painting, but a court cleared the painter and the dealer in 2017.
Reading a lot about the animal mind at the moment – an excellent book by Virginia Morell, Animal Wise, published by Black Inc in 2013 talks about recent scientific research which is, very slowly, beginning to realise that animals do in fact have “minds” – and I came across some remarks about bower-birds which add the imprimatur of science to the claim that they are making art.
Scientists studying the greater bowerbirds mapped and tabulated the thousands of stones, glass and other beautiful items of decoration the male birds use to ornament their bowers (as described in an earlier post) The Art of the Bower-Bird. One scientist wrote a code letter on each little stone and piece of glass, hundreds and thousands of them even just at one bower. What did she find? The birds weren’t only collecting items of beauty to display to their lady loves, they were actually creating the illusion of perspective in the way they laid them out – the same techniques artists use for landscape painting. The birds put the largest of their pieces furthest away from the opening to the nest and the smallest ones close to it. The female bowerbird inside the nest looking outwards will then perceive them as all being of around the same side. Was this an accident? No of course not. When the researchers disrupted the birds’ careful curation, they found they restored them back to the original order once the researchers went away. Each item had its proper place. “Bowerbirds, the scientists concluded, are artists – the first animal, other than humans, that is fully recognised as having a artistic sense”.
Well I don’t know if that is the conclusion we need to come to. I think the painting primates demonstrate their artistic sense once they have learnt to paint properly, much as humans do. But the point is, that artistic sense, the aesthetic engagement, belongs in the interaction between mind and world, and there is no way we should ever have concluded that humans are alone in this.
Another complex entry to an elaborate bower
Valuable real estate needs expensive decor even in the bush!
The palaver about the destiny of the three tertiary art schools in Sydney would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious. Sydney as a centre of Australian art in all its forms is slipping into oblivion. Far be it from me to make pronouncements, but I have occupied senior administrative posts in two Sydney Universities and, at the other end of the spectrum, have recently been a TAFE student in Visual Arts with major in painting. I know how the logic of the market operates in Universities and how this inevitably shapes the options in fields which do not immediately translate into lots of student numbers or ready external funding. It costs a lot to run outstanding art education and the cost per head of student is inevitably going to be far higher than the cost for running a business or standard arts program. And you can’t charge sky high fees (as in Vet Science, Medicine or Dentistry) because a degree in Fine Arts is not going to result in an assured income, or any income at all in some cases. [Although arts incomes in the US have been strongly rising recently].Rising incomes in the US for art graduates
Art education lies at the heart of a community’s ability to support a flourishing creative sector and cultural life. Art courses in secondary schools are mostly taught by teachers who are graduates of University art programs. Professional artists increasingly come from dedicated art schools. In Sydney, the three main tertiary Art programs offer three year undergraduate degrees while serious students go on to the Masters of Fine Art or beyond.
What University management expects is something very different from what artists need. The key institution in Sydney has been what is now the National Art School although in my mother’s day when she was a student under Roy de Maistre and other luminaries it was still East Sydney Tech. Most of Australia’s very best artists – painters, sculptors, printmakers and others – are graduates of the NAS. The great names of an earlier generation came out of the NAS and its more recent alumni are no less distinguished: Guy de Maestri, Luke Sciberras, Fiona Hall to name a few.
National Art School – old Darlinghurst Jail site, Sydney
A few years ago the NSW Government backed an enormous push to move the NAS into what was COFA, then a college of UNSW. This was successfully resisted, fortunately, but the pressure will not go away until somebody “up there” realises that a National Art School should be just that. I fully support the recommendation that the NAS be separately funded by the Federal Government on the same model as the National Institute of Dramatic Art. The NAS should not be a teaching program of a University but should retain its strengths in the training of practicing artists and all the other roles which necessarily go with a flourishing art culture in any great international city.
At the University of NSW the College of Fine Arts had a semi-independent identity but following a huge rebuilding program funded mostly by philanthropy it was fully integrated into the University in 2014 and its new title “UNSW Art and Design”reflects the distinctive character which has developed there, with its focus on new media, design, digital production, cinema and a fair dose of po-mo theory. Don’t mistake me, the old COFA/new Faculty does great work and offers outstanding programs and courses, but the fundamental commitment is not to the production of studio based fine arts such as painting and drawing.
UNSW Art and Design: artist’s impression from Oxford Street Paddington
Sydney College of the Arts was originally established as a College of Advanced Education (CAE) in 1970 and was amalgamated into the University of Sydney in 1990, being given the wonderful old sandstone harbourside site of Callan Park as its home. SCA has many distinguished alumni including Ben Quilty, Bronwyn Bancroft and Locus Jones. Callan Park has been a massive dilemma for the NSW State Government which owns the site and is just itching to do something spectacular with it – new development unspecified. Local opposition to the various plans for the site with the strong support of Leichhardt Council has been able to stave this off for some years, but now that the Councils have amalgamated and with the insane development mania now gripping the NSW Goverment the likelihood of the site remaining as it is goes to zero once the art school is moved off it.
Callan Park Master Plan: glorious harbourside and classic sandstone
Save Callan Park success – but for how long?
Three art schools, each with distinctive profiles, cost a lot to run. It is easy to see why the planners and economists thought it would be a really good idea to amalgamate them all with what used to be COFA and have the whole lot somehow managed by UNSW. But less than a month later after the announcement of this totally unfeasible plan it’s been dropped and the SCA is going to remain with the University of Sydney but will be rolled into the Faculty of Arts.
This actually makes a lot of sense although where on earth the studio facilities and art-workshops will be located on that crowded campus is anyone’s guess. But it’s not impossible to imagine something good transpiring. Carriageworks is located on an old railway site not far away and its stunning spaces host many great art exhibits. If student studio space could be developed nearby it would consolidate the cultural value of the site.
Carriageworks – at the old Eveleigh Workshops site. Amazing space!
While the Faculty of Arts at Sydney no doubt has its own financial difficulties and will not welcome trying to stretch budgets to accommodate a new Arts program, it makes sense in other ways and could open up a much wider vision for the Faculty of Arts itself which is to tell the truth pretty unadventurous. The School of Art, or whatever its name will be, could engage more deeply with other humanities areas and open up a lot of new synergies. This is where the high school art teachers, for instance, would most appropriately be trained. And other students in the Faculty could build their programs to include a new range of subjects. Good outcomes all round there, although there would still need quarantined funding for the studio programs and the various technical facilities which will go with them.
So there is a way forward and it could be a positive thing for Sydney. If only something could be done to redirect the enthusiasm of the new Director of the Art Gallery of NSW towards actually supporting art instead of wanting to be an architectural designer, and if the three art schools could be confirmed in their separate identities with different funding models, Sydney could be restored as a centre for Australian art. As it is now, all the best students want to go to Melbourne.
The Artist’s Studio. 1870. Jean-Frederic Bazille. Musee d’Orsay, Paris
The distance between the art student, the practicing artist, the gallerist and the collector/investor often seems so vast that it’s hard to believe they are all part of the same ecosystem. But of course they are, the product of a complex interlocking network of ideas, preferences, cultural values, economies and desires. Once was a time when artists stacked up their finished canvases in a corner of their studio. If they were lucky enough to be shown in a gallery, then the gallery got a cut, but often enough collectors or art-lovers visited the studio, had a glass or two of absinthe, paid some cash to the artist and walked out with the painting. Perhaps, as in Bazille’s amazing painting (above) a gentleman played piano while the negotiations were in progress.
OK, it’s an oversimplification. But the idea of a “quality” artist selling from their studio is now almost unthinkable. The link between artist and seller is so distant that many artists have no idea who currently “owns” their work. If they do meet up, over a glass of Cristal at a glamorous dinner party perhaps, it’s because the artist too has become a celebrity. Many successful artists never see their works again because they are consigned to storage as part of an investment strategy. Did you know that if you buy art as part of your superannuation you are not allowed to look at it? It must be locked away somewhere, otherwise you are getting a benefit from it before you are allowed to. You have to be sixty and retire first. Crazy! Strict rules govern investment in SMSH’s
A good artist has to have a gallery. Galleries compete for artists, but only if they sell, and especially if they have a rising reputation. Once with a gallery, the artist is no longer free to sell from their studio. They can give paintings away as gifts, of course, but even that is frowned upon. For decades this was the accepted system: an artist, a gallery, a buyer. In the secondary market, where art is on-sold from its first purchaser, auctions were the norm, but there were also private sales.
This was a fairly stable process until round about the 1990s. Then, in a strange contortion of late global capitalism, the rise of the super-elites, including traditional oligarchs, real-estate tycoons, movie stars and glamorous celebrities with infinite wealth saw the system change.
Neo Rauch’s 1998 painting Etappe. Bought by Brad Pitt at Art Basel for one million US in 2009. David Zwirner and Galerie Eigen Art, Berlin/Leipzig.
There were new players awash with funds from the “developing” economies: China, Brazil, India. And with the end of so-called communism funds were flooding around the globe and into the hands of gangsters and various versions of Mafia with their new-style goon squads: armies of suited accountants and investment managers. Gazillions of dollars went into superannuation funds which had to give a decent yield.
Three stock market indices: US$
Periodic panics emerged, as they always do in a capitalist system. Stock markets rose and fell, raw materials markets collapsed, industrial work moved off-shore to low cost countries and then their bloated and unbalanced economies went off the rails. Democratic systems stalled. Military rule came back. Nothing was stable.
Where then could the super-rich, or their financial managers, deposit their gotten (ill or otherwise) gains?
Pablo Picasso’s ” Dora Maar au chat” is auctioned by Tobias Meyer at Sotheby’s New York during the Impressionist and Modern Art Sale 03 May 2006. The painting sold for USD 85 million. AFP PHOTO/Timothy A. CLARY (Photo credit should read TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)
Aha! The art market! What a great idea. Original works of art are just that: original. Walter Benjamin put his finger right on the pulse when he wrote about the aura of the art work in the age of mechanical reproduction. [It is worth reading and re-reading this work – so prescient, yet he had no idea in the 1930s how it would unfold].
The magic is that you cannot duplicate an original work of art. You can make prints of it, of course. Or someone can try forging it. But in the end there can one authentic example of each work, and only a limited number from each artist especially when the artist is dead.
Artists become superstars. A dizzying variety of choices emerge, some of them hard to “collect”, as in the best-known works of Tracey Emin. Tracey recently married a rock in a formal ceremony and they are reported to be very happy.
Tracey Emin dinner hosted by Phillips and Vanity Fair at Cecconi’s at Soho Beach House on December 3, 2013 in Miami Beach, Florida, to celebrate her wedding.
A dense supporting cast in the art world decide which works are important, which styles are great, which fashions are in. The art market itself slides in its preferences from time to time. How to invest in the right pieces? Let the market decide, it is capitalism after all.
The Mei Moses index – reproduced under the terms of fair dealing for purposes of study and research.
And so the glamour auction houses emerged in the main cities of global capitalism: London, New York, Hong Kong. Lesser markets emerged in outliers: Melbourne, Sydney, Vancouver, wherever there were funds to be invested and profits to be made. Some great books have been written about the world of the auction house. I mentioned some time ago the wonderful film of Isaac Julien, with its glimpses of the art market and interview with one of the main players in the British art market. Isaac Julien: PLAYTIME.
Isaac Julien: portrait with still from Playtime 2013
I will add shortly the titles of some books and articles I have really enjoyed, including some fiction.
So here we are today. The profound impulse to make and enjoy art has been ripped away from its base in local cultures and economies. The new Global Art Market is a dizzying beast. In the next few posts I will be looking at some recent trends and think about what it all means for the ordinary artist in backwaters like Australia.
Roy Lichtenstein. “Oh, All Right”. Sold at auction for $42.6 million in 2010.
This post was originally meant to go onto my work-in-progress art site (see link below). It turns out to have been a mistake to use my name for both of these URLs of these sites, because WordPress when it gets tired and emotional doesn’t know which one to put the post in. Still, I thought it might be worthwhile to say a few words about my experience of site development in WordPress as an artist and writer.
The first blog site I ever set up was about life in Sydney, with a focus on food and the inner west. That site is still live and you can go there easily by putting Elinor Entity into Google. It was set up on Blogger which was then one of the only options. Blogger has developed a lot since then and offers great simplicity and functionality but it doesn’t have the Website quality which you get with a WordPress blog.
So I decided to set up a WordPress site when I started studying art at TAFE. I thought I could use it to put my written work up on. But my teacher never looked at the site and wanted me to hand in written papers which I did, but I put various expanded versions and research comments on things that had interested me on the site anyway. I am talking about this site which you are on now, annettehamilton.wordpress.com. It was a very steep learning curve and I went through hours and days of struggle to learn how to use it, but once it was set up it was a breeze.
I now have three sites live and two others I am using as practice although both will go live eventually. One is this site, obviously, which has been a delight to develop and use. I used the same template for my Writing Zone site, which I set up to manage my fiction and memoir publications. These WordPress templates are free and don’t require third party hosting or any knowledge of coding although you can of course make some modifications through the templates. Not all the free templates offer the same range of options so check them out carefully. There are hundreds of them, both sites developed by WordPress and by third parties – most of the latter are not free though.
But using free WordPress templates with a WordPress URL is kind of low rent. The real deal is to obtain your own domain name, either through the WordPress set-up process or separately through a domain name provider, and set yourself up with a paid theme and a hosting service. The domain name, the specialist theme, and the hosting service all cost money.
You can do something inbetween by setting up your own domain name through WordPress, and using WordPress themes and WordPress as your host. Or you can buy a dedicated theme. I wanted a Portfolio site so I thought I would be very clever and do that. I thought I could put all my images up on the site, on grids, and the viewer would be able to click on each one and bring up information about the picture, such as size, medium etc. as well as any other background.
Well that just didn’t happen. I have spent hours and hours trying to make the paid theme I purchased, Qua, work properly. Only now have I realised that the kind of clickable functionality I wanted isn’t available with that theme. It just doesn’t work like that but I couldn’t see this out from the demo. Now I’m stuck with a fairly expensive paid theme which won’t do what I want. Quite often you will be told that you can make things happen by going into CSS or doing some kind of html coding. Well sorry but that’s not in the repertoire of this artist/writer and I’m not going to start paying a specialist to do it.
So I’m stuck with a kind of portfolio site, which sort of/half works but isn’t what I had in mind at all. One of these days, when I don’t want to spend more time painting and writing, I might go back to the drawing board and see if I can set up a better one.
Another idea is to sign up for an Art Archiving service. Again, it involves expense, in this case an annual fee. But you can put all your paintings on it, and track where they are, whether any have been sold, prices and such. Plus I think there is a facility for commenting on the paintings. More on this soon.
His striking photographs were the main element of the book.
Annette Hamilton Art Writing from Australia 