Art and Money [1 ed.] 9781443884013, 9781443876216

Citation preview

Art and Money

Art and Money Edited by

Peter Stupples

Art and Money Edited by Peter Stupples This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Peter Stupples and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7621-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7621-6

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii Peter Stupples Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 The Invisible Coin in Masaccio’s Tribute Money Estelle Alma Maré Chapter Two ................................................................................................ 7 Francesco di Marco Datini of Prato: Medieval Merchant, Patron of the Arts, Philanthropist Joy Monteath Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 23 Pop Art Makes Money Peter Stupples Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 35 Some Reflections on Aboriginal Art’s Relationship with Money Laura Fisher Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 59 Art and Money: Coins of the Realm Max Haiven Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 75 Art Education and Money in the 21st Century Leoni Schmidt

vi

Contents

Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 89 The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally Rebecca Hamid Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 121 Art and Money: What is Really Being Bought and Sold? Jewell Homad-Johnson Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 137 Implications and Ideals of Artist-Run Initiatives as an Alternative Economy of the Arts: A Study of None Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand Brendan Philip Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 145 Coining New Zealand: Projecting Nationhood and Money, 1933-1940 Mark Stocker Contributors ............................................................................................. 169

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1-1. Masaccio, Payment of the Tribute Money, Capella Brancacci, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, 1426-7, fresco, 247 x 597 cm. Fig. 2-1. Statue to Francesco di Marco Datini, Piazza del Comune, Prato. Photo: Joy Monteath. Fig. 2-2. Brunelleschi, Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence, 1419-27. Fig. 2-3. Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, The Trinity, 1400-10, tempera on wood, 217 x 89; Datini on the left, Ginevra and Margherita on the right. Museo Capitolino, Rome. Fig. 2-4. Pietro and Antonio di Miniato, View of Prato with Saints, together with Dagomari and Francesco Datini, 1425, fresco, Museo Civico, Palazzo Pretorio, Prato. Photo: Antonio Quattrone, Archivo del Museo di Palazzo Pretorio, Prato. Fig. 2-5. Filippo Lipi, Madonna del Ceppo, 1452-3, oil on panel, 187 x 120, Museo Civico, Prato. Fig. 4-1. Roy Lichtenstein, Ten Dollar Bill, 1956, lithograph, image 25.2 x 47.7, sheet 42.8 x 57.6, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Gift of Kenneth Tyler and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler, 2010. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/ Licensed by Viscopy, 2014 Fig. 4-2. Phillip Hefferton, Sinking George, 1962, oil on canvas, 229.9 x 173.4 x 4.4, The Menil Collection, Houston, USA, accession no. 2001004. © The Estate of Phillip Hefferton. Gift of Betty and Monte Factor. Fig. 4-3. Andy Warhol, 192 One Dollar Bills, 1962, silkscreen ink, pencil, acrylic paint on canvas, 249 x 189, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin. Copyright ARS/Licensed by Viscopy 2014. Fig. 5-1. Cesare Pietroiusti, image from a 2007 performance in which the artist treated money with sulfuric acid. Photo: Martina Della Valle. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 5-2. Cesare Pietroiusti and Paul Griffiths, Eating Money—An Auction, 2005-7. Performance at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK. Photo: Caters News. Courtesy of the Ikon Gallery. Fig. 5-3. Cesar Pietroiusti, Money-Watching, 2007. Performance and social action at a Birmingham shopfront. Photo: Chris Keenan. Courtesy of the Ikon Gallery and the artist. Fig. 5-4. Máximo González, Big Magma CCCLXX-I, 2011. Installation view. Money and glue. Courtesy of the artist.

viii

List of Illustrations

Fig. 5-5. Máximo González, Basura Sin Paisaje (Landfill Without Landscape), 2012. Detail. Out-of-circulation money. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 7-1. Darryn George, Kaitiaki, 2012, oil on canvas, dimensions variable, Melbourne Art Fair, 2012, Melbourne, Australia. Fig. 7-2. Scott Eady, 100 Bikes Project: Gwangju, 2012, dimensions variable, Gwangju Biennale 2012, Gwangju, South Korea. Photo: Scott Eady. Fig. 7-3. Darryn George, Folder Room, 2013, 2 pot full gloss poly on board, lighting, 629 x 474 x 370, Personal Structures, Palazzo Bembo, Venice Biennale 2013. Fig. 7-4. Scott Eady, Ivan (Calciami!), 2013, powder coated bronze, paper, diam. 36, Personal Structures, Palazzo Bembo, Venice Biennale 2013. Photo: Scott Eady. Fig. 7-5. Scott Eady, Ivan (Calciami!), 2013, powder coated bronze, paper, diam. 36 Personal Structures, Palazzo Bembo, Venice Biennale 2013. Photo: Rebecca Hamid. Fig. 8-1. John Zinnanti, Untitled, photograph, 2013. Phoenix, Arizona. [email protected]. Fig. 9-1. The None Gallery building at 24 Stafford Street, Dunedin, New Zealand. Fig. 9-2. The Raw Gallery Space. Fig. 9-3. Stairwell at None with posters for ten years of events. Fig. 10-1. Percy Metcalfe, after Bertram Mackennal, Head of King George V, 1932 (original 1911), The National Archives, U.K. Fig. 10-2. George Kruger Gray designs for New Zealand coinage reverses, 1933, The National Archives, U.K. Fig. 10-3. Percy Metcalfe, designs for New Zealand coinage reverses, 1933, The National Archives, U.K. Fig. 10-4. George Kruger Gray, New Zealand coinage reverses, 1933. Photo: Mark Stocker. Fig. 10-5. George Kruger Gray, designs for New Zealand florin reverse, 1933: George Kruger Gray, copy after W.R.B. Oliver, North Island Kiwi, 1933, The National Archives, U.K. Fig. 10-6. Allan Gairdner Wyon, Hector Memorial Medal, 1911, University of Canterbury, New Zealand; George Kruger Gray, design for New Zealand shilling reverse, 1933, The National Archives, U.K. Fig. 10-7. Percy Metcalfe, Waitangi Crown trials, 1934-5, The National Archives, U.K Fig. 10-8. Percy Metcalfe, Waitangi Crown reverse, 1935, Noble Numismatic Pty, Sydney, Australia.

Art and Money

ix

Fig. 10-9. Leonard Cornwall Mitchell, designs for 1940 New Zealand coinage reverses, 1939, The National Archives, U.K. Fig. 10-10. Percy Metcalfe, after Leonard Cornwall Mitchell, plaster models of 1940 New Zealand coinage reverses, 1939, The National Archives, U.K. Fig. 10-11. Leonard Cornwall Mitchell, New Zealand coinage reverses, 1940. Photo: Mark Stocker.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T

he “Art and Money” symposium was held in the Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, partnered by the Brandbach, Dept. of Marketing, School of Business, University of Otago, on August 30, 2013. The symposium organiser was Peter Stupples, the editor of this volume of selected papers, who was also curator of the exhibition that accompanied the symposium. The symposium was the result of a challenge from Dr Paul Stock, a member of the Programme Committee for the previous symposium, “Art and Food,” that we would not have the courage to discuss the intimate relationship between art and money. It was a challenge we could not resist. The call for papers drew an enthusiastic and varied response, from those who wanted to talk about the depiction of money in images to those who lamented art’s dependency upon money from patrons and government agencies—art proved that it is still a region of public life replete with angry idealists, who do not believe the world pays enough for such a key element of cultural well-being. Thanks go to Professor Leoni Schmidt, Head of the Dunedin School of Art, for her steadfast academic and financial support for the series of annual symposia and to Dr Roel Wijland, the inspired leader of the Brandbach—“a virtual place where a diverse group of talented students make adventurous advertising ideas happen.” Dr Wijland created a website and posters for the symposium and contributed to the cost of advertising. The Otago Community Trust supported the venture for the third year running. The inventive and enthusiastic students of Culinary Arts at Otago Polytechnic, under the leadership of Associate Professor Richard Mitchell, put on a splendid supper event in the Bank of New Zealand’s old building on Princes Street in Dunedin, a building that is itself a work of art, formerly dedicated to the circulation of money. The hanging of the exhibition could not have taken place without the assistance of Clive Humphreys, David Green and, above all Neil Emmerson. Fiona Clarkson handled the media release. Sarah Arnell and Sarah Buchholz organised the food, assisted by Hannah Knight and Amelia Dougherty. IT support was in the capable hands of Ted Whitaker.

xii

Acknowledgements

As usual these public events rely upon the work of a large number of volunteers who willingly give of their time and expertise, a fine example of what Leoni Schmidt in her chapter calls the “gift economy.”

INTRODUCTION PETER STUPPLES

J

acob Burckhardt describes “art” as the “fruit of reflection and careful adaptation” and in this dialectical sense all aspects of the social development of cultures can be characterised as “art.”

As the majority of the Italian states [in the Renaissance] were in their internal constitution works of art…so was their relation to one another and to foreign countries also a work of art.1

This included trade and commerce as well as the manufacture of artworks as more commonly understood. There exists in the general social consciousness, however, a perceived difference between art and commerce, a difference that is generally unarticulated but has something to do with the moral and spiritual values seemingly ascribed to art as opposed to their absence in the grubby world of business—art floats on a celestial cloud with the Gods, soaring above the earthly world of brute trade. The celestial clouds billow with moral rectitude, aspire to an almost sacred aura, bear the souls of artists in apotheosis to their heavenly rewards or fear damnation when there is any sustained talk of coins of earthly realms or gossip of price and market. Yet the truth is quite otherwise. And always has been. Indeed art and money—in the broadest sense of their dyadic interaction—have only too much in common. Both are spheres of social activity that carry symbolic values. A coin is simply a piece of metal, usually an alloy, stamped with signs to give it symbolic meaning, to give it a value, a value that changes with the vicissitudes of its economic life, or, when no longer legal tender, with its life as a collectable. A painting is a piece of canvas, stretched on a frame to make it taut, that is then covered with pigment, brushed with an image, a sign that gives it value, a value that changes with the vicissitudes of its aesthetic and symbolic life, with its commodity value. Art and money come together whenever the values of both are exchanged within a market—in trade between artist and

xiv

Introduction

client/patron, between dealer and customer, between competitors for social authority. Art is capital. Art is an investment. Possessing art of value is a display of economic power, of the difference between the rich and poor, between those who buy labour and those who carry out the wishes of those commanding capital. Art is indeed a measure of status, of authority, of wealth, of abundantly disposable assets, of raw power. As Joy Monteath points out in chapter 2, when the Italian merchant Francesco Datini grew in financial stature from local trader to European magnate, he was no longer satisfied with domestic images on which to focus his religious devotions, but commissioned frescoes and hospitals, paintings and a palazzo. His businesses even traded in art and crafts. He believed that having his portrait, and that of his family, painted onto a wooden panel or canvas as part of a religious composition, would give him a better chance to gain grander intangible merits, to advance the possibility of a secure and comfortable life after death. Burckhardt points out the centrality of the money economy to the citystates of Italy in the Renaissance. Indeed the powerful were obsessed with money and treasure. Money was a measure of their success. Renaissance Italy gave rise to the art of statistics to measure wealth and tax dues, to count populations and the exchange of goods, to put a value on everything both within the states’ accumulated capital but also in the flow of trade. In 1478 we have…a most important and in its way complete view of the commerce and trades of [Florence], some of which may be wholly or partly reckoned among the fine arts—such as those which had to do with damasks and gold and silver embroidery, with woodcarving and intarsia, with the sculpture of arabesques in marble and sandstone, with portraits in wax, and with jewellery and work in gold.2

Studies of Masaccio’s Tribute Money often concentrate on matters of perspective or the depiction of light, leaving the subject without comment, as if the very subject of tax and commerce were inappropriate for an essay on art history. Yet, as we have already noted, taxes and commerce were an essential fact of life in Renaissance Italy. Warring princes and condottieri contested for tribute, customs dues and taxes. Popes and cardinals fought each other over money and the power to gather favours and tribute. Masaccio appears to show Christ giving his blessing to the legitimate taxing of those with capital whilst condemning the exploitation of those without (“children.”) At the time the fresco was being painted (1426-7) Florence was reforming its tax system and it was those “legitimate” taxes that were used by Florentine officials to pay Masaccio and Masolino for

Art and Money

xv

their decoration in the Brancacci Chapel. In chapter 1 Estelle Alma Maré adds a further footnote to this subject. It was during the Renaissance that the master craftsman of an artist’s workshop began to be elevated within the market place by higher prices for his (or less often her) work and within the patron and intellectual classes through the perception of an originality, evidence of a divine gift or “genius,” bringing fame and, more rarely, fortune. The divine gift distinguished the artistic production of the “master” from that of the artisan, from the apprentices in his studio, the thinker-maker from the workman-maker, the originator and leader of a set of visual ideas from those content to repeat images from a pattern book. Yet, however famous or original, the artist rarely, if ever, commanded financial or political capital. The artist was dependent upon those with money, the patron classes, for a livelihood. Money flowed more in the exchange of artworks in the market place or political arena than into the pockets of the artists themselves. However making money through banking and trade was quite different to the earlier brutish wielding of power by feudal landholders and their henchmen. Lending money for a fee (interest) was akin to usury and frowned upon both by the Christian church and Islam. Subterfuges had to be employed, such as getting the dirty work of lending done by nonChristians or non-Muslims, such a Jews, or employing complex systems that appeared no longer to be “usury,” such as the Medicis’ deployment of bills of exchange. However there were other ways to ensure the purity of one’s dirty work and that was by extending generous patronage to the church or mosque and employing artists to carry out this holy work. Genius, the divine gift, enhanced the intellectual value of that patronage, particularly in the Christian world. Money made through the instruments of trade and exchange could be used to engage artists, even those with the divine gift, architects and craftsmen, to raise houses of worship. It is in this sense of the “divinity” of the intellectually most exalted art that the artists themselves, the Raphaels and Michelangelos, began to be thought of as morally divine (even if their mundane existence was far from “holy”) and removed from the vulgar trade that provided the money for their daily bread and the employment of their studio workmen. There was, as it were, a divine obfuscation of the social relationship between art and money. As I point out in the first part of chapter 3, though genius and originality were the signs of the divine gift, there were seldom signs of the money that passed between artist and patrons, such as the church or state, or between dealers and patrons, either secular or divine. It was as if this social lubricant, the essential grease in the system, didn’t exist.

xvi

Introduction

It fell to the Pop artists of the 1960s in the United States to represent capital, to reveal both the system and the “grease.” Andy Warhol shocked the artworld by opening up a discourse on the power of money pulsing through the history of art, the museum, dealer and artists’ studio worlds of America. With Hefferton, Dowd and Lichtenstein, Warhol celebrated money as a visual symbol. As Dowd remarked: Crammed into each bill is a whole array of impressive letters, numbers, and symbols. Indeed it’s a document of “signs” to guide the seeker to enduring faith in the system. What could be more persuasive or compelling than a document with the carefully selected contents: well chosen words supported by compelling pictures—[a] fun house of symbols, weighty symbols.3

It was both the system and the symbols it had developed over time that fascinated Pop artists: if in the Renaissance there was a need to highlight the moral value of the divine gift, to disguise the rude fact of art as part of a financial system, then the iconoclastic power of Pop was turned on the subject to reveal precisely that close bond. Moreover it was now possible to explore that system, through a long and complex history of symbols, through the use of decorated coins and carefully designed bills of exchange, that had once meant measuring the value of a product with a quantity of metal, but now, by the 1960s, through the proxies of cheap metal-like coins and paper that floated in realms of inflationary and deflationary values, like artworks themselves. It is these realistic fictions, uncovered by Pop art, that have become more fantastic in the contemporary world, that are examined in three further chapters of this book. Rebecca Hamid (chapter 7) is an art dealer who experienced the Wild West of the Neoliberal world of High Art both in an attempt to “brand,” to enhance the commercial value of her own gallery, and to promote the careers of two of her current stable of artists. She emphasises the financial divisions that exist within artworlds,4 each a social, economic and political network linked to particular products. The less prestigious division, or what Terry Smith in his taxonomy of contemporary art calls a “current,” 5 is the local scene—provincial art, parochial, conservative, reassuring, undemanding, competent, cheap, appealing to the masses, with a short product life, more a backwater than a current: the national current flows within a mainstream of national history of art and culture, more radical, appealing to the middle class or aspiring intellectuals, affordable, with a place in the history of the local culture, and granted some degree of longevity: the strongest current is that of the global culture world of

Art and Money

xvii

“spectacular” art, flowing in the fast currents of the international superrich, a seeming avant-garde, very expensive, made by “branded” artists and their teams of assistants, making work too large for standard domestic consumption or smaller galleries, more suitable for mighty mansions and open air display, with a place in the event-driven culture of fashion and celebrity, seldom aspiring to any tangible intellectual value, a megaDisneyland of art, managed by branded dealers at a few select sites of international significance, its place uncertain in the cultural future. Of course this crude division, in reality, is more complex and nuanced by Rebecca Hamid, but this frame conveys the grim reality of the international artworld for artists and dealers. It is a reality that is not new, that has always existed, if not in quite the gaudy vulgarity of the élite marketplace of tax-haven mega-wealth. Art practitioners and traders the world over and throughout history have always been in competition with one another: cultural circumstances dictating who will be favoured and who ignored, the grease lubricating the careers of some and its lack inhibiting the development of others. Artworlds are competitive, like all aspects of life. It is just that, in our world of instant communication, the communication of all and every intimate detail of trade and taste, it is so much more in your face and on the pages of the tabloids than in the slower and more restricted world of communications of the European Renaissance or of the diminishing number of ateliers in the rest of the world. Shocked by her experience and that of her artists, Hamid goes on to posit an alternative, a subversive world of counter art, an alternative to the gross power, the spectacle and aesthetic vulgarity of the world of the superrich. This subversive world Terry Smith locates in the third or local “current,” but it more properly lies in the ruffled surface of the mainstream occasioned by passing wind gusts. Yet that counter action is replete with ironies: there is always the danger (?) that it may appeal to the superrich gallery and collector world, there to be consumed, ingested, to be spat out, reinvented as “spectacular avant-garde” and thus constrained by the very target of its attack, rendered impotent to subvert, artists losing control over the direction and momentum of their agency: there is also the more frequently experienced danger that it will be ignored, die in the frame, as it were, denied the attention it needs to be subversive in any effective way. The counteraction, in any case, will not receive the attention of the local or national artworlds, too caught up in their slipstreams, in the gossip of their own private agendas. So has subversion a chance? History doesn’t favour losers. Despite wishful thinking, such as Gene Ray’s models of resistance to global capital,6 money and power tend to trickle up and never down!

xviii

Introduction

Marx was right about cause and effect but his “beautifully failed project”7 had no practical strategy to solve the “problems” for those trying to subvert the new High Art world. In chapter 4 Laura Fisher traces the role of capitalism in the rise of Australian Aboriginal art from its national cultural obscurity before the 1980s to its current effulgence, outdazzling white Australian art in the global spectacle. What began as a government subvention to revive, economically and culturally, a people disenfranchised and marginalised through aggressive colonisation, became a multimillion dollar business in the hands of dealers with an eye to a marketable product, that created its own megastars exhibited around the world, their work selling for previously undreamed of sums. This is not to gainsay the very high standard of aesthetic sentiment attaching itself to the work of the megastars, but simply reinforces the very “problems” (if such they are) facing artists and their work from any culture—from Raphael to Kngwarreye—where “artistic innovations and unique poetic and conceptual content” become commercial commodities traded by dealers less concerned about aesthetic matters than with the money that can be made. “Money, as both a galvanising and destabilising force,” Fisher points out with a convincing degree of evidence, “has been fundamentally constitutive of Aboriginal art-making practices.” Despite the largely unarticulated original intentions, Australian Aboriginal art has not been free, almost from its re-emergence after decades of neglect, from the world of commerce, to reacquire within the Aboriginal world the indigenous aura it once possessed. Yet it would be foolish to dream that cultures can be “reinvented” to live a life outside of the commercial and political worlds of their natural existence. However much white Australia might want Reconciliation it cannot control the subsequent social momentum of a cultural revolution it sought to promote. White Australians whipped Aboriginals to the margins of colonial society and cannot expect them to return to the world as passive museum specimens. The experience of colonisation has made Aboriginals more savvy. Like the rest of us, they have to survive in the world as it is and not as it exists in the minds of well-meaning romantics. The art of the now has to make its way in the culture, political and economic, of the now. Aboriginals have been emancipated into capitalism. For many this may not seem like redemption, but it can be made to yield a living and return a degree of dignity. Fisher deconstructs the complexities of the Australian Aboriginal artworlds. She discusses “the widely voiced hope that the Aboriginal art trade will improve Aboriginal people’s economic status, the degree to which the marked disparity between ‘white’ wealth and ‘black’ poverty

Art and Money

xix

has been a focus of attention in critical engagements with Aboriginal art, the conviction that processes of commodification degrade Aboriginal culture and art, and the spectacularisation of the Aboriginal art market boom,” and sheds “some light on the interplay of utopian and dystopian ideas that have informed all of these formulations of Aboriginal art’s relationship with money.” In chapter 5 Max Haiven, following Fredric Jameson, claims that capitalism is not simply commerce, “the ebb and flow of commodities and the exploitation of labour,” but creates a social “totality.” “Its economic components rely, ultimately, on political choices; these political choices in turn rely on a set of cultural meanings; these cultural meanings in turn rely on aesthetic conventions; and these conventions in turn rely on economic fundamentals” and that “all these dimensions are interconnected and interreliant, like a proverbial house of cards.” 8 The worlds of the Italian Renaissance and Aboriginal painting are part of political and economic systems, where there is a constant dialectical contestation of power, where nothing is static and forever, but is constantly being redefined and newly, but only temporarily, “understood.” Within these historical totalities what is it to “represent?” Postmodern art is particularly concerned with this “crisis” of representation. Not only is this a case of the visual representation of things, but more significantly for us now the representation of ideas, particularly the idea of representation itself in all its many facets. Who is representing what and how and for what purpose? Art is an illusion, but so too, as I argue in the chapter on Pop art, and echoing Haiven, is the world of finance, of money, in which the commodity “art” is irremediably embroiled. The price of high-end global art often bears little relationship to its cultural value, that intangible “something” to which art seems to relate. Money, Haiven claims, seems to mismeasure, to misrepresent everything, including art. Perhaps this depends on what is being measured or represented. Certainly not “human life and happiness.” Money decidedly measures and represents accumulation, but, perhaps in some bizarre way, money also measures accurately things like hubris, the psychological imbalance of power, irresponsible action rather than reflection, and often in truly tragicomic ways. After all both Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons mock the capital that feeds them, yet the moneyed only ask for more abuse, as if they were suffering from some unconscious masochism of wealth. Max Haiven, again following Jameson, repeatedly emphasises the fact that the sublime interdependency of the capitalist totality is beyond the representational scope of art except in part, such as my suggested masochism of wealth. Like Hamid he point to strategies available to the

xx

Introduction

worlds of art in the economic circumstances in which we find ourselves— firstly to give capitalism what it craves, like Hirst and Koons, or secondly “to use art to comment on and critique money’s social and political power.” Of course giving capitalism what it wants and critiquing the world of Mammon are often combined in a single artwork, such as many of the images of Andy Warhol, sometimes unwittingly, but often with tongue in cheek, salivating for the wealth such a critique will bring. Haiven castigates such artists: “the transformation of art into a speculative commodity presided over by a cadre of self-aware art superstars who see themselves not merely as ‘brands,’ but as financial impresarios.” He describes their work as “an alternative asset class,” “merely one element of larger financial portfolios, mobilised to counterbalance the risks and yields of other investments.” Haiven points to a third strategy that “seeks to show that the value of money and the power of art are both the products of human cooperation and creativity,” both, perhaps, not unlike Burckhardt’s “fruits of reflection and adaptation.” Unlike Hamid, Haiven put his faith not so much in subversion as in “art that draws specific attention to the deep affinity of art and money as forms of mediation,” adapting our creative energy both to demonstrate the hold money has over us as well as to question our enslavement to its magic. We try to stand back from the totality of capitalism, mock it, critique both it and our own enslavement, even challenge, in some unspecified way, that totality, without recognising that even this strategy is an essentially passive activity, blind to the need, if indeed need there is, to prepare for a revolution to topple capitalism itself, a concept which is a step too far, even for those who enjoy goading the hold of money and critiquing art’s complicity. In chapter 8 Jewell Homad-Johnson seeks to direct our attention away from the razzamatazz of radical speculation and to return art to its seemingly rightful place in a spiritual world, outside the glare of High Global art or any critique of the capitalist totality. Homad-Johnson advocates a turn to the ideas of Kandinsky and the spiritual in art. Whilst following Hamid and Haiven in her analysis of the current state of the world’s art market and the hegemony of money, Homad-Johnson asks the very pertinent question: “What exactly is anyone paying for when these billions change hands?” Her answer is not Haiven’s “alternative asset class,” but that “buying art offers the opportunity to buy what money can’t buy” (her emphasis). That “what” is indeed one of the most interesting questions in art’s magical history and at the heart of various theories of aesthetics. Homad-Johnson develops her own explanation/theory, that,

Art and Money

xxi

following Lambert Wiesing, “there is in fact a presence in images—a worldly kind of present-ness.” It is the nature of that present-ness that it eludes language. It might, indeed, not be so much a “gift” of the work of art itself as a predisposition in the mind of the viewer, either singly or collectively, that finds a particular form of satisfaction, an inward pleasing gestalt, in some feature or form declared as “present-ness.” For want of any words, this is sometimes referred to as the very humanity, the sense of the “human spirit” in the work of art. For example Homad-Johnson offers the allure of the Mona Lisa, but perhaps it is in a collective sense that this painting, such as offered up by Walter Pater, brings pilgrims to the Louvre, or is this simply slick, or perhaps more generously, unconscious “branding?” It is this want of words for Wiesing’s “present-ness” that suggests, as David Zwirner is reported as saying, that “one of the reasons there’s so much talk about money is that it’s so much easier to talk about than the art.” So difficult is it in fact that Homad-Johnson closes her spirited defence with the example of Kandinsky with which she began and an aphorism from Fritz Lang that, with or without money, “The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart.” It is certainly the heart that is on the sleeve of artist-run initiatives, as a form of opposition to the totalising of capitalism in the artworlds, that motivates the advocacy of Brendan Philip in chapter 9. Here is an example of a practice that tries to keep itself as far away from money as possible: “this refusal of definition and engagement with monetary concerns, however, should not be seen as a denial of something as much as the pursuit of an Other.” It is this Other with which Philip is chiefly concerned. Like Hamid, Haiven and Homad-Johnson, Philip admits the hegemony of global capitalism, and even the impossibility of direct confrontation with it, but finds some consolation in the Temporary Autonomous Zones identified by Peter Lamborn Wilson. “There is still no ‘outside’ of this system [of global capital], only spaces within the margins and stolen moments in the shadows, not where money is resisted but when it can be at best effectively ignored for however short a time…we are able to carve out spaces now and then, here and there, where creative practices can thrive on their own merits.” This a brave stance, standing up for freedom of creativity, with its back to the Wild West of the Neoliberal world of High Art as described by Rebecca Hamid. Philip asks his fellow followers of artist-initiatives “to look around ourselves, figure out what we want to do and to take the responsibility for doing it.” In chapter 6 Leoni Schmidt examines the tensions between the educators/producers of artists and their financial patrons, in particular between contemporary institutions of art education and their funders. In

xxii

Introduction

the distant past art had a central role in societies, in ritual, in celebration, in providing solace and distraction from the harsh necessities of survival, to provide, as Homad-Johnson would put it, spiritual nourishment. Smallscale societies satisfied this need locally, domestically. Only the collectivity could provide the capital to employ labour for the major works of architecture and precious ritual artworks. The artisans were not privileged. They were taught in workshops and died in poverty and without fame. Think of all the legions of Chinese ceramicists who contributed to the few fine wares enjoyed by Emperors and scholar-scribes or the nameless monks at work for a lifetime in the scriptoria. They were “funded,” if that’s not too grand a word, by institutions at a rate considered appropriate to their specific role within the economic scheme of things. Since the Italian Renaissance in the West, and even more so since the emergence of Modernism in the 19th century, as Schmidt points out, artists are trained, at first in the few academies and now in the vastly proliferated number of art schools, to be autonomous creators without a clear social role or set of obligations within established social practices. This creates a tension between those who guard the purse strings on behalf of capitalism and those who ask to be funded to train those who will often be at the forefront of criticism of that very capitalist establishment—both are somewhat confounded and confused, as the discussion on Koons and Damien Hirst above made clear. Yet it is also true, as Schmidt claims, that it is artists—in the broadest sense of the word—who push the boundaries of thought, of conceptualisation, of our examination and assessment of human life on this small planet hurtling through space. We need such people, it is claimed. This role as thinker, observer, of commentator, of critic, even entertainer, can be described as modern artists’ social utility. Yet when they make their claim, their training paid for out of the public purse, society is apt to marginalise their value, even reject them and cast them out like pariahs—unless they learn to play at the capitalist game, as Hamid found out. This chapter raises issues about art training, art practice and social utility, which are far from being resolved in the minds of theorists, in the practice and self-evaluation of artists or by the market place. Given the generally held opinion of the present situation in the worlds of art in the social totality of global capitalism, it is indeed salutary to read the variety of strategies of artists to retain their integrity as autonomous creators, seeking the holy grails of “present-ness,” originality, aura, social utility or simply self-determination. One outstanding example was the quixotic heroism of Kazimir Malevich in 1917-21. Malevich backed the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917-18, the only political event, in the

Art and Money

xxiii

history of capitalism’s triumphal march to hegemony, to seek its replacement by a form of social collectivity. Malevich briefly advocated the destruction of all museums and collections of art in order for human beings to start their visual creativity anew, the visual as enlightened speculation, like Walter Benjamin after 1924 “committing himself wholeheartedly to a revolutionary liquidation of cultural tradition in the name of a democratic future.”9 Malevich’s Suprematism was envisioned as the vanguard of that renewal, where art would no longer act as a mirror to the political, social and economic power of specific cultures, but as the creative think tank of a new, finally enlightened age. Malevich’s ideas make the “strategies” of our own day seem like fiddling whilst true freedom burns. 10 Yet of course Suprematism and Malevich failed, as Bolshevism failed, within four years of October 1917. The forces ranged against them, both within and without the new Russia, both on the socalled Left and the Right of the political spectrum, were too strong. And not only that, it may be argued, human nature had so accustomed itself to both money and the conventions of the bourgeoisie, that Malevich’s ideas were treated as a form of madness. An extreme neo-liberalism was eventually victorious in the post-Soviet Russian Federation to which art has played the pander, as it had done to “Communism” in the past. As if to bring art history back, from the dizzy heights of theoretical speculation and the splenetic diabolism of global capitalism, to the quieter realm of a more traditional close documentation, evidence, upon which, after all, all speculation must have its foundation, Mark Stocker, in chapter 10, explores the relationship between coinage and national identity in New Zealand. Stocker turns his spotlight on the very objecthood of coinage, not with the mockery of Dowd, Hefferton and Lichtenstein, nor the celebratory bravado of Warhol, but in the way decisions about images on coins charted the way a nation instantiated itself, bore witness to its selfhood, particularly when emerging from the womb of empire into the self-determination of “dominion.” It is salutary in the 21st century to be reminded how recent such history is and how transient the moments of such self-consciousness are, indeed to see art and design as within the flow of time, subject to the constancies of change, so that what seems set for ever, like Empire, is but a moment in a never ending process. Even coinage itself, with its own long history, will soon seem uniquely quaint and collectable, as money becomes a thing of swipes and internet banking. Coinage as object has always been a commodity of exchange, but the validity of the face value is soon changed to the market value of the collectable when demonetised and withdrawn from circulation to become heritage. As numismatic catalogues make clear, coins are also artworks,

xxiv

Introduction

their designers often well-known artists. The price put on a coin that is no longer in legal tender depends not only upon rarity value but also aesthetic merit. These sentiments combine in the market place such that a Tudor gold sovereign of the reign of Henry VIII will cost you over £120,000! Stocker’s chapter sidesteps the vulgar issues that preoccupy the minds of other contributors to examine in some detail the issue of the self-awareness of a nation through its freedom to design and mint its own currency. New Zealand was the last of the British dominions to do so, from 1933, with British coins no longer legal tender from 1935. Despite this freedom the designs for the first New Zealand coins were commissioned from two British artists—Kruger Gray, who designed coins for a whole swathe of colonies and dependencies in the Empire, and Percy Metcalfe. Both used books depicting the flora and fauna of New Zealand, without any first-hand experience of the former colony. It was not until 1940 that New Zealandbased designers, nearly all of whom had their initial training in Great Britain, had a hand in the production of New Zealand money. Artists making money: whoever said the two concepts were antithetical!

Notes 1. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, 1st publ. 1860 (London: Penguin Books, 1990) 73. 2. Burckhardt:1990, 69. 3. Excerpt from Robert Dowd: Pop Art Money, a catalogue essay by Michael Zakian for the Weisman Museum exhibition, 2009. (accessed 7 November 2014). 4. The term “artworld” was first elaborated in philosophical terms by Arthur Danto—“The Art World,” The Journal of Philosophy, 61:19 (1964) and George Dickie—Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), and in sociological terms, by Howard Becker—Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 5. Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 6. Such as Gene Ray, “Another (Art) World is Possible: Theorising Oppositional Convergence,” Third Text, 18:6 (2004) 565-72 7. See Max Haiven, 59 in this book. 8. Ibid. 9. Adam Kirsch, “The Redemption of Walter Benjamin,” New York Review of Books, 10 July 2014, 36. 10. For a sample of Malevich’s extreme position see chapter 5, “The End of Painting: From White Suprematism to ‘Blank Canvas,’” in Aleksandra Shatskikh’s Black Square: Malevich and The Origin of Suprematism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012) 251-71.

Art and Money

xxv

References Becker, Howard, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, 1st publ. 1860 (London: Penguin Books, 1990). Danto, Arthur, “The Art World,” The Journal of Philosophy, 61:19 (1964). Dickie, George, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974). Kirsch, Adam, “The Redemption of Walter Benjamin,” New York Review of Books, 10 July 2014. Ray, Gene, “Another (Art) World is Possible: Theorising Oppositional Convergence,” Third Text, 18:6 (2004). Shatskikh, Aleksandra, Black Square: Malevich and The Origin of Suprematism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012). Smith, Terry, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Zakian, Michael, catalogue essay for the Weisman Museum exhibition Robert Dowd: Pop Art Money, 2009.

CHAPTER ONE THE INVISIBLE COIN IN MASACCIO’S TRIBUTE MONEY ESTELLE ALMA MARÉ

T

omasso Cassai, called Masaccio (1401-28), was one of the great fresco painters of the early Italian Renaissance. He was a pupil of Marriotto di Christofano (ca. 1395-1457) in Florence, where he befriended other artists, such as Masolino da Panicale (ca. 1383- ca.1447)1 with whom he collaborated, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) and the sculptor Donato Donatello (ca. 1386-1466). In the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, Masaccio painted a cycle of Biblical events, among which the panel referred to as the Tribute Money (1426-7) is in a section dedicated to Peter, Jesus’s closest disciple.2

Fig. 1-1. Masaccio, Payment of the Tribute Money, Capella Brancacci, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, 1426-7, fresco, 247 x 597 cm.

2

Chapter One

Formally this fresco is lauded for its innovative perspectival composition, masterful illusionism based on the imitation of natural forms, the three-dimensionality of the figures, the artist’s knowledge of antique figural composition and his revival of a traditional narrative genre.3 The theme of the Tribute Money refers to the arrival of Jesus and his disciples during the time of the Passover in Capernaum at Peter’s home, which is depicted behind the figures to the right of the picture. According to The Gospel According to Matthew (17:27), when accosted by the tax collector, who was not a Roman, but a Jew representing the priestly order, for His and Peter’s payment of the Jewish temple tax, Jesus understood that the tax collector knew that He was not a rabbi and therefore not exempt from the tax; also Peter was older than the other disciples and therefore eligible for payment. Consequently Jesus instructs Peter, who was a fisherman, as follows: But so that we may not cause offence, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a fourdrachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours. (New International Version of the Bible)

In the picture different events involving the same persons take place in a uniform pictorial space. In this kind of composition, which was popular in medieval art, the narrative device is referred to as “continuous action,”4 “continuous narrative,” or depictions of “simultaneous succession,” since various phases of an event series are presented simultaneously within a single spatial setting. Accordingly, in the Tribute Money the figure of Peter is shown three times in different attitudes in the same pictorial space. He is present in the central group, confronted by the back-turned tax collector; at the left he crouches in the act of catching a fish, and to the right of the picture he hands the coin retrieved from the fish’s mouth to the tax collector. With this gesture Peter’s third and the tax collector’s second appearance concludes the narrative.

Extra-pictorial references The tribute money theme of Masaccio’s fresco may have struck a chord with contemporary Florentines, not only as a didactic religious picture, but also as a veiled reference to the current controversy in their city concerning the proposed tax to cover the cost of their lost battle against Milan during the years 1422-7.5 Citizens who possessed property to the value of one hundred florins had to pay half a florin as a point-five percentage tax, considered to be an arbitrary imposition that evoked a

The Invisible Coin in Masaccio’s Tribute Money

3

furious reaction. The matter was finally settled in 1427 with the institution of an official tax register that allowed for a fairer system of taxation in the city. Masaccio, the young Florentine painter, reacted to the proposed tax by choosing to represent a New Testament event that referred to taxation, but had never before been depicted in art. Modern viewers may, however, find the parallel between the Florentine resistance against the imposition of a new tax and the demand of payment from Jesus and Peter rather strained. From Matthew 17:24 one gathers that the tax collector was suspicious that Jesus might evade payment of the obligatory tax, since Jesus was not an ordained rabbi and consequently not exempt from the temple tax. In order not to offend the religious authorities that tried to catch Him taking liberties with the law, Jesus was willing to pay up. For that purpose he worked a miracle by creating the four-drachma coin that Peter retrieved from the fish’s mouth. In order to establish what kind of coin Peter hands to the tax collector, but that remains invisible in Masaccio’s depiction, references to historical sources are necessary.

The temple tax and coinage appropriate for payment In the wilderness, during the Exodus from Egypt, Moses, the leader of the Jewish tribe, established that “Each one who crosses over to those already counted is to give half a shekel, according to the sanctuary shekel, which weighs twenty gerahs. This half a shekel is an offering to the LORD” (Exodus 30:11-16). A “gerah” is an ancient Hebrew unit of weight and currency, equivalent to one-twentieth of a shekel, weighing 0.568 grammes. When the temple in Jerusalem, also referred to as Herod’s temple, was inaugurated, temple tax was imposed to provide for its maintenance, daily sacrifices, and expenses for oil, priestly robes, fuel, incense, water, and so on. Every male over the age of twenty was required to give half a shekel, a coin of pure silver that weighed a half-ounce. In the currency of that time it was worth about two drachma, the equivalent of two days’ wages. The shekel of Tyre was a new coin, renowned throughout the ancient world for the quality of its silver, and as such became the standard currency for international transactions. This coin continued to bear the Egyptian eagle on reverse when the portrait face was changed to that of Tyre’s supreme god, Bal-Melkart (or Melquarth), who was considered by the Greeks and Romans to be Hercules. Notwithstanding its pagan iconography this shekel was the accepted coin for payment of the temple

4

Chapter One

tax and the thirty silver coins that Judas received as payment for betraying Jesus (Matthew 26:14-16) may also have been shekels. No drachma coin existed at the time of Jesus. Templegoers paid the tribute money with a stater, the equivalent of four drachma or two shekels, required for two persons. The stater was a Greek or Tyrian coin that could also be used to pay the temple tax for two persons. It was minted at Antioch, at Caesarea in Cappadocia, and in Tyre. By Jesus’s time toll booths were set up in places outside Jerusalem a month before Passover, that is from the fifteenth of March, to pre-empt payment of the required tax. According to this arrangement the tax could be paid in advance in various towns, but after a certain date it had to be paid at the temple. Therefore, it may have been that upon entering Capernaum Jesus and his disciples came to such a tollbooth, a detail omitted in Masaccio’s depiction. The setting of the Tribute Money is outside Peter’s house where the tax collector seems to operate without an official venue.

Money changers and the temple in Jerusalem In Jesus’s time all kinds of currencies were in use, all of them more or less equally valid for usual business purposes in Palestine. However, Roman tax had to be paid in Roman currency and the temple tax had to be paid in Jewish currency.6 At Passover as many as a million pilgrims visited the temple in Jerusalem, most of whom had to convert the currency they carried to pay for offerings. To facilitate the conversion of unacceptable currency carried by visitors from all over the Roman Empire to appropriate coins accepted by temple authorities, money changers installed their banking tables in the temple’s Court of the Gentiles. These unscrupulous dealers charged a hefty fee for their service and made an unseemly profit. Their unethical practice had become so pernicious that on the occasion of a temple visit during his early ministry, as well as a second time after that, Jesus is said to have overturned their tables (Mark 11:15-17; Matthew 21:12-13). Jesus accused the usurers of turning the “house of prayer” into a marketplace and violently drove them out. The temple had indeed, in some sense, become the Jewish national bank as well as a public treasury containing vast stores of private wealth.

The Invisible Coin in Masaccio’s Tribute Money

5

Masaccio’s artistic expression For information about the historical event depicted in the Tribute Money Masaccio’s only source was presumably the Bible. He composed the painting according to the requirements of an historia following the criteria for narrative painting laid down by Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) in his De pictura (published in 1435). The historia, as the word implies, represents history painting, such as the narrative about the claim of the tax collector that Jesus and Peter should pay a prescribed fee owing to the temple treasury. Historia painting during the Italian Quattrocento is also exemplary in the application of perspective whereby the represented figures are situated in a rationalised space, and visual rhetoric whereby their gestures express the meaning of their actions. Jesus’s command to Peter to catch a fish is expressed vividly, evoking the rhetorical device of energeia, by pointing in the direction of the river, a gesture that is echoed by Peter in response. Thus Masaccio, who was in the advance guard of early Renaissance painters, accomplished a self-referential painting in the Tribute Money. It is a painting exemplifying the criteria of the historia, affording the viewer an imaginative interpretation of a long-past event, but transposing it into his own time and cultural experience. One may conclude that even if Masaccio’s knowledge of the historical facts of Jesus’s time was lacking and he dressed the represented figures in a classical Greek fashion, but with Franciscan bare feet,7 his message to us, across the centuries, is that art is not a document of reality, but expresses its own criteria in a specific context.

Notes 1. See Law Bradley Watkins, “The Peter Cycle: Its Meaning,” The Brancacci Chapel Frescoes: Meaning and Use (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Xerox University Microfilms, 1976) 79-121. 2. For information about Mariotto di Christoforo, see Anna Maria Bernacchioni, , accessed 3 May 2014. 3. See Joseph Polzer, “Masaccio and the Late Antique,” The Art Bulletin 53 (1, March, 1971) 36-40. 4. Warman Welliwer, “Narrative Method and Narrative Form in Masaccio’s Tribute Money,” Art Quarterly, new series 1(1) (1977) 43ff. 5. Christian Detmold (trans.), The Historical, Political and Diplomatic Writings of Niccolo Machiavelli (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1882). 6. For a discussion of money and taxation in the time of Jesus, see James Buchan, “Thirty Pieces of Silver,” in Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money

6

Chapter One

(London: Picador, 1997) 36-49, and David Hendin, “Jesus and Numismatics: The Importance of Coins in Reconstructing Jesus and His World,” in James H. Charlesworth with Brian Rhea (eds.), Jesus Research: New Methodologies and Perceptions (Grand Rapids, Michigan and Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014) 190-7. 7. Livio Pestelli, “Apostolic Bare Feet in Masaccio’s Tribute Money: Early Christian and Medieval Sources,” Notes in the History of Art, 26:1 (Fall 2006) 514.

References Bernacchioni, Anna Maria, . Buchan, James, “Thirty Pieces of Silver,” in Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money (London: Picador, 1997). Detmold, Christian, The Historical, Political and Diplomatic Writings of Niccolo Machiavelli (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1882). Hendin, David, “Jesus and Numismatics: The Importance of Coins in Reconstructing Jesus and His World,” in James H. Charlesworth with Brian Rhea (eds.), Jesus Research: New Methodologies and Perceptions (Grand Rapids, Michigan and Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014). Pestelli, Livio, “Apostolic Bare Feet in Masaccio’s Tribute Money: Early Christian and Medieval Sources,” Notes in the History of Art, 26:1 (Fall 2006). Polzer, Joseph, “Masaccio and the Late Antique,” The Art Bulletin, 53 (1, March, 1971). Watkins, Law Bradley, “The Peter Cycle: Its Meaning,” The Brancacci Chapel Frescoes: Meaning and Use (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Xerox University Microfilms, 1976). Welliwer, Warman, “Narrative Method and Narrative Form in Masaccio’s Tribute Money,” Art Quarterly, new series 1(1) (1977) 43ff.

CHAPTER TWO FRANCESCO DI MARCO DATINI OF PRATO: MEDIEVAL MERCHANT, PATRON OF THE ARTS, PHILANTHROPIST JOY MONTEATH

Fig. 2-1. Statue to Francesco di Marco Datini, Piazza del Comune, Prato. Photo: Joy Monteath.

8

Chapter Two

I

n 1870, bags of ledgers, account books, deeds of partnership, insurance policies, bills of lading and exchange, cheques and one hundred and forty thousand letters, both of a private and business nature, were discovered in a dusty recess under the stairs of a large medieval house in Prato, near Florence in Italy. Both house and documents belonged to Francesco Datini, a 14th century Italian merchant. Today they are transcribed, catalogued and kept in the Archivio di Stato di Prato, Datini’s former home.

Datini’s early life Prato, sited on the river Bisenzio, had been an important centre for the Italian textile industry, and in particular of woollen cloth, since the 11th century. It was here that Francesco was born about 1335 to Marco di Datini, a small time merchant and taverner, and his wife Monna Vermiglia. His parents and two siblings died in the Great Plague of 1348, leaving Francesco and his younger brother Stephano to be cared for by a kind woman, Monna Piera, and their guardian and tutor Piero Giunta. About the age of thirteen he was apprenticed to a Florentine merchant. In the workshops he listened and learned from Tuscan traders recently returned from Avignon in the south of France. Two years later he saved a little money and set off to Avignon where he was to begin his career in commerce that would span over fifty years.

Datini’s years in Avignon and the making of a wealthy merchant Avignon was a city of great opportunities for merchants at the beginning of the 14th century. Situated on the river Rhône, it was one of the important trading posts between the north and south of Europe. From 1301 until 1378, Avignon was home to seven French popes and their courts. Once a small provincial capital, it was now bursting at the seams, a city of extremes of wealth, poverty and corruption. Petrarch lived there for several years. He was a vociferous critic of the city describing Avignon as the Babylon of the West—full of “debauchery, licentious banquets, liars, criminals and foul sloth!” No wonder there was a thriving market for goods and services including luxury items for the Church and the newly rich. Onto a good thing, Tuscan traders, skilled artisans, bankers and artists set up their fondachi (warehouses), workshops, studios and banks. It was to this busy and exciting world that the young Datini arrived about 1350

Francesco di Marco Datini of Prato

9

to spend the next thirty three years of his life as a merchant and banker. Little is known of his first years in Avignon but it is thought that he worked as an employee and message boy for other merchants. By 1361 he was established as a merchant with companies and partners dealing chiefly in armour, accessories for making arms and leather goods. The Hundred Years War was in full swing with many countries joining sides so that a steady market was guaranteed. He took on two partners from Tuscany and continued diversifying his range of goods which eventually included spices, dyes, glass, rice, majolica, honey, oil, wine, wheat, and silk, woollen, linen, fustian cloths and coffers. As a money changer or banker he was also able to deal as a sideline in precious stones and metals and objects of art, for religious and secular use.

The trading currency used by Datini The Florentine gold florin, with the lily of Florence on one side and John the Baptist on the other, was used both in Italy and abroad. It contained a precise amount of gold and its value fluctuated according to the price of gold on the market. Other European countries minted a similar coin further complicating international financial transactions.

Transportation of goods Getting the imports and exports to their destinations was a lengthy, costly and hazardous business which could reduce profit margins significantly. For overland transport, precious objects were wrapped in straw, placed in panniers and carried by mules. Armed escorts often accompanied the merchants to avoid raids from brigands. For sea transportation, goods were packed into bales and loaded into chartered carracks, and Venetian and Genoese galleys. Weather conditions and marauding pirates made voyages hazardous, so Datini formed his own insurance business and performed underwriting for other merchants. Added to the burdens of the merchant were taxes, toll duties and market uncertainty.

The slave trade Outbreaks of the plague caused labour shortages, so Datini became involved in the slave trade. Importation of slaves was officially authorized in Florence providing they were infidels and not Christians. They arrived with the other goods on Venetian and Genoese galleys from Spain, Africa,

10

Chapter Two

the Balkans and the shores of the Black Sea. Many were only children, predominantly female, sold by their parents for food, or kidnapped by raiders or sailors. As chattels in the homes of wealthy men, their families and priests, they worked alongside the other servants.

The Datini Empire at its largest in 1399 Datini’s companies numbered eleven plus a joint venture in the sale of fine silk cloth. He is thought to be the first to use the system of multiple companies with a Head Director and partners for each. The companies were based in Catalonia (3), Florence (3), Avignon (1), Pisa (1), Prato (2) and Genoa (1). His trade routes stretched from England, Flanders and Germany to the Black Sea, North Africa and throughout the Mediterranean.

Trading and accounting practises Datini used the most up-to-date forms of trading and accounting practises of the times. Transactions using “the double entry” system were entered into ledgers headed “In the Name of God and for Profit.” He used invoices, lading bills, promissory notes and bills of exchange (the forerunners of cheques) which avoided carrying large amounts of cash. Datini, always the workaholic, was an obsessive writer and record keeper. Often working late into the night, he corresponded with his companies and his household, worrying about things going wrong, chiding and bullying and demanding instant answers. He also insisted that every piece of documentation both of a private and commercial nature be retained.

Datini marries By the age of thirty-five Datini was a rich man who enjoyed life in Avignon to the full. His pious friend Ser Lapo Mazzei described him as “a man who has known all the pleasures of the body, a man who kept women and lived only on partridges, adoring art and money and forgetting his Creator and himself.” In 1376, perhaps because his foster mother and friends urged him to marry and to return to Prato, the forty-year-old Datini married sixteenyear-old Margherita Bandini. A Florentine of minor nobility, she lived in Avignon with her mother and two sisters. Although she had no dowry, she

Francesco di Marco Datini of Prato

11

brought him youth, good looks and breeding. The perfect medieval trophy wife! The wedding was held at Carnivale before Lent and Datini, in keeping with his status, spared no expense. After many delays and false promises to his foster mother he finally returned to Prato six years later in 1382. In reality this was a decision forced upon him by the excommunication of the state of the Florentine Republic and by the Papal Court’s abandonment of Avignon which resulted in the commercial and financial decline of that city.

Datini in Prato and Florence 1382-1410 Prior to his return Datini purchased three properties in Prato during business trips to Florence. Naturally he wanted a house which reflected his wealth and social standing. Over the next ten years, under his close supervision of the finest detail and his demands for perfection, these properties were slowly developed into his grand house which still stands, albeit much changed, today. The new house boasted two stone chimneys, bathrooms and two kitchens, windows covered in oiled linen, a wine cellar, bread ovens, a large hall for receiving guests and dining, and a medieval version of a steam sauna with a glass window. A garden, orchard and a fondaco with an office completed the complex. The servants and slaves slept where they could, in the family’s bedrooms, on the stairs or in the kitchens. Not content with supervising his palazzo, he bought land on the hills above Prato on which he established a farm and built a luxurious villa “Il Palco.” Because he wanted to be nearer the centre of trade in Florence, Datini bought a house there too, where he lived until the last ten years of his life, leaving Margherita in charge at Prato, a role she did not always enjoy, complaining that she felt like a hotel keeper looking after the important guests invited by Datini while running the family home which was often full of the extended family. He was always writing to her telling her what to do and bossing her about. Illiterate, she initially used a scrivener, but with the help of their good friend Ser Lapo Mazzei, she learned to read and write. Their letters now form an important archive of Italian day-today domestic life in the 14th century. Sadly the couple had no children of their own which lead to tensions and quarrels. But when Datini fathered a girl, Ginevra, by their slave Lucia, Margherita eventually overcame her resentment. They formally adopted Ginevra when she was six and loved her as their own.

12

Chapter Two

New companies Once established in Prato, Datini was enrolled in the L’Arte Della Lana, the Wool Guild, and L’Arte Della Tinta, the Dyers’ Guild. This enabled him to establish two companies in Prato, one to import wool from Provence, Spain and Flanders, with the finest wool coming from the great abbey lands of England and the Cotswolds. The second company was to “work the cloth.” Raw materials for dyes came from Spain, France and Germany through his company in Pisa. Black Sea alum, the essential mordant for fixing dyes, arrived through his company in Genoa. In Florence he opened a mercer’s shop selling cloths of various sorts. Later he established two more companies and a bank (1392). In order to trade in a greater variety of goods, he joined the L’Arte della Seta, the guild of the silk merchants, and L’Arte di Calimala, the guild of the cloth finishers. More branches opened in Genoa (1392), Spain and Balearic Islands (1393 and 1394) and the company in Avignon continued to thrive. Unlike other Tuscan traders he diversified in many types of imports and exports. He was wise enough not to meddle in politics or the Church, unlike some of the other great trading families of the time.

Datini and art of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries Throughout his life, Datini involved himself in the late medieval and then the Early Renaissance evolution of art. This not only included trade in religious and luxury items, but the commissioning and overseeing the decoration of his palazzo, the commissioning of art and sacred objects for churches in Prato and Florence, and at the end of his life, through philanthropic activities. It was a complex relationship. His strong personality influenced not only his business and family life but also his negotiations with artists and their work, whether it be in their studios, or in his home. Michele Cassandro1 writes that Datini has been variously described by scholars over the years as “a man of great business ability, combined with considerable human qualities, and a certain moral and civic rigour despite evident defects some of a serious nature...” He goes on to say that, on the other hand, researchers and writers describe him “[as] reviled for his meanness and greed, morally compromised, with a tendency to tax evasion, a certain ethical and religious ambiguity and hypocrisy and that he showed a lack of respect and concern for others.” Suspicious, bad

Francesco di Marco Datini of Prato

13

tempered and paranoid in his dealings with friends, family and workers are other interpretations. Where the truth lies may still be debated, but these comments may help clarify his attitudes and actions.

The trade of religious and secular items As a money changer or banker, initially in Avignon, Datini was able to trade in precious stones and metals. He expanded his exports and imports of luxury items including crucifixes, paintings, richly embroidered cloths for priests’ vestments, paternoster beads from England for the Church. And for the newly wealthy middle classes, French enamels, objects made from gold and silver and maiolica (ceramics from Spain.) The techniques of producing this lustreware had spread from eastern countries, such as Persia, to firstly Malaga then Valencia. From about 1393 Datini imported not only “made to order” highly decorated and much coveted ceramic plates and bowls, often emblazoned with the family crests of the rich and noble families (and for himself), but also a middle range which was sold from the haberdashers’ shops in the towns. From Florence came wooden chests or cassone. Those painted with wedding scenes and designed to hold brides’ dowries were especially popular. Works of art for private devotional use were manufactured in a variety of shapes and sizes, materials and quality. These were seen as necessary household objects and as a display of social respectability. Beauty at that time was understood in terms of the power to evoke emotions. Tabernacles of the Virgin and Child placed in bedrooms were used to invoke piety especially in women and girls. Many were of these devotional works were of indifferent artistic merit and mass produced. Their value depended on size and the use of costly materials, whereas the skill of the artist was considered to be of lesser value. By the beginning of the 15th century religious bas-reliefs had become part of the decor of Florentine homes. Reliefs for the wealthier homes were of marble or bronze. Poorer homes were decorated with reliefs carved in wood or modelled in plaster or terracotta which were then gilded or painted. Clear instructions as to their content and the number required was given to the workshops by the merchants and little was left to the artists’ creative imagination. Hinged portable altars depicting the crucifixion with accompanying saints were valued in homes and by travellers alike. From the Datini records, the price of works of art appears to have risen significantly during his years of trading. The more expensive works were

14

Chapter Two

ordered specifically and paid for in advance. Thus the merchants were guaranteed a good profit. Datini greatly prospered in his sales of religious and secular items, not only in his years in Avignon but after his return to Italy.

Datini and the artists Florentine artists and one from Prato were employed by Datini to work not only on his house but also on his commissions in churches. As was the custom, the client paid for the materials and provided board and lodging for the workers. Records show that Datini, always worried about fraud, was careful to source raw materials through his trading contacts at the best price, the most expensive being gold, and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. The skill of the artists whose guild was incorporated into the Doctors and Apothecaries’ Guild included what we would call today painters and decorators. No hard and fast line divided the craftsman from the artist. A dipintore (or painter) might agree to painting frescoes, an altarpiece, or decorate walls, chests or earthenware bowls. Payment was by the day or according to the size of the job. The painter of figures was the highest paid and was recompensed for each individual item. Datini was a volatile and difficult employer. There is evidence of bitter quarrels and disputes, regarding payment of contracts and work done. In 1392 three artists, including Niccolò Gerini, walked off the job and went unpaid for months until they took their case to the court of their Guild. Only after the intervention of Datini’s notary, were they paid and accepted less than what was considered their due.

The decoration of the Palazzo Befitting a man of his status, Datini required the decoration of his home not only to reflect his role as a patriarch, his wealth, status and piety, but also to charm and impress his important visitors. There is no doubt that he was influenced by his years in France, by the Florentine style of house decoration and an awareness of the growing trend towards the depiction of ideas of Humanism espoused at the end of the 14th century and into the early years of the 15th Renaissance. In the courtyard and loggia Niccolò Gerini painted a frescoes of the virtues (prudence, fortitude, justice and temperance), two frescoes of the sciences (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics) and the Christian virtues (faith, hope and charity.) In the entranceway to the house, he painted a large image of St Christopher as

Francesco di Marco Datini of Prato

15

the protector of the house, alongside Tomasso del Mazza’s Christ in the Act of Blessing. Wall paintings, including the charming hunting scenes in “the room with one bed” on the ground floor, were carried out by Dino di Puccio and Jacopo D’Agnolo, while Arrigo di Niccolò from Prato decorated the walls of a room on the first floor. Stemme or family crests of Datini and his wife Margherita were painted on the vaulted ceiling. Agnolo di Taddeo Gaddi and Bartolomeo di Bertozzo decorated one of the rooms with “tree-painted walls” and the ceiling with “yellow lilies on a dark background.” More simple designs on the architectural elements of the house included a lily motif on the vaults. The final work was completed just before Datini’s death. To encourage his spiritual devotion, Datini ordered three sacred pictures for his bedroom from his agent, one for each of the guest rooms and one for his office. A large tabernacle of the Virgin and Child was installed in the corner of the garden wall opposite the house.

Datini’s commissions to churches As a wealthy man he was expected to be a generous benefactor. At the same time as artists were decorating his home, he commissioned Gerini and his colleague Lorenzo di Niccolò to decorate the church of his patron saint, San Francesco, with frescoes, altar pieces, crucifixes and panels. Other artists included Tommaso del Mazza who supplied an altar and a crucifix. Francesco d’Arrigo was commissioned to paint a fresco in San Pier Fiorelli, (which Datini was not very pleased with.) He enjoyed a happier relationship with young Arrigo di Niccolò who not only painted frescoes in the church of San Francesco but also decorated Datini’s writing desk and painted two fine blue cotton cloth screens with “the Lamb of God and the Cross with the Coat of Arms” for an altar in San Francesco. The Florentine Giovanni di Tano Fei was also in favour with Datini, who commissioned him to paint sacred panels for San Francesco, for a monastery in Corsica and work for sale in Avignon. Iris Origo writes of valuable glass windows “with stories on them” which Datini presented not only to churches in Prato, but also to the important churches of Florence. She states that they were the work of Don Leonardo di Simone, a Vallombrosian monk, for which he was paid three florins a braccio as well as for raw materials and living expenses.2 Many of these works commissioned and paid for by Datini are now lost. During his later years Datini may be classified as a patron of the arts, albeit a minor one when compared with the great Florentine mercantile

16

Chapter Two

families of the Medici and Strozzi who were to follow. His more lasting legacy is the results of his philanthropy.

Datini, the penitent Michele Cassandro describes how the merchants of that time squared their sometimes dubious economic activities, especially involving usury, with the laws of the Church. Attendances at Church, making charitable gestures, the display of religious paintings and tabernacles within the home were some of the attempts to reconcile these differences. Datini was no different to others in this respect. His pious and good friend Ser Lapo Mazzei constantly urged him to think about the fate of his soul and plied him with “improving” books on the subject. In his last years of failing health and anxieties, Datini’s faith appears to have strengthened and his relationships with friends, business associates and Margherita became less volatile. In August 1399 he joined the Bianchi, a popular penitent group who wore white robes and walked barefoot behind a large cross chanting and praying through the countryside and towns of the north of Italy. A desire for the cleansing of past sins, giving up the comforts of life, adherence to a strict diet and sleeping in the open were required. Datini and twelve others, accompanied by their spiritual advisor the Bishop of Fiesole, set off for nine days to the countryside, finishing with a Mass back in Florence. Datini’s records show that their food and lodgings weren’t strictly compliant with the rules but perhaps allowances were made to accommodate Datini’s age and poor health. This was the year he also met with the Dominican friar Giovanni Domenici who, with Ser Lapo Mazzei, sowed the seed for a charitable foundation for Datini’s fortune after his death. As Datini had no legitimate son to inherit his fortune and empire, he needed to think carefully how his estate was to be dispersed. In the meantime another plague epidemic broke out forcing Datini and his household to flee to Bologna. Many of his friends died and it wasn’t until 1401 that they returned to Prato where Datini, in spite of his increasing melancholy, threw himself back into managing his business interests again. Important people were invited to stay at Palazzo Datini. Ambassadors, aristocrats, cardinals and, in July 1410, King Louis II of Anjou. In return for one thousand florins, Datini was granted permission to include the royal lily of France on a blue background on his coat of arms. These visitors appealed to Datini’s need for ostentation but the burden of organisation fell as usual on the shoulders of Margherita.

Francesco di Marco Datini of Prato

17

Datini’s death and will In August 1410, just a few weeks after King Louis’s departure, Datini died aged seventy-five. Ser Lapo Mazzei reported that even on his death bed Datini could not come to terms with his impending demise, finding it hard to believe that his prayers were of no avail. Two weeks prior to his death, his final will was drawn up. The bulk of his estate, money and properties were left to his Foundation in Prato “Casa del Ceppo di Poveri di Francesco di Marco.” The Foundation was based in his home, as it was an independent institution and “in no way controlled by the Church or by any other ecclesiastic.” He did not trust the Church to carry out his wishes, but entrusted the task of administration to four buonomini (elders) appointed by the Commune of Prato. Other bequests were made to Margherita, Ginevra his daughter, and family, friends and workers and the churches of Prato. He released his slaves, and left a large sum “about which my executors are well informed,” which may well have been to compensate for his past usury. One thousand florins were left to Florence’s largest hospital Spedale di Santa Maria Nuova “to start a new place...to feed children,” and three hundred florins to pay for twelve silver lamps in the Chapel of the Sacred Girdle in the Duomo. His great public funeral in the Duomo was held at the Commune’s expense. It was not a unanimous decision, but the majority felt it only proper in view of his services to the city. He is buried in San Francesco, the church he generously endowed during his life. His marble tombstone carved by Niccolò Lamberti is at the foot of the high altar and inscribed: Here lies the body of the prudent and honourable man Francesco di Marco Datini, citizen of Prato and prosperous merchant of Florence. May his soul rest in peace.

Fig. 2-2. Brunelleschi, Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence, 1419-27.

18

Chapter Two

Datini’s philanthropic legacy: Datini’s charitable foundation, although much changed, exists today but little money is left. However it continued to care for the poor of Prato, and in particular for women and children, up until the 20th century. His twelve silver lamps still hang in the Chapel of the Virgin’s Girdle in the Duomo. From his bequest for a foundlings hospital in Florence money was released by the Spedale di Santa Maria Nuova to the Silk Guild, which pledged to build the complex and maintain the hospital. The great architect Filippo Brunelleschi, a member of the Guild, was elected to design the building. Completed in the middle of the 15th century it was one of the first examples of Renaissance architecture. Famous for its charming ten terracotta roundels of babies in swaddling bands by Andrea della Robbia on the spandrels of the arcade, this beautiful building remains today not only as a symbol of the humanist and welfare philosophies of the times, but is still involved in the welfare of the children of Florence.

Fig. 2-3. Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, The Trinity, 1400-10, tempera on wood, 217 x 89, Datini on the left, Ginevra and Margherita on the right. Museo Capitolino, Rome.

Francesco di Marco Datini of Prato

19

Some images of Datini are still to be seen. He commissioned Niccolò Gerini to paint The Trinity which he began in 1405 and finished in 1410. At the bottom of the painting are depicted Datini, Margherita and Ginevra. It now hangs in the Capotoline Museum in Rome (Fig. 2-3). Tommaso di Piero Trombetto’s 1390 depiction of Datini in his red merchant’s garb is found in the merchant’s palazzo, now a museum. Others images painted after his death includes Pietro di Miniato’s Tabernacolo della Romita with Francesco and Margherita praying (1415).

Fig. 2-4. Pietro and Antonio di Miniato, View of Prato with Saints, together with Dagomari and Francesco Datini, 1425, fresco, Museo Civico, Palazzo Pretorio, Prato. Photo: Antonio Quattrone, Archivo del Museo di Palazzo Pretorio, Prato.

20

Chapter Two

Miniato’s View of the Town of Prato with Paolo Dagomari and Francesco Datini (1425) is especially interesting as it depicts Datini holding the symbol of his charitable foundation Il Ceppo, and his palazzo is to be seen above the Duomo, indicating the high status of Datini in Prato (Fig. 2-4). In 1410 after Datini’s death, the administrators of his Foundation, with much haggling, commissioned five Florentine artists, including Gerini, to decorate and paint the exterior walls of the palazzo with sixteen frescoes showing the life of the merchant. Unfortunately over the intervening years, without maintenance, these frescoes have disappeared, leaving only a few remnants now preserved and displayed in the museum.

Fig. 2-5. Filippo Lipi, Madonna del Ceppo, 1452-3, oil on panel, 187 x 120, Museo Civico, Prato.

Filippo Lippi’s Virgin Mary on the Throne with the Christ Child, Saints and Francesco Datini Presenting the Four Good Men of the Ceppo to the Madonna del Ceppo (1452), once placed in the palazzo court, fortunately fared better and can be seen today in the Prato Museo Civico ( Fig.2-5).

Francesco di Marco Datini of Prato

21

Conclusion Datini the merchant of Prato saw the beginnings of a new age. By diversification, canniness, and an unwillingness to be involved in local politics or that of the church, he survived the vicissitudes of the day and remained highly successful, unlike some of the other great Florentine merchants of the Renaissance. With his creative vision and shrewdness, his spirit of enterprise, drive, innovative commercial methods and his international connections he was truly one of the great merchants of the early Renaissance. His obsession with recording and preserving every detail of his private and business life ensured an unequalled legacy of medieval domestic life and trade. His patronage of the arts is evidenced by his commissioning of works for his home and churches. Through his philanthropy, his charitable foundation fulfilled his wishes to care for the poor of Prato while the Ospedale degli Innocenti is a reminder today of his commitment to the welfare of the foundlings and orphans of Florence six hundred years ago.

Acknowledgements Dott.ssa Maria Rafaella de Gramatica, Direttrice dell’ Archivio di Stato di Prato. Dr Eleanor A Congdon, Associate Professor, Youngston State University, Ohio, USA.

Notes 1. Michele Cassandro, “Aspects of the Life and Character of Francesco di Marco Datini” in Giampiero Nigro (ed.), Francesco di Marco Datini. The Man, the Merchant (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2013), Chapter 3. 2. Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato. Daily Life in a Medieval City (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2010) 240.

References Cassandro, Michele, “Aspects of the Life and Character of Francesco di Marco Datini” in Giampiero Nigro (ed.), Francesco di Marco Datini: The Man the Merchant (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2013). Origo, Iris, The Merchant of Prato. Daily Life in a Medieval City (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992).

CHAPTER THREE POP ART MAKES MONEY PETER STUPPLES

I

n the beginning there was no money and no art. But there were obligations—thanks for favours given, for gifts received, support in contestations for power. Over time obligations became calculated, quantified, ritualised, at the same time as images began to serve rituals— oblations to the deities, the marking of the sacred, the signification of authority. Quantified obligations, promises to pay, became symbolised in coinage, ritualised oblations became art—visual allegories. The first artists were probably paid by gifts as they used their own gifts of craftsmanship to carve and figure for themselves a place within contemporary social structures. Their skills were eventually used to design and make the very coins with which they may have been paid. Art and money went, as it were, hand in hand. In hunter-gather societies, when art was seen as the representation of allegories governing the customs and beliefs of everyday life, it was largely a communal activity. It was only when those skills became more specialised in urban settlements that the role of artist gradually separated out from the general community and workshops produced more precious objects on commission from patrons—from the secular chieftainship or the sacral priesthood. Within a workshop particularly gifted craftsmen eventually made a name for themselves, and their “gift” became valued not only for their manual dexterity but also for their conceptual originality that met some need, previously perceived or recently realised, within the patron class. In the Italian Renaissance that conceptual originality—in design and composition, the elaboration of lineal and aerial perspective, the use of light and shade to delineate form—became the mark of a Master. It was rewarded with money and prestige, a dyad that often seemed to be two sides of a coin: mundane reward for labour and the intangible reward of fame. Already Leon Battista Alberti was characterising this difference as

24

Chapter Three

one of moral value. 1 On the one hand artists were praised for their otherworldliness, the selflessness of their intellectual endeavour, at the same time as being necessarily concerned about their daily bread and their ranking in the artmarket of the patronage: Titian, for example, only ever carried our commissioned work with a contract drawn up to cover costs and added profit.2 “By contrast,” as the Wittkowers pointed out, “the lofty art of Raphael could only result from a high-minded soul. This concept, moreover, was ultimately derived from the Neo-Platonic beliefs permeating Renaissance thought, that man’s soul is manifest in his body and, as a corollary, the artist’s soul in his work.”3 The Academies of Europe, both in their teaching of art and their attitude to money, followed the lead of Alberti when he wrote: “You who strive to excel in painting, should cultivate above all the fame and reputation which you see attained by the ancients, and in so doing it will be a good thing to remember that avarice has always been the enemy of renown and virtue.” Later Joshua Reynolds, in his Discourses on Art, wrote a great deal about the virtues of “genius” but never about money. In more mundane and modern terms W.R.D. Fairbairn talked about art as either play, where art is made “for its own sake,” or work, where the “ulterior motive [is] making a living, gaining social prestige, or propagating a cause.”4 Yet Titian’s work, as the Wittkowers again point out, shows that “ulterior motives” and “the joy of creation” are not mutually incompatible.5 With the rise of the dealer galleries in Paris in the 1870s the price of art and the type art that sells became a measure of the value of a work—not only its market value but also a measure of its aesthetic worth. As Robert Jensen pointed out: “The challengers to the French Academy used market value to demonstrate how previously disfranchised artists (and that could be anyone who was not a member of the Academy) were vindicated by later prices, consequently demonstrating their right of place in the pantheon of great artists.” 6 Picasso shamelessly flattered his dealers, painting their portraits, their friends and family. A visit to Picasso’s studio, Miró wrote to a friend, “made my spirits sink. Everything is done for his dealer, for the money. A visit to Picasso is like visiting a ballerina with a number of lovers.”7 Yet search any set of books on Picasso and you won’t find the word “money” in the index. Of course the market takes time to adjust to new products, to new labels. Just as it took thirty years for the dealers of the Impressionists to create a market for their work, so it took time for New York to find value—both pecuniary and aesthetic—in the work of the Abstract Expressionists. Yet the same dyad to which Alberti had drawn attention

Pop Art Makes Money

25

was also in the minds of scholars contemplating the work of the Abstract Expressionists—their early struggles for recognition were heroic, selfsacrificing but their current success, Meyer Schapiro warned, exposes them “to dangerous corruption.” He goes on: “Paintings are perhaps the most costly man-made objects in the world…[This] stamps the painting as an object of speculation, confusing the values of art. The fact that the work of art has such a status means that the approach to it is rarely innocent enough; one is too much concerned for the future of the work, its value as an investment, its capacity to survive in the market and to symbolise the social quality of its owner.” Schapiro, by implication, points to a conspiracy of dealers and collectors to make a market for art, as opposed to the “artist,” as he puts it, “[as] one of the most moral and idealistic of beings,”8 perhaps, we might add, content to live drugged by the thin air atop Mount Olympus? Despite the significance in the literature, and in the minds of artists themselves, of the dyadic values of art, money was seldom a subject of representation: artists designed coins and banknotes but rarely used these objects or their circulation or power as subjects worthy of their moral and idealistic attention.9

Fig. 4-1. Roy Lichtenstein, Ten Dollar Bill, 1956, lithograph, image 25.2 x 47.7, sheet 42.8 x 57.6, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Gift of Kenneth Tyler and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler, 2010. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/ Licensed by Viscopy, 2014.

26

Chapter Three

As usual in the history of American Pop Art it was Lichtenstein who took the first step into the profane territory formerly eschewed not only by artists but also their idolaters. Such is the fame of his Ten Dollar Bill, a lithographic print in 25 editions, that it was selected to feature in the exhibition “$how Me the Money: The Dollar As Art” for the American Numismatic Association Money Museum in Colorado Springs in 2002. But what was Lichtenstein doing, exactly? The image is clearly not a copy nor even a representation of an actual bill, it is not counterfeit, not forged, but grossly parodied, it is a purposely inept travesty of the reverence for that most significant American value, the value of the dollar, as a comic character clumsily portrays his promise to pay, declaring the authenticity and probity of the institution that makes that promise to pay the holder the value in an unnamed “good”—like gold. What is happening in terms of “art,” of aesthetic value, when the sly parody, the joke, the fun image becomes a collectors’ item, a commodity in its own right in the market place? When, in fact, “price” becomes the very subject of aesthetic contemplation? Or is this not so? After all does our appetite for food ever play a part in the aesthetic contemplation of the still life? Or what about desire, particularly our desire for money? Do we contemplate our possession of it in excess, or our lack of it, when we look at the framed print of a dollar on our wall? Are we celebrating our wealth, our poverty, tickling our desires or simply admiring the humour and skill of a clever printmaker, with him enjoying the sick joke of our enslavement to money? Or are we looking at a new bill of tender in the lotto of the market, the market of art? Or perhaps all of these, in different ways and at different times. Incidentally, a somewhat soiled print of Lichtenstein’s ten-dollar bill sold for US$7,170 at Christies in New York in 2002. It was with this sense of play (or was it work?) that Phillip Hefferton painted his oil of Sinking George in 1962. Hefferton shared studio space in Los Angeles with Robert Dowd where they both painted versions of American money. Hefferton’s Sinking George is a blatant parody of the iconic first president of the United States, fallen from the cutter of State. His Winkin’ Lincoln wryly smiles at the viewer as he promises to pay the bearer five dollars. Hefferton also completed a work entitled The Money Truck, on the back of which he wrote: “The Money Truck. Here’s to you, Lichtenstein, you son of a bitch. I’m still the king.”10 Play? Work? Or an intense competition—ambition, akin to avarice: more for me and less for you. Walter Hopps believes that Hefferton and Dowd began dollar images before Warhol.11 These images got both artists into strife. Their paintings were regarded as unpatriotic or, even worse, and more absurdly, as

Pop Art Makes Money

27

counterfeit money. Indeed the subsequent career of both artists was undermined by the reception of their images of the American dollar.

Fig. 4-2. Phillip Hefferton, Sinking George, 1962, oil on canvas, 229.9 x 173.4 x 4.4, The Menil Collection, Houston, USA, accession no. 2001-004. Gift of Betty and Monte Factor. © The Estate of Phillip Hefferton. Photo: Paul Hester.

28

Chapter Three

After an interview with Dowd Lynn Pope reported: One morning in 1963, two agents from the Secret Service knocked on the door of Dowd's studio. They took him down to the Federal building in downtown LA, where they sternly read to him a litany of counterfeiting laws. Evidently it didn't matter that he was a former U.S. Marine. “They were attempting to intimidate me with all these threats,” he says. “It was really a matter of them attempting to tell me that if I continued to paint money, that I would be arrested for counterfeiting, that I was breaking the law.” “They did have some work of mine that they had confiscated as contraband. They told me they were going to museums and collectors and confiscate all the paintings out of the collections. My situation as a young artist, struggling at that point, was that I certainly didn't need any major problems added onto my life at the moment, in terms of survival and trying to do my work.”12

Some of his money images went missing from storage or were found ripped to shreds. No culprit was ever found. For those who have been to the United States and have some sense of the fierce pride of American nationalism it is understandable that these images may appear to be unpatriotic, anti-American to the point of treachery, particularly as they were first exhibited in the year America became engaged in Vietnam and faced the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is little wonder that even in this day and age neither Hefferton’s Poo Poo, where Washington’s headpiece is slipping not only from his head but out of the picture frame, nor his Money Truck, are available as Google images. We are looking at Pop, or rather Proto-Pop, as abjection, as a parody of the image of the first Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, as mockery of a currency now triumphant in the world of aggressive capitalism. Who said Pop art was bland and disengaged? In that same momentous year Andy Warhol also turned his ironic attention to the dollar bill, possibly as a result of hearing about the work of Dowd and Hefferton that had been shown alongside his Campbell Soup paintings in the show “New Paintings of Common Objects” at the Pasadena Art Museum at the end of 1962. Of course Warhol insisted on his own story about this choice of image. He says he asked his friends what he should paint and, he recalled, or more probably deliberately misrecalled, that “finally one lady friend of mine asked me the right question: ‘Well, what do you love most?’ That’s how I started painting money.”13 He began with drawings—the graphite One Dollar Bill with Lincoln’s Portrait, and the casein and silver paint and pencil Silver Certificate. The dollar bill would obsess him, in more ways than one, for most of his

Pop Art Makes Money

29

remaining life. He asked the young Berkeley Reinhold in the 1980s “to send one U.S. dollar bill to one hundred artists and ask them to comment on the relationship between art and money by using the dollar bill any way they wanted.” “American money is very well designed, really,” Warhol once remarked. “I like it better than any other kind of money.”14 Dowd seemed to be more serious in his assessment of the artistic worth of bank note design. My fascination with American currency lies in its quality of “symbolness.” Truly each bill is an epic story in picture and word…Forget that it illustrates a complete monetary system of unimaginable proportions or that it represents destinies of nations and men. What we are dealing with here is a marvellous form of American literature of epic proportions in the proud 15 tradition of P.T Barnum and tabloid journalism.

The last sentence somewhat undermines the seriousness of the paragraph’s opening. Dowd then went on: Crammed into each bill is a whole array of impressive letters, numbers, and symbols. Indeed it’s a document of “signs” to guide the seeker to enduring faith in the system. What could be more persuasive or compelling than a document with the carefully selected contents: well chosen words supported by compelling pictures—[a] fun house of symbols, weighty symbols.16

Later in 1962 Warhol produced his multiples of money—after the soup cans and green stamps, such as the silkscreen and acrylic 192 One Dollar Bills. These multiples were Warhol’s answer to Jasper Johns’s numbers of the late 1950s, the intriguing abstraction of a near repeated motif, but whereas Johns’s images were created by the painstaking process of using encaustic on newspaper to give a depth and surface texture, as well as colour complexities, to construct a rich surface, Warhol used a silkscreen, quick drying acrylic and the uneven scrape of the squeegee to give tonal variation, to create a parody of Johns. Coke bottles, Marilyns and Mona Lisas swiftly followed. The 1963 Mona Lisas are entitled Thirty are Better than One, rubbishing the aura of the original, as the 192 Dollar Bills are undeniably better, ahem! more valuable, than one. And what about the 200 Dollar Bills of the same year?

30

Chapter Three

Fig. 4-3. Andy Warhol, 192 One Dollar Bills, 1962, silkscreen ink, pencil, acrylic paint on canvas, 249 x 189, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin. Copyright ARS/Licensed by Viscopy 2014.

In November 2009, that 200 Dollar Bills was auctioned at Sotheby’s. It was anticipated it would sell for between US$8 and US$12 million. Instead it sold for US$42,762,500, each screen-printed dollar valued at US$218,812 as opposed to Lichtenstein measly $7,000! The son of a bitch. Who’s king now?! We are all familiar with Warhol’s views on money as described in his 1975 book THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol: “Business art is the step that comes after Art…Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business—they’d say ‘Money is bad,’ and ‘Working is bad,’ but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”17 And “Cash. I’m just not happy when I don’t have it.” 18 When accused of being merely a commercial artist, especially in the 1970s when, like Picasso, he made a practice of painting annual portraits of his rich client base, Warhol responded by saying that he had always been a commercial artist in the sense that a commercial artist is “someone that sells art.”19 And, after all, as Tony Judt pointed out, “money makes goods measureable.”20 In 1981 Warhol returned to the dollar as a theme, this time the sign released from its frame in the currency note to become a free floating

Pop Art Makes Money

31

signifier, treated with the colours of the funfair, in groups of nine, say, or twenty, or as single portraits of a sign for money on the move, casting a freakish shadow and curiously resembling the Soviet hammer and sickle, a symbol Warhol had played with five years before. Here we have the dollar triumphant, galloping capitalism rampant, just as the hammer and sickle was sold as a now harmless still life for capitalist buyers: like everything else the ideals of the original Russian revolutions, the workers and peasants striding together into the bright future, are simply reduced to a sign for sale in the market—especially poignant as these images were exhibited first of all in Italy where the Communist Party had, for an all too few years after the Second World War, acted as a sign of hope for the impoverished Italian proletariat and peasantry. Warhol’s critics, and critics of Pop Art more generally, often accuse both the artist and the movement of shallowness, a lack of any aesthetic value, an undermining of art’s aura, of offering the viewer objects for recognition but no space for imaginative cogitation, no possibility of poetry.21 But I would argue that the age of mechanical reproduction has only expanded the aesthetic field. The art of the past was also about the here and now—religious belief, social status, even the allegorical tools of mental speculation from the urbane to the mundane. It is only art history that brought into play the very notion of the timeless, the pursuit of beauty for its own sake. Warhol obliged us to look at what we have done to ourselves in the consumer age. As Blake Gopnik wrote in response to a Warhol show in 2005: “Taken as a whole, his art seems to portray a world so thoroughly sold out that there’s no hope for it.” In other words Warhol’s Pop shows what money has done to us. It is some of the most profound art of the 20th century. Gopnik went on “[Warhol’s] pictures have shock value, it’s the kind of shock you get from pictures in a tabloid, the kind of shock that leaves you once you’ve left the checkout aisle.”22 In his Creative Credo (1920) Paul Klee declared: “My aim is always to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting—to make the invisible visible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is, in fact, reality which forms the mystery of our existence.” This is often taken to mean that Klee considered our inner experience the primary material for art and Modernism. Pop Art, on the contrary, is often posited as deflecting aesthetic aura from the inner to the outer world, to common commercial and public imagery, reversing the Modernist tenet. Of course this simplistic dichotomy can be contested on a number of fronts, but the frequency of its iteration has assumed the mantle of a truth. But think about it. Money is magic. It is a trick. It is as much a token of value and probity as an icon, as a flag, as the words on a page—words, say, by Plato

32

Chapter Three

or Immanuel Kant. Money also contains within it a group of constantly change-shifting symbols/allegories, perhaps of felt realities—a sense of superiority and entitlement, of deprivation and injustice, of desire, of envy and fear, of violence, of moral conflict. The reverse of that coin lies in the feelings behind the dyad of Alberti, that art is about other things and artists should be other people than mere mortals, that to eschew money is worthy of the deepest respect, that if we abandon a money economy we will lead better lives, less conflicted by greed and a sense of inferiority that makes us want to kill and burn. Warhol, and to a lesser extent Hefferton, Dowd and Lichtenstein, simply brought money out of the closet and overtly into the discourse of art, to where it had in fact been all the time. The hidden power of money has guided the course of art’s histories through patronage and, somewhat differently today—through the award of scholarships, residences, public commissions, that is scarcely different to the way art earned the wherewithal to perpetuate itself in the Western world since Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt. The emperor of art was never simply a naked youth/maiden offering the golden apple of rare aesthetic delectation, but s/he was always already decked in cloaks of bank notes, garlanded in golden coins. It’s just that we didn’t want to see it. After all it was the iconoclast Pierre Bourdieu who made the observation that “with a few illustrious exceptions, seemingly designed to recall the ideal, painters and writers are deeply self-interested, calculating, obsessed with money and ready to do anything to succeed.”23 I would add that in my experience members of all professions are more often than not obsessed with money, it is simply that in the arts this has been gilded with the aura of a Raphaelesque idealism that Warhol and his fellow Pop artists did their irreverent best to deconstruct.

Notes 1. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (London: Penguin, 1991) 64. 2. Margot and Rudolf Wittkower, Born Under Saturn (New York: New York Review of Books, 2007). 3. Wittkowers: 2007, 93. 4. W.R.D. Fairbairn, “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Art,” British Journal of Psychology, 28:1938. 5. Wittkowers: 2007, 270. 6 . Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) 18. 7. Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992) 71.

Pop Art Makes Money

33

8. Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art (New York: Brazillier, 1982) 224-6. The idealism of Schapiro was echoed in the writing of Clement Greenberg and in Harold Rosenberg’s The Tradition of the New (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994). 9. There were exceptions, where still-lifes or collections of curiosities included coins or banknotes, such as the work of the American artist Nicholas Alden Brooks—Five Dollar Bill, Program and Ticket Stubs from Ford’s Theatre (1889) or Ten Dollars on the First Race, Saratoga (1890). 10. Jim Edwards, “New Painting of Common Objects,” an interview with Walter Hopps, in Pop Art: U.S./U.K. Connections, 1956-1966 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001) 47. 11 . For example Dowd’s Vincent Dollar, 1965, oil on canvas, 45.7 x 91.4, formerly collection of Jodi and Monte Gordon, Los Angeles and sold in September 2014 for US$ 18, 750 from an estimate of only $ 3,500. 12. Lynn Pyne, “Pop Art's West Side” and “Robert Dowd: Artist Paid For Spoofs on U.S. Currency,” The Phoenix Gazette, July 14, 1990. 13. David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry Abrams, 1989) 108. 14 . Berkeley Reinhold, Vincent Fermont and Deborah Harry, Andy Warhol: Making Money (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2010). 15 . Scarlet Cheng, “‘Robert Dowd: Pop Art Money’: Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine,” Los Angeles Times, January 18, 2009. 16 . Excerpt from Robert Dowd: Pop Art Money, catalogue essay by Michael Zakian for the Weisman Museum exhibition, 2009, accessed 7 November 2014. 17. Andy Warhol, THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1975) 92. 18. ibid., 130. 19. Kenneth Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (New York: Carol and Graf, 2004) 387. 20. Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (London: Vintage Books, 2013) 382. 21. See for example John Yau, In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1993) 27, 36-37. 22. Blake Gopnik, “Sad Comment on a Sold-out Society,” Guardian Weekly, October 7-13 2005, 23, referring to a show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC. 23. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) 79.

References Alberti, Leon Battista, On Painting (London: Penguin, 1991). Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Bourdon, David, Warhol (New York: Harry Abrams, 1989).

34

Chapter Three

Cheng, Scarlet, “‘Robert Dowd: Pop Art Money’: Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine,” Los Angeles Times, January 18, 2009. Fairbairn, W.R.D., “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Art,” British Journal of Psychology, 28:1938. Goldsmith, Kenneth, (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (New York: Carol and Graf, 2004). Gopnik, Blake, “Sad Comment on a Sold-out Society,” Guardian Weekly, October 7-13 2005. Jensen, Robert, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Judt, Tony, with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (London: Vintage Books, 2013). Miró, Joan, Selected Writings and Interviews (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992). Pop Art: U.S./U.K. Connections, 1956-1966 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001). Pyne, Lynn, “Pop Art's West Side” and “Robert Dowd: Artist Paid For Spoofs on U.S. Currency,” The Phoenix Gazette, July 14, 1990. Reinhold, Berkeley, Vincent Fermont and Deborah Harry, Andy Warhol: Making Money (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2010). Rosenberg, Harold, The Tradition of the New (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994). Schapiro, Meyer, Modern Art (New York: Brazillier, 1982). Warhol, Andy, THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1975). Wittkower, Margot and Rudolf, Born Under Saturn (New York: New York Review of Books, 2007). Yau, John, In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1993. Zakian, Robert, Robert Dowd: Pop Art Money, catalogue essay for the Weisman Museum exhibition, 2009.

CHAPTER FOUR SOME REFLECTIONS ON ABORIGINAL ART’S RELATIONSHIP WITH MONEY LAURA FISHER

B

etween the 1980s and 2000s there was a remarkable swell of interest in Australian Aboriginal art both within Australia and internationally. As a consequence, Aboriginal art came to occupy a central place in the Australian artistic and cultural landscape, and particular artists and styles came to be highly valued within the primary and secondary fine arts markets. Government subvention has been a very important factor in this story: since the early 1970s Aboriginal art production has been supported by a range of subsidy measures oriented to policy objectives around Aboriginal economic empowerment, well-being and cultural renewal, as well as around broader policy agendas relating to Reconciliation, tourism and national branding. Most important among these has been the funding of Aboriginal Art Centres in remote parts of Australia, the principal source of the work that has entered the high-end art market. Therefore a peculiar combination of private and public monies has driven the expansion of the Aboriginal art sector, a combination that tells us a great deal about the changing dynamics of Indigenous/Settler relations and Indigenous affairs governance since the mid-twentieth century. In my view, the extraordinary artistic innovations and unique poetic and conceptual content in Aboriginal art forms are in no way diminished by acknowledging the substantial effect upon them of both the commercial market and State funding. Money, as both a galvanising and destabilising force, has been fundamentally constitutive of Aboriginal art-making practices and indeed the very aesthetic values that are now associated with the Aboriginal art movement. This is of course true of other art movements: the fine arts have for a long time been entangled with money in a duplicitous relationship of dependence and disavowal. However Aboriginal art stands out as unique in a very important respect. Despite the best efforts of a range of (mostly non-Indigenous) intermediaries—the

36

Chapter Four

dealers, agents, art professionals and art writers who are collectively involved in what Bourdieu describes as the “symbolic production” of artworks—it has not achieved the kind of autonomy from the world of commerce, and from instrumental structures and relations, upon which western beliefs about the value of art since the Romantic movement have been largely predicated.1 There are two key reasons for this.2 First, the artists concerned are among the most impoverished and marginalised of Australian citizens. Not only does this mean that their activities and objectives are fundamentally shaped by economic need, but that their economic circumstances are a perennial concern for the State and for wellmeaning non-indigenous citizens. Second, the Aboriginal art phenomenon has been a focus for the emancipatory and redemptive currents of social and political change that have occurred at the interface between Aboriginal people, the State and Australian civil society. There are many significant points of convergence between the trajectory of the Aboriginal art movement and the trajectory of the State’s transition from an assimilationist policy paradigm that anticipated the disappearance of Aboriginal culture, to a policy paradigm premised on the acknowledgment of the injustices of colonisation and a respect for Aboriginal cultural difference.3 This has meant that Aboriginal art, as a vivid testament to Aboriginal cultural survival, has been put to the service of a range of activist, advocacy and governance projects that have sought to validate and celebrate Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal personhood within national public culture.4 Thus, in addition to being treated as a means to engage Aboriginal with the mainstream economy, Aboriginal art has been a conduit of politicised communication and symbolic action; a site of contested meaning that registers the ethical conundrum at the heart of Australia’s Settler State condition. With this context in mind, the following discussion will review and analyse a range of popular and critical discourses that have been concerned with Aboriginal art’s relationship with money. It will examine how these discourses manifest the unique socio-economic and sociocultural conditions of Aboriginal art’s creation and sale, and the hopes and expectations about Aboriginal people and their culture that have crystallised around the Aboriginal art movement. I have two key aims: the first is to reveal the extent to which excitement and distress about “money” have mediated the public’s understanding of the Aboriginal art movement. To this end I will discuss the widely voiced hope that the Aboriginal art trade will improve Aboriginal people’s economic status, the degree to which the marked disparity between “white” wealth and “black” poverty has been a focus of attention in critical engagements with

Some Reflections on Aboriginal Art’s Relationship with Money

37

Aboriginal art, the conviction that processes of commodification degrade Aboriginal culture and art, and the spectacularisation of the Aboriginal art market boom. My second aim is to shed some light on the interplay of utopian and dystopian ideas that have informed all of these formulations of Aboriginal art’s relationship with money. I will argue that the following paradox is fuelling this interplay. Since the early 1970s, the idea that art production is a virtuous economic activity that can help alleviate Aboriginal poverty has been a unanimously celebrated narrative of the Aboriginal art movement. This view has had widespread currency, even though the fine arts system treats pecuniary interests as antithetical to authentic creative pursuits, and has embraced Aboriginal art in the Modernist mode as being about the sincere and intensely meaningful rendition of “culture.” Aboriginal artists have indeed used their art as a means to make money, and have been ensconced as artistic workers within several economies: the government funded Art Centre, the cash poor economy of their extended families and communities, the élite fine arts market, and the overtly commercial Aboriginal art and souvenir market. As I will demonstrate, the points of tension and contiguity that have arisen between these economies have revealed that the consecrative structures of the fine arts system have been profoundly strained, and in many cases breeched, by the layered economic imperatives driving Aboriginal art production. I will ultimately suggest that the utopian and dystopian ideas at play manifest the disjunctions between some core ideals (aesthetic and ethical) that have framed many people’s positive impressions of the Aboriginal art movement, and the ideological and economic platforms upon which Aboriginal art’s emergence as a form of fine art took shape.

Government subsidy and the economic foundations of the Aboriginal art movement I will here provide only a cursory historical account of the Aboriginal art movement before attending to some of the economic circumstances that have shaped the Aboriginal art phenomenon.5 The Aboriginal art movement is generally understood to have been instigated by the formation of two organisations in the early 1970s: first, the Papunya Tula Artists’ cooperative (hereafter PTA) in the Western Desert settlement of Papunya, where senior men began using acrylic paint on board to create symbolic portrayals of their Dreaming narratives6 for sale; and second, the Aboriginal Arts Board (hereafter AAB) within the Australia Council (the statutory body responsible for national Arts policy, funding and

38

Chapter Four

promotion). The AAB, positioned at the vanguard of the then Labor Government’s Aboriginal Self-determination policy, was mandated to empower Aboriginal people to revive and maintain their cultural practices through grants and other forms of support.7 In the 1980s and 1990s, the Aboriginal art movement and Aboriginal art sector gathered momentum through the establishment of numerous community-owned and controlled Aboriginal Art Centres. The AAB was for a long time the primary source of funding for these organisations, all of which have facilitated the creation and sale of arts and crafts distinguished by the particular materials, ancestral traditions, natural environments and Dreamings that are the patrimony of local people. However, the formation of PTA and the AAB should really be understood not as points of origin but as points of transition to an organised setting for the production and marketing of “Aboriginal Art.” This is because Aboriginal people across Australia had been trading artefacts and craft objects such as weavings, tools and carvings from the first days of colonisation in mission settlements, pastoral stations and towns.8 In recalling the profound impact of the AAB’s funding measures, it is essential to recognise that concerns about Aboriginal people’s poverty, their low rates of participation in mainstream education, their chronic welfare dependency and the scarcity of economic opportunities in remote parts of Australia, have been fundamental to the subsidisation paradigm that it spearheaded and that enabled the Aboriginal art sector to grow. The idea that art production provides a much needed avenue by which Aboriginal people could acquire an independent income stream—put simply, that Aboriginal people should use their art to make money—has been widely extoled by those involved in the Aboriginal art movement since the 1970s and in concerned discourses about the need to ensure its sustainability. The following summation by Philip Batty is typical: [The Aboriginal art industry] is far and away the most successful “enterprise” that Aboriginal people have ever been involved in…Given the fact that Aboriginals are the poorest people in the country, with little prospect of earning an income outside labouring jobs or the dole, the money earned through art is a welcome benefit…[The] Aboriginal art industry is allowing, if only at a small level, Aboriginal people to partake in the wider economy on an equitable basis.9

At a policy level, views of this kind can be traced to the earliest subsidy interventions. The AAB, for example, drew strong links between Aboriginal art, Aboriginal economic empowerment and the restoration of

Some Reflections on Aboriginal Art’s Relationship with Money

39

Aboriginal dignity and self-determination. As its first chair, Dick Roughsey, wrote in 1976: It should be appreciated that Aboriginal participation in the visual arts is not on a hobby basis. Most Aborigines live on meagre resources and the development of their art is seen as a way of breaking out of the depressed routine in which they are trapped…Of prime concern to the Board is the urgent task of making it possible for traditional Aboriginal communities to use their artistic skills as a means of surviving culturally and 10 economically.

The AAB established a highly idiosyncratic model of art subsidy at Papunya in 1972, when, in response to the evidence that the artists were unwilling to paint if there was no cash flow, and with the market for their art being virtually non-existent, it decided to commission works and pay the artists for the paintings they produced. This model was “the antithesis of the handout mentality frequently adopted in Aboriginal programs… which has greatly damaged Aboriginals’ dignity.”11 This approach— whereby art production took shape as a form of “cultural work” and artists expected payment for the labour invested in art production—became the template for the way many Art Centres around the country have operated.

The development of the Aboriginal art market To understand how the market for the art being created at the Art Centres developed, we must take into account the broader national cultural context within which Aboriginal culture was being newly configured, as well as the institutional and commercial practices of fine arts validation that were brought to bear upon Aboriginal art. With respect to the former, events like the 1988 Bicentenary, the 2000 Olympic Games, as well as the Land Rights and Reconciliation movements, brought unprecedented popular attention to Aboriginal art and culture both in Australia and abroad. As suggested above, these events imbued Aboriginal visual culture with a symbolic significance in the context of both the justice-focused activism of Aboriginal people, and the redemptive movements of the State and nonindigenous civil society.12 Concurrently, in response to a number of key Australian and international exhibitions, the engagement of important fine arts dealers and high profile collectors, and the decision on the part of major Australian art institutions to begin acquiring Aboriginal art, Aboriginal art came to be recognised as a dynamic tributary to the field of Australian contemporary art.13 On the secondary market, Sotheby’s presided over an Aboriginal art market boom between 1997 and 2007,

40

Chapter Four

with several other auction houses entering the market for briefer periods. In the 2000s in particular, Aboriginal art came to be viewed as a highly attractive investment: Aboriginal paintings were accumulated as part of private superannuation portfolios, and were entering the auction market very soon after they had been purchased on the primary market, and in some cases then reappeared on the secondary market relatively quickly.14 The Australian press regularly reported on the Aboriginal art market’s development, and the sensationalist tendencies of this coverage played an important role in establishing the public face of the Aboriginal art movement. Journalists captured the public interest by highlighting the incongruous relationship between Aboriginal people, living a hand to mouth existence in remote communities and Alice Springs, and wealthy domestic and overseas collectors competing for their work in prestigious galleries and auction houses. The following titles of newspaper articles, documentaries and books are indicative of the coverage: “The art boom of dreamtime,” “Dots for Dollars” and “Dot for Dollar,” “The Emily Industry,”15 “Selling off the Dreaming,” “Black art gold rush” and “Dollar Dreaming.”16 Here we find the disenchanting juxtaposition of commerce with the sacred world of the Dreaming, and the affiliation of the inherently repetitive practice of dotting with “dollars,” suggestive of a degraded, mercenary activity. These and other journalistic investigations focused on a range of inflammatory topics, among them the way artists’ relatives pressured artists to produce quick and sometimes poor quality works because they were dependent on their cash flow, and on the manipulative relationships certain non-indigenous art dealers and agents had with artists. There were also allegations of fraud, which pertained to genuine fakes, as well as the ubiquity of collectivised production (by family members in communities) of artworks that were attributed to a single artist. Headlines like “Indigenous art breaks the $1m barrier” and “$2.4m for Possum painting that once fetched $1200—you’re not dreaming” exemplify the tone of the coverage of the auction market boom.17 The consequence of this kind of media coverage was that a public discourse of intrigue and controversy around money matters—one which counterpoised visions of great poverty and great wealth—provided the backdrop for the development of both the primary and secondary market in Aboriginal fine arts, up-staging the more slow-paced and uncertain art critical discourses.18 These are not usual circumstances. Economic sociologist, Olav Velthuis, explains that generally the value of a fine artist’s work accrues after a “waiting game” at the primary market level, involving a long period of highly discretionary exposure, carefully managed by the artist’s dealer, associated with evidence of strong critical

Some Reflections on Aboriginal Art’s Relationship with Money

41

reception.19 It is clear that this has not been the case with Aboriginal art, because the dissemination of information about the movement and the cultivation of its audience occurred simultaneously with the development of a lucrative primary and resale market for it.20 While the media coverage is one indication of this, another is the fact that for many years Sotheby’s auction catalogues—notable for their eloquent and detailed explanations of the spiritual and custodial knowledge that informs the works—were among the best sources of information on Aboriginal art.21 Thus the sensationalism of the press and the seductions of the auction house context entailed an interweaving of aesthetic and financial value systems. This is indicative of the deficit of autonomy, as noted above, and the difficulties (and conflicts of interest) associated with determining how the quality of Aboriginal art was being evaluated. 22

Critical perspectives on the Aboriginal art market While Aboriginal art’s success in the marketplace stimulated many positive assessments of its economically transformative potential, various critical discourses and controversies attest to the prevalence of opposing views. It is here that we find the dystopian perspectives on Aboriginal art’s relationship with money that run counter to the utopian threads discussed above. These negative responses have ranged from those that see marketisation and commodification per se as destructive to Aboriginal culture, to those which presuppose that certain kinds of commodification should be welcomed, but take issue with what they feel to be base and exploitative kinds of commodification. We find an example of the former variation in the recollections of Geoffrey Bardon, the sensitive and erudite school art teacher who first encouraged the men at Papunya to paint, when he describes what took place when there was no money to pay the artists: “They would not paint, they said. Nor could I prevail upon them to paint without money. The monstrousness of it was not lost on me as they began to chant in their own languages amongst themselves, then at me: ‘Money, money, money’.”23 As Bardon saw it, the money imperative was the catalyst for a tragic enervation of the potency of meaning the painters had initially invested in the paintings, a quality of meaning that was akin, in his view, to that invested in their ceremony, dance and song. As Fred Myers suggests: “if art could glorify and restore, then money was the corruption that undermined the communion Bardon had with the men and turned them into a ‘travesty of what they once had been’.”24 A further example of a unilaterally negative impression of the Aboriginal art market can be found in a suite of articles written by scholars

42

Chapter Four

Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis in the late 1980s, published in the Australian journals Praxis M and Artlink and the overseas journals Third Text and Art in America.25 These articles were informed by a critical Marxist perspective on capitalist relations and hegemony, as well as by a post-colonial critique. Fry and Willis argued that the impact of commodification on Aboriginal culture was totalising in its degradation, and that colonial forces were simply tightening their grip through the various economic, cultural and social exchanges that were constitutive of Aboriginal art. They were incredulous of those who regarded Aboriginal artists as being empowered by the success of their art, and argued that: [The] marketing of contemporary Aboriginal art can be seen as a form of soft neo-colonialism, through which Aboriginal people are incorporated into commodity production…One result is that traditional beliefs and practices have to be reconfigured according to the relative success or failure of the commodity. There is thus no continuity of tradition, no 40,000-year-old culture, no “time before time.” There are only objects, produced by a range of fragmented cultures with varying connections to traditional and economic necessity, posed against the homogenized readings of these objects according to the meaning systems of the culture of dominance.26

A third example, one which is best understood as a provocation on the question of whether Aboriginal artists were benefiting from the market for their work, is the documentary Art from the Heart?, produced for the ABC in 1999 by Richard Moore and Jeremy Eccles. The documentary is noteworthy not only because it posed the question of whether the cultural foundations of Aboriginal art were being diluted by artists’ desire for money and the impact of commercial forces (as conveyed by the question mark in the title), but because it was highly controversial, with many people judging it to be racially discriminatory and damaging to the Aboriginal art cause. The film explored several of the inflammatory issues noted above: familial pressures to produce, the ubiquity of works of uncertain provenance, and the fact that artists in Alice Springs had relationships with several dealers for whom they painted regularly for cash. It also contained scenes which showed that artists did not understand the way the market operated, and attended to the way in which Art Centres’ obligations to serve the entire community—in terms of being able to facilitate the creation of work, foster the cross-generational teaching of culture, and having a supply of cash to pay artists—was leading to the market being flooded with poor quality works. There are numerous moments in the film in which money matters are addressed with striking openness. For example, Hank Ebes, a charismatic (and now retired) dealer,

Some Reflections on Aboriginal Art’s Relationship with Money

43

both admired and maligned in the Aboriginal art world, is filmed making comments like “the cab drivers in Alice Springs sell more paintings than the galleries,” and “It is black art for white people. Without the money that we supply, there is no Aboriginal art. Make no mistake about that.” When the documentary was circulated by the ABC, prior to broadcast, it was heavily criticised by Art Centre coordinators and others who had assisted the producers.27 They argued that they had been misled about the producers’ agenda and the documentary was twice prevented from being screened. There were two segments particularly offensive to the film’s critics. In the first, artists at Balgo Art Centre, in response to Moore’s questions, debate whether they paint for money or paint for “country” and from the “heart.” One artist, among the most successful at the time, stated repeatedly and emphatically that he only paints for money. The second segment, which is played out in several small episodes throughout the documentary, involves Moore bargaining with a male artist on Todd Mall (the main shopping strip in Alice Springs) who is trying to sell a painting to tourists. In retrospect, Richard Moore notes the significance of the fact that the criticisms came largely from “white gatekeepers” who were heavily invested in the success of the Art Centre system. These individuals were greatly disturbed that the film questioned the virtue of the Art Centre rationale and challenged the widespread belief that artists were driven to make work primarily because of their love of their ancestral country, and their desire to maintain their culture for future generations, a belief that has been integral to the narrative of the art movement as a whole and encouraged by Art Centre coordinators and most other champions of Aboriginal art.28 Let us turn now to the second variation of negative perspectives about Aboriginal art and money, those endorsing the commodification of Aboriginal art under certain conditions, but view certain forms of commodification as extremely problematic. These voices have largely focused upon the opportunistic and exploitative practices of mercenary non-indigenous dealers and agents, particularly those who have circumvented the Art Centre system.29 Their critiques portray Aboriginal artists as victims of a lamentable and highly unethical erosion of the essentially non-commercial structures upon which the Aboriginal art movement was built. Numerous examples of these views can be found in the discourses that surrounded the 2007 Senate Inquiry into the Indigenous Visual Arts and Crafts Sector.30 This inquiry took place during the year in which the over-heated Aboriginal art auction market culminated in some record-breaking sales, and when the relationships between dealers in the (overcrowded) primary art market had become markedly sectarian and

44

Chapter Four

adversarial. The associated newspaper articles, hearing transcripts and submissions reveal the tangle of financial, ethical and emotional investments non-indigenous Australians had in the future of the Aboriginal art sector. While this discussion cannot adequately address the complexity of the arguments made, collectively they make clear that a substantial number of people, organisations and commercial interests now had stakes in the future of the Aboriginal art movement, particularly as it had been anointed through major exhibitions, institutional acquisitions and the engagement of high status collectors. The discourses that contributed to the inquiry were largely concerned with differentiating virtuous from unscrupulous commercial conduct (the consensus being that the former was the purview of a few high-end art dealers and Art Centres). They addressed many of the troubling circumstances explored in Art from the Heart?, tending to frame these in the following way: Aboriginal artists are not getting a fair share of the income generated by their work; they are being compelled to leave their homelands and live in Alice Springs where they become prey to relatives who demand money from them while also being vulnerable to the deprivations, alcoholism, and violence that are a daily reality for disenfranchised Aboriginal people in such towns. Profiteering agents (colloquially described as “carpetbaggers”) take advantage of their poor literacy and numeracy skills and exploit the power of the obligation they have to their kin31 by manipulating artists’ relatives. Naive and/or wellmeaning collectors are buying debased art in the belief that artists are benefiting from that sale and that the work is valuable. In the vast majority of these discourses we find the following set of interrelated dichotomies: fine arts dealer vs. entrepreneurial dealer, Art Centre vs. non-Art Centre, love of art vs. love of money, ethical vs. unethical conduct, good vs. bad art, strong Aboriginal culture vs. degraded Aboriginal culture. It is not hard to see how many these dichotomies reflect the classic opposition of disinterestedness to self-interest/pecuniary interest that is traceable to Kantian understandings of the principles that underpin art’s autonomy.32 The latter terms all point to a valueless and deceptive form of art, polluted by material interests and avarice, whereas the former delineate a morally pure union between high culture, ethicalhumanist sensibilities and liberty of thought and imagination. If we accept Bourdieu’s proposition that this idealised aggregation is conditional upon “the suspension and removal of economic necessity,”33 we can begin to comprehend the discord between the settings in which Aboriginal art is produced and the settings in which it has been consecrated as a form of fine art, a discord held in fragile suspension by the dealers, Art Centre

Some Reflections on Aboriginal Art’s Relationship with Money

45

coordinators, and other professionals who conduct their work in the spaces where these domains meet. The Senate Inquiry discourses in which these kinds of dichotomies were embedded often had an intense, polemical, moral charge. For example, Indigenous scholar Marcia Langton wrote: Indigenous art, the great economic lifeline for bush communities, is being undermined by its own success and parasites feeding off its lifeblood…how many children have gone hungry—and become ill, terminally ill—in these exchanges while carpetbaggers pay off their mortgages, spruce up their equity portfolios, dine out with clients, buy a new BMW? 34

In his 2006 feature article “Scams in the Desert,” which set the stage for the inquiry, Nicholas Rothwell wrote that “the dark side of the desert painting trade is…destroying the broader Aboriginal art industry, the one viable source of income and the one productive economic activity for Indigenous people across remote Australia.” He concluded with the question: “Art buyer, as you read this weekend paper, is your conscience clear?”35 What is notable about these interpretations is that they situate an ostensibly morally pure and emancipatory configuration of the economic dimensions of the Aboriginal art movement as being overwhelmed by a malevolent configuration of these economic dimensions, in which artists are unequivocally victims. Latent within Rothwell’s and Langton’s impressions of the ruination of the art movement by profiteering is the long-standing faith in the idea that Aboriginal art can mitigate Aboriginal poverty. Moreover, as with the criticisms of Art from the Heart?, these kinds of arguments point to the critical mediating role played by the Art Centres in attesting to the non-commercial, culturally grounded imperatives of Aboriginal art production, an impression that cannot be sustained if artists deal directly with market. As I argued above, this way of thinking has been pivotal to the utopianism that underlies the way the Aboriginal art movement has been imagined through an altruistic lens, and these quotations amply illustrate the dystopianism with which it is in dialectical relation.

Concluding remarks The discourses reviewed above exemplify the spectrum of perspectives on Aboriginal art and money that have informed, in both overt and covert ways, the public understanding of the Aboriginal art movement. Some of

46

Chapter Four

these have the titillating flavour of the kinds of narratives about money, and the mysteriousness of art’s value, that are endlessly fascinating to the public: inflationary markets, record prices, excessive wealth, fraud, fakes, “rags to riches” stories, and tragic downfalls. Others, from the AAB policy context to the articles authored by Anne-Marie Willis and Tony Fry, have been expressive of various ethical concerns around Aboriginal people’s wellbeing, their disempowerment, and their vulnerability to exploitation within both commercial settings and within the dominant national culture. Where Aboriginal fine art is concerned, we have encountered the impression that money undermines the aesthetic and cultural integrity of Aboriginal art, as illustrated in Art from the Heart?, as well as in the backlash it triggered. In the context of the 2007 Inquiry, ethical concerns found another permutation, articulated as a means to segregate the market into virtuous and unvirtuous spheres, and to defend the behaviour of artists whose priorities and relationships were destabilising the value structures within which their work had come to accrue value as fine art. All of these interpretations of Aboriginal art’s relationship to money point, as Myers has suggested, to various “struggles over fixing the place and limits of Aboriginal culture’s very appropriation by the market” and signal that Aboriginal artworks “partially resist and partially accommodate both their commodification and their status as fine art.”36 They reveal, as I noted earlier, that Aboriginal art has confounded the processes of aesthetic autonomisation on many fronts. They are all symptomatic of the degree to which market forces have mediated the public’s perceptions of the Aboriginal art movement over the last several decades. Further, they indicate that many concerned non-indigenous citizens feel compelled to find ethical means of engaging with Indigenous personhood, culture and disadvantage, and that Aboriginal art has been an avenue for exercising these tendencies. Further still, they are revelatory of the extent to which the State, far from adopting a conventional “arm’s length” approach to arts subsidy, has targeted Aboriginal art as an avenue to address its own obligations to mitigate Aboriginal poverty in remote areas and demonstrate its concern with recuperating and validating Aboriginal culture within national public culture. So how do we make sense of the co-existence of the utopian and dystopian perspectives on Aboriginal art and money reviewed in this article? While the preoccupation with exploitative commercial conditions that culminated in the Senate Inquiry of 2007 is justified to an extent, the intensity of these discourses, and the controversy caused by Art from the Heart? cannot solely be accounted for by concern that Aboriginal artists are being victimised. These responses efface, and in so doing lay open for

Some Reflections on Aboriginal Art’s Relationship with Money

47

critical interrogation, some fundamental contradictions inherent to the idealised narrative of the Aboriginal art movement. I would argue that they reveal the impossible tension inherent in the interweaving, on the one hand, of the ethical and pragmatic goals that have shaped the expansion of the Aboriginal art sector, and, on the other hand, of the aesthetic ideals according to which Aboriginal art has been made meaningful as fine art. These discourses reveal that the immense hopes that have been attached to the Aboriginal art movement, and which have underpinned the energy many non-indigenous people have expended upon it, were ill-prepared for the consequences that have flowed from the fact that Aboriginal people have indeed treated their art as a means to make money. Convictions about Aboriginal art being an “economic lifeline” collapse if the artists’ approach to the market violates those subtle and convoluted principles that enable works of fine art to accrue economic value. These principles have been successfully inverted by artists such Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, artists who fit art economist David Galenson’s description of the “artist as materialist.”37 Warhol, Koons and Hirst audaciously and strategically broadcast their love for money and their desire for wealth, and manage to bring about a rare convergence of celebrity aura and fine art status. As such, they are the exceptions that prove the rule that the art world remains deeply invested in the belief that artists are driven by a passion for their work—for truth, beauty, the good, and the intrinsic and transcendent value of ideas—and not by material interests. While certain aspects of the Aboriginal art movement have resonated powerfully with these cherished ideals, many other aspects—the subsidy paradigm upon which the Aboriginal Art Centres were built, many of the cultural and familial priorities that orient the artists’ practice, and the relationships they have established with entrepreneurial dealers—are irreconcilable with them. Ultimately, therefore, my hope is that the preceding discussion has shed light upon the paradox at the heart of the utopian vision of the Aboriginal art movement: that an Aboriginal art trade can benefit Aboriginal people economically, and at the same time bring about a revitalisation of Aboriginal culture as a form of high art.

Acknowledgements I wish to thank Jamie Roberts, Gay McDonald and Peter Stupples for very helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. I am also grateful to Richard Moore for taking the time to share his reflections on the issues that surrounded the making of the film Art from the Heart? I also thank Peter and the other organisers of the Art and Money Symposium for their

48

Chapter Four

very warm welcome, and audience members for their thoughtful comments on the paper I delivered there.

Notes 1. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993) 37; Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958) 32-47. The exception to this is “urban” Aboriginal art, which is largely outside the purview of this discussion. My focus here is the Aboriginal art produced in the least urbanised regions of Australia (and the town of Alice Springs), in which the incursion of the infrastructure and culture of settler society occurred much later than on the coastal fringe, and is still only partial in many respects. 2. There are, of course, further dimensions to the partiality of Aboriginal art’s autonomy which I am unable to address in the following discussion, not least those arising from the fact that Aboriginal art is embedded within structures of social and cultural meaning, that is, other “regimes of value,” that are endogenous to the communities within which it is created. See Howard Morphy, “Indigenous Art as Economy,” in Diane Austin-Broos and Gaynor Macdonald (eds), Culture, Economy and Governance in Aboriginal Australia (Sydney, NSW: Sydney University Press, 2005) 19-28. 3. For insights into these points of convergence, see Timothy Rowse, “The Arts Advocacy of H. C. Coombs,” in Tony Bennett and David Carter (eds), Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 114-34; Fred Myers, “The Wizards of Oz: Nation, State and the Production of Aboriginal Fine Art” in Fred Myers (ed.), The Empire of Things (Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 2001) 165-204. 4. See for example Sylvia Kleinert, “Black Canberra,” Art & Text 30 (1988) 92-5; Vivien Johnson, “Among Others: Reply to ‘Black Canberra’,” Art & Text 30 (1988) 98-9; Hetti Perkins and Victoria Lynn, “Blak Artists, Cultural Activists” in Victoria Lynn (ed.), Australian Perspecta 1993 (Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 1993) x-xii; Terry Smith, “Public Art between Cultures: The ‘Aboriginal Memorial,’ Aboriginality and Nationality in Australia,” Critical Inquiry, 27:4 (2001) 629-61. 5. For more detailed examinations of the Aboriginal art movement, see the essays in Bernard Lüthi and Gary Lee (eds), Aratjara: Art of the First Australians (Dusseldorf and Cologne: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen & DuMont Buchverlag, 1993); Fred Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (London: Duke University Press, 2002); Howard Morphy, Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008). 6. “The Dreaming” refers to the spatially and temporally interminable sphere—the “everywhen” as anthropologist William Stanner described it—of sacred knowledge that underpins the meaning and purpose of Aboriginal existence. Dreaming narratives recall and revivify the paths and activities of ancestral deities who

Some Reflections on Aboriginal Art’s Relationship with Money

49

created the land formations, plants, animals and people and anchored them to each other through totemic identification, moral codes and bonds of custodianship and reciprocity. W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays (Collingwood, Vic.: Black Inc., 2010) 58; After the Dreaming (Sydney: The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), 1968). 7. See Aboriginal Arts Board, National Seminar on Aboriginal Arts: Conference Papers (Canberra: Aboriginal Arts Board, Australian Council for the Arts, 1973). 8. Ronald M. Berndt, “A Living Aboriginal Art: The Changing Inside and Outside Contexts” in Peter Loveday and Peter Cooke (eds), Aboriginal Arts and Crafts and the Market (Darwin: The Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, 1983) 29-36; Morphy: 2005. 9. Philip Batty, “Money, Corruption and Authenticity,” Artlink, 1 & 2 (1990) 32-3. 10. Dick Roughsey, “The Aboriginal Arts Board,” Art and Australia, 13:3 (1976) 235-9. See also Australia Council, Aboriginal Arts Board Program Booklet (North Sydney: Arts Information Program of the Australia Council, 1979); Australia Council, Australia Council Annual Report 1983/1984 (North Sydney: Australia Council, Commonwealth of Australia, 1984); Jon Altman, Chris McGuigan and Peter Yu, The Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Industry: Report of the Review Committee, Department of Aboriginal Affairs (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1989) chapters 8 & 9. For recent articulations of this perspective in policy contexts, see Office for the Arts, Indigenous Visual Arts Industry Support (IVAIS) Fact Sheet (2011), ; Office for the Arts, Culture and Closing the Gap Fact Sheet (2011), . 11. Australia Council, Australia Council for the Arts Annual Report (North Sydney: Australia Council, 1975/1976) 23. 12. For discussions of these phenomena see Laura Fisher, “‘Aboriginal Mass Culture’: A Critical History,” Visual Studies, 29:3 (2014, forthcoming); Andrew Lattas, “Aborigines and Contemporary Australian Nationalism: Primordiality and the Cultural Politics of Otherness” in Gillian Cowlishaw and Barry Morris (eds), Race Matters (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997) 223-55; Nicholas Baume, “Learning from the Dreamtime,” Art & Australia, 26:1 (1988) 77-83; Marcia Langton, “Culture Wars” in Michelle Grossman (ed.), Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writings by Indigenous Australians (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2003) 81-91. 13. For example, the Australian Perspecta exhibitions of 1981 and 1983 were significant, as was the 1988 exhibition Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia at the Asia Society Galleries, New York. For accounts of the changing acquisition policies of Australian art institutions, see Anna Philp, “Life and Art? Relocating Aboriginal Art and Culture in the Museum,” reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia, 2:1 (2007) 48-70; Wally Caruana, “The Collection of Indigenous Australian Art: Beginnings and Some Highlights,” in Pauline Green (ed.), Building the Collection (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2007) 193209.

50

Chapter Four

14. The Aboriginal art market contracted with the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007-08. For useful sources on the Aboriginal art market, see Shireen Huda, Pedigree and Panache: A History of the Art Auction in Australia (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2008); Tim Acker, Lisa Stefanoff, Alice Woodhead, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Economies Project: Literature Review, CRC-REP Working Paper CW010 (Alice Springs: Ninti One Limited, 2013). 15. This refers to Emily Kngwarreye, among the most celebrated Aboriginal artists, over whom many dealers competed for works. 16. Jane Cadzow, “The Art Boom of Dreamtime,” The Australian Weekend Magazine, 14-15 March, 1987, 1-2; L. Schwartz, “Dots for Dollars,” The Age, November 26, 1989, 1-2; Four Corners, “Dot for Dollar” [television documentary], Australian Broadcasting Corporation, May 31, 1999, ; Jane Cadzow, “The Emily Industry,” The Sydney Morning Herald (Good Weekend), August 5, 1995, 31-7; Germaine Greer, “Selling off the Dreaming,” Sydney Morning Herald, December 6, 1997, 5; Lorena Allam, “Black Art Gold Rush,” ABC Background Briefing, September 25, 2005, ; Ben Genocchio, Dollar Dreaming: Inside the Aboriginal Art World (Prahran, Vic.: Hardie Grant Books, 2008). 17. Corrie Perkins and Sarah Elks, “Indigenous Art Breaks the $1m Barrier,” The Australian, May 24, 2007; Gabriella Coslovich, “$2.4m for Possum Painting that Once Fetched $1200—You’re not Dreaming,” The Age, July 25, 2007. See also Susan McCulloch, “The Hand that Signed the Paper,” The Weekend Australian Review, April 24-5, 1999, 4-6. For critical writings on these events, see Fred Myers, “Some Properties of Art and Culture: Ontologies of the Image and Economies of Exchange,” in Daniel Miller (ed.), Materiality (London: Duke University Press, 2005) 88-117; Vivien Johnson, “The Aboriginal Art Scandals’ Scandal,” Artlink, 20:1 (2000) 32-3. 18. See Roger Benjamin, “The Brush with Words: Criticism and Aboriginal Art,” in Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale (eds), The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000) 446-70; Tim Bonyhady, “Papunya Stories,” Australian Humanities Review, 20 (2000), ; Sebastian Smee, “Culture Shift,” The Weekend Australian, March 11-12, 2006. 19. Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) 40-1. 20. Parallels can be drawn between the inflationary Aboriginal art market and the 1980s art boom in New York. In the latter case the number of galleries increased rapidly, the works of artists without established reputations achieved disproportionately high prices, and auction houses and private dealers were both trading the work of living artists. As Nancy Sullivan observes, it became clear that the availability of money and an eagerness amongst collectors to enter the market was determining the kind of art that was being made and the kinds of artists that were being canonised, which entailed that pre-existing “aesthetic and economic

Some Reflections on Aboriginal Art’s Relationship with Money

51

values had collapsed under the weight of new money entering the system.” See Nancy Sullivan, “Inside Trading: Postmodernism and the Social Drama of Sunflowers in the 1980s Art World,” in George E. Marcus and Fred Myers (eds), The Traffic in Culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 1995) 256-301. 21. It is also notable that Wally Caruana, who was the pioneering Senior Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at the National Gallery of Australia between 1984 and 2001, and involved with many seminal exhibitions and monographs on the Aboriginal art movement, was a senior consultant at Sotheby's for many years and involved in brokering relationships with major collectors. 22. For an art critic’s take on this problem, see Sebastian Smee, “Forget Me Not,” The Australian, April 5, 2008. 23. Quoted in Myers:2001, 175. 24. Ibid. 174-5. 25. Anne-Marie Willis and Tony Fry, “Ethnocentricism, Art & the Culture of Domination,” Praxis M, 20 (1988) 16-22; “Art as Ethnocide: The Case of Australia,” Third Text, 5 (1989) 3-20; “Aboriginal Art: Symptom or Success?” Art in America, 77:7 (1989) 108-16, 159-160, 163; “Not What You'd Call a Good Paint Job,” Artlink 9:3 (1989) 48-9. For recent reflections see “Looking Back” in Ian McLean (ed.), How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art (Brisbane, Sydney: Institute of Modern Art & Power Publications, 2011), 286-7. 26. Willis and Fry:1989, “Aboriginal art: Symptom or success?” 116. 27. For criticisms see G. Greene, “ABC in Storm over Art Film,” The Age, April 21, 1999:2; Jacqueline Healy, “Art from the Heart?,” Art Monthly Australia, 122 (1999) 13-15; Romaine Moreton, “Secondary Curator’s Notes” (on Art from the Heart?), Australian Screen: Australia’s Audiovisual Heritage Online, . For a response from one of the producers, see Jeremy Eccles, “Art from the Heart?—A Rejoinder,” Art Monthly Australia, 127 (2000) 4-5. 28. Richard Moore, personal communication with the author, 24 April 2014. 29. A large group of people who can be usefully characterised as entrepreneurial dealers or intermediaries began trading in Aboriginal art in the early 1990s once high prices were being achieved for particular artists. While some of these expanded already existing tourism and souvenir enterprises, others came from business backgrounds, far removed from either Aboriginal culture or art in general. These operators have facilitated the production of paintings by taking rolls of canvas and materials to communities, and/or establishing painting sheds and painting rooms on their properties, or in shops and galleries in Alice Springs visited by artists. Their remunerative arrangements with artists have often been ad hoc or based on long-term relationships of reciprocity. The variety of means by which these operators typically pay artists (other than cash) are reflective of the goods and services which are in demand in remote communities: second hand cars, alcohol, medicine, food, clothing, school fees, a tab or running account at a store, taxi rides and so on. In contrast to fine arts dealers, who stage individualised exhibitions at well-spaced intervals and are guided by principles of discretion, differentiation and restricted supply, the entrepreneurial dealers tend to treat the

52

Chapter Four

works they sell as revolving “stock”: they mix paintings up with other merchandise, try to respond directly to perceived demand, and do not believe that any dealer has proprietary rights over a particular artist. 30. The Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Indigenous Art—Securing the Future: Australia’s Indigenous Visual Arts and Crafts Sector (Canberra: Standing Committee on Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, 2007). The report, submissions and hearing transcripts can be downloaded from the Parliament of Australia website: . 31. This obligation, often referred to as “humbugging” in Aboriginal vernacular, has been discussed by anthropologists as “demand sharing.” See Nicolas Peterson, “Demand Sharing: Reciprocity and the Pressure for Generosity among Foragers,” American Anthropologist, 95:4 (1993) 860-74. 32. See Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001) 144-51; Mark Banks, “Autonomy Guaranteed? Cultural Work and the ‘Art-Commerce Relation’,” Journal of Cultural Research, 14:3 (2010) 251-69; Daniel Miller, “Primitive Art and the Necessity of Primitivism to Art,” in Susan Hiller (ed.), The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art (London & New York: Routledge, 1991) 50-71. 33. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) 54. 34. Marcia Langton, “Dodgy Dreaming as Parasites Run Free,” The Australian, May 25, 2007. 35. Nicolas Rothwell “Scams in the Desert,” The Weekend Australian, March 4-5, 2006. 36. Myers:2005, 105. 37. David Galenson, Artists and the Market: From Leonardo and Titian to Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst, NBER Working Paper 1377, September 2007, .

References Aboriginal Arts Board, National Seminar on Aboriginal Arts: Conference Papers (Canberra: Aboriginal Arts Board, Australian Council for the Arts, 1973). Acker, Tim, Lisa Stefanoff, Alice Woodhead, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Economies Project: Literature Review, CRC-REP Working Paper CW010 (Alice Springs: Ninti One Limited, 2013). Allam, Lorena, “Black Art Gold Rush,” ABC Background Briefing, September 25, 2005, accessed May 20, 2014.

Some Reflections on Aboriginal Art’s Relationship with Money

53

Altman, Jon, Chris McGuigan and Peter Yu, The Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Industry: Report of the Review Committee, Department of Aboriginal Affairs (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1989). Australia Council, Australia Council Annual Report 1983/1984 (North Sydney: Australia Council, Commonwealth of Australia, 1984). —. Aboriginal Arts Board Program Booklet (North Sydney: Arts Information Program of the Australia Council, 1979). —. Australia Council for the Arts Annual Report (North Sydney: Australia Council, 1975/1976). Banks, Mark, “Autonomy Guaranteed? Cultural Work and the ‘ArtCommerce Relation’,” Journal of Cultural Research 14:3 (2010). accessed 13 March, 2013. Batty, Philip, “Money, Corruption and Authenticity,” Artlink, 1 & 2 (1990). Baume, Nicholas, “Learning from the Dreamtime,” Art & Australia, 26:1 (1988). Benjamin, Roger, “The Brush with Words: Criticism and Aboriginal Art,” in Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale (eds), The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000) 446–70. Berndt, Ronald M,. “A Living Aboriginal Art: The Changing Inside and Outside Contexts,” in Peter Loveday and Peter Cooke (eds), Aboriginal Arts and Crafts and the Market (Darwin: The Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, 1983). Bonyhady, Tim, “Papunya stories,” Australian Humanities Review, 20 (2000), accessed May 20, 2014. Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). —. Distinction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Cadzow, Jane, “The Art Boom of Dreamtime,” The Australian Weekend Magazine, 14-15 March, 1987. —. “The Emily Industry,” The Sydney Morning Herald (Good Weekend), August 5, 1995. Caruana, Wally, “The Collection of Indigenous Australian Art: Beginnings and Some Highlights,” in Pauline Green (ed.), Building the Collection (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2007). Coslovich, Gabriella, “$2.4m for Possum Painting that Once Fetched $1200—You’re Not Dreaming,” The Age, July 25, 2007.

54

Chapter Four

Eccles, Jeremy, “Art from the Heart?—A Rejoinder,” Art Monthly Australia, 127 (2000) 4-5. Fisher, Laura, “‘Aboriginal Mass Culture’: A Critical History,” Visual Studies 29:3 (2014), forthcoming. Four Corners, “Dot for Dollar” [television documentary], Australian Broadcasting Corporation, May 31, 1999, accessed May 20, 2014. Galenson, David, Artists and the Market: From Leonardo and Titian to Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst, NBER Working Paper 1377, September 2007, accessed 19 April, 2014. Genocchio, Ben, Dollar Dreaming: Inside the Aboriginal Art World (Prahan, Vic.: Hardie Grant Books, 2008). Greene, G., “ABC in Storm over Art Film,” The Age, April 21, 1999, 2. Greer, Germaine, “Selling off the Dreaming,” Sydney Morning Herald, December 6, 1997. Healy, Jacqueline, “Art from the Heart?,” Art Monthly Australia, 122 (1999). Huda, Shireen, Pedigree and Panache: A History of the Art Auction in Australia (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2008). Johnson, Vivien, “Among Others: Reply to ‘Black Canberra,’” Art & Text 30 (1988). Johnson, Vivien, “The Aboriginal Art Scandals’ Scandal,” Artlink, 20 (2000). Kleinert, Sylvia, “Black Canberra,” Art & Text, 30 (1988). Langton, Marcia, “Culture Wars,” in Michelle Grossman (ed.), Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writings by Indigenous Australians (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2003). Lattas, Andrew, “Aborigines and Contemporary Australian Nationalism: Primordiality and the Cultural Politics of Otherness,” in Gillian Cowlishaw and Barry Morris (eds), Race Matters (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997). Lüthi, Bernard and Gary Lee (eds), Aratjara: Art of the First Australians (Dusseldorf and Cologne: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen & DuMont Buchverlag, 1993). McCulloch, Susan, “The Hand that Signed the Paper,” The Weekend Australian Review, April 24-5, 1999.

Some Reflections on Aboriginal Art’s Relationship with Money

55

Marcus, George E. and Fred Myers (eds), The Traffic in Culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 1995). Miller, Daniel, “Primitive Art and the Necessity of Primitivism to Art,” in Susan Hiller (ed.), The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art (London & New York: Routledge, 1991). Moreton, Romaine, “Secondary Curator’s Notes (on Art from the Heart?),” Australian Screen: Australia’s Audiovisual Heritage Online, accessed 24 April, 2014. Morphy, Howard, “Indigenous Art as Economy,” in Diane Austin-Broos and Gaynor Macdonald (eds), Culture, Economy and Governance in Aboriginal Australia (Sydney, NSW: Sydney University Press, 2005). —. Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-cultural Categories (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008). Myers, Fred, “The Wizards of Oz: Nation, State and the Production of Aboriginal Fine Art” in Fred Myers (ed.), The Empire of Things (Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 2001). —. Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (London, Duke University Press, 2002). —. “Some Properties of Art and Culture: Ontologies of the Image and Economies of Exchange,” in Daniel Miller (ed.), Materiality (London: Duke University Press, 2005). Office for the Arts, Indigenous Visual Arts Industry Support (IVAIS) Fact Sheet (Canberra: Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2011), accessed May 20, 2014. —. Culture and Closing the Gap Fact Sheet (Canberra: Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2011), accessed May 20, 2014. Perkins, Corrie and Sarah Elks, “Indigenous Art Breaks the $1m Barrier,” The Australian, May 24, 2007. Perkins, Hetti and Victoria Lynn, “Blak Artists, Cultural Activists,” in Victoria Lynn (ed.), Australian Perspecta 1993 (Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 1993) x–xii. Peterson, Nicolas, “Demand Sharing: Reciprocity and the Pressure for Generosity among Foragers,” American Anthropologist, 95: 4 (1993).

56

Chapter Four

Philp, Anna, “Life and Art? Relocating Aboriginal Art and Culture in the Museum,” reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia, 2:1 (2007). Rothwell, Nicolas, “Scams in the Desert,” The Weekend Australian, March 4-5, 2006. Rowse, Timothy, “The Arts Advocacy of H.C. Coombs,” in Tony Bennett and David Carter (eds), Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Roughsey, Dick, “The Aboriginal Arts Board,” Art and Australia 13:3 (1976). Schwartz, L., “Dots for Dollars,” The Age, November 26, 1989. Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Indigenous Art—Securing the Future: Australia’s Indigenous Visual Arts and Crafts Sector (Canberra: Standing Committee on Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, 2007). Shiner, Larry, The Invention of Art (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001). Smee, Sebastian, “Culture Shift,” The Weekend Australian, March 11-12, 2006. —. “Forget Me Not,” The Australian, April 5, 2008. Smith, Terry, “Public Art between Cultures: The ‘Aboriginal Memorial’, Aboriginality, and Nationality in Australia,” Critical Inquiry, 27:4 (2001). Stanner, William E. H., After the Dreaming (Sydney: The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), 1968). —. The Dreaming and Other Essays (Collingwood, Vic: Black Inc., 2010). Sullivan, Nancy, “Inside Trading: Postmodernism and the Social Drama of Sunflowers in the 1980s Art World” in George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (eds), The Traffic in Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). Velthuis, Olav, Talking Prices (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (London, Chatto & Windus, 1958). Willis, Anne-Marie and Tony Fry, “Aboriginal Art: Symptom or Success?,” Art in America, 77:7 (1989). —. “Art as Ethnocide: The Case of Australia,” Third Text, 5 (1989). —. “Ethnocentricism, art & the culture of domination,” Praxis M, 20 (1988).

Some Reflections on Aboriginal Art’s Relationship with Money

57

—. “Looking back,” in Ian McLean (ed.), How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art (Brisbane, Sydney: Institute of Modern Art & Power Publications, 2011). —. “Not What You'd Call a Good Paint Job,” Artlink, 9:3 (1989).

CHAPTER FIVE ART AND MONEY: COINS OF THE REALM MAX HAIVEN

I

n the introduction to Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson’s recent book Representing Capital, he revisits a theme that runs throughout his career: the fact that capital, that massive force in our world, that inhuman yet all-too-human intelligence or agency at the core of the capitalist economy, both demands and refuses to be represented.1 His book, which is a new reading of the first volume of Karl Marx’s Kapital, focuses on how that famous book is at once the most robust attempt to represent capital through language, and also, ultimately, a beautifully failed project. Jameson explains that this is because, in contrast to the hypotheses of mainstream economists and even many Marxists, capitalism creates more than a purely economic system, the power of which is limited to the ebb and flow of commodities and the exploitation of labour. Rather, capitalism represents, in his words, a “totality.” Its economic components rely, ultimately, on political choices; these political choices in turn rely on a set of cultural meanings; these cultural meanings in turn rely on aesthetic conventions; and these conventions in turn rely on economic fundamentals. Or, if you prefer, the social, cultural, economic, political, aesthetic and ideological components of capitalism all fit together in a non-linear, noncausal way. In contrast to the economic reductionism that has so long plagued Marxist critique, Jameson wants us to develop an understanding of capitalism that sees all these dimensions as interconnected and interreliant, like a proverbial house of cards. A notion of capitalist totality does not mean that resistance is futile, or that all individuals and all social structures automatically and uncritically obey the grim dictates of capital in all cases. Rather, it means that each and every social, aesthetic, political, cultural or economic process must be

60

Chapter Five

unpacked and understood dialectically. That is, we must approach everything as a site of power and contestation, capture and release, difference and repetition, utopianism and dystopianism, price and value. Such an approach to capitalist totality also means, for Jameson, an understanding about the so-called crisis of representation. We are likely familiar with this terminology as it pervades the post-modern aesthetic scene, animated as it is by a distrust of Modernist, Romantic and Enlightenment representational strategies, from realism to surrealism to socialist realism. Such a crisis has delivered us to an artistic moment more than ever dedicated to endless introspection, deconstruction, cynicism, irony and a concern with process, where the objective of art is no longer to represent the world but to call into question the very desire to represent.2 Yet this crisis of representation is also a common referent in other fields as well. For instance, political studies have, for years, been struggling with the question of how to justify the claims of so-called “representative governments,” especially in an age of globalisation.3 This is an age when multiculturalism is a (sometimes difficult) fact of life, when indigenous nations around the world are making their rightful claims against colonial-settler states, and when human migration has become commonplace and more liquid than ever.4 More profoundly, it is an age when the seemingly borderless force of transnational capitalism wreaks utter havoc on economies and societies around the world with impunity, and often with government complicity. Who the state represents and how that representation ought to be imagined is everywhere in crisis.5 So too might we point to a crisis of representation in the realm of economics, one brought so horrifically home to roost in 2008 when literally trillions of dollars worth of equity seemingly disappeared into the ether over a matter of days.6 This was, in effect, a double crisis of representation. First, it was a crisis for the hegemonic discipline of mainstream economics, which was ultimately forced to concede that its quasi-scientific measures and formula for representing global wealth and its movements had failed in their task. Second, however, it was also the moment when the main instruments of a financialised global economy showed themselves to be utterly incredible or “fictitious” representations of real-world wealth.7 The representations at the heart of the crisis, and the heart of our global financial architecture, are not merely “vanilla” stocks and bonds, but highly complex credit default swaps, collateralised debt obligations, mortgage-backed securities, structured investment vehicles and derivatives contracts.8 As I have argued elsewhere, the financial crisis revealed that these dark arts of finance are not the arcane powers of the

Art and Money: Coins of the Realm

61

underworld, wielded by awesome Wall-Street necromancers, but cheap parlour tricks by financial magicians caught up in their own illusions.9 Beyond the depraved antics of the financial sector, this crisis of representation in the global economy at large has dramatic and sorrowful impacts. It is borne out, for instance, in the startling fact that over 50% of the world’s farmers are malnourished thanks to the way global financialised capitalism undervalues their labour, gambles with global crop prices and drives corporate biopiracy.10 More broadly, it is played out in the ironies of austerity, where somehow countries that were rich yesterday are poor today, though the nuts and bolts of their economies have not substantively changed.11 In other words, the crisis of representation is also a crisis emanating from some profound disconnection between the price of things and their actual value. That is, there is some fundamental and terrifying chasm between, on the one hand, the quantity and qualities of money in a globalised age and, on the other, all those things that, today, increasingly, money seems to unduly influence: the value of food, the value of art, the value of human life, the value of culture, the value of land, the value of the public sphere, indeed, the value of the climate itself in an age of “carbon credits” and “carbon markets.” Money seems to measure or represent everything today, or, more accurately, mismeasure and misrepresent everything.12 Of course, the idea that money has somehow overstepped its bounds and become too powerful is ancient and ubiquitous. Practically everyone today would agree, from anarcho-communists to Christian fundamentalists.13 But here I agree with Jameson: blaming money itself is wrongheaded.14 It’s not that money is a neutral tool. Rather, money is just one element, though an important element, of capitalism. Jameson notes that Marx himself was quite hostile to critics of his day who sought to reform the system through legislative changes to the monetary system, or who sought to “correct” capitalism’s imbalances and excesses by inventing new currencies.15 Rather, Marx saw money as a key manifestation of capitalism —a system that is, ultimately, based not on who has the most money, but who controls the means of production.16 Money facilitates this system by disciplining us all and forcing us to conform to the system’s dictates. The ruling class uses money to buy our labour time. And lack of money, or the fear of lack of money, is the invisible whip that is held over all our heads, and also the heads of governments large and small, to ensure we all fall in line. For Jameson, money is a form of mediation—a necessary but flawed component of a larger system.

62

Chapter Five

Money is, of course, largely worthless: today it is token-like coins with no intrinsic metallic value, or printed slips of paper or, increasingly, some mass immaterial hallucination of credit and debt, held somewhere in a vast global computer network, haunting our lives like some digital panoptic superego, always watching. So for Marx and Jameson, money is not the root of all evil, but it facilitates the evil of a system that fundamentally values accumulation over human life and happiness. As mentioned above, Jameson, following Lukacs, sees the capitalist totality as driven by a fundamental paradox: it is inherently unrepresentable, yet it demands representation. The capitalist totality in which we live is made up of far too many moving, interconnected, inter-reliant parts to be fathomable to any single imagination. The sublime interdependency of the system, one that incorporates each of us, all art, all science, all politics, exceeds our ability to create what Jameson calls “cognitive maps” of our social world. As such, any cultural text (and, for that matter, any economic formula, theoretical excursus or visual representation) will always be an incomplete, partial and flawed representation of the world, a mediation.17 My basic argument is that art works which use coins, bills, credit cards (or representations thereof) as artistic material, inherently dwell upon this conundrum. On the one hand, they all seek to comment on, or at least draw power and meaning from, a capitalist economy that is, ultimately, beyond the scope of representation. Like moths to a flame, these works are attracted by an impossible desire to give aesthetic substance to that capitalist system that so dominates all our lives. I want to take up three “strategies” I see at work in this art that mobilises money as a medium. Well, actually four strategies. The first is not really a strategy at all: it is just rank opportunism. Given that, today, the ruling class is defined by little more than their access to money, many artists have dedicated themselves to ornamenting the rich with images of money.18 From painting to fashion to jewellery, there are plenty of artists who simply use the aesthetics of money as a means to create uncritical and often atrociously bad commodities that cater to the vanity of the wealthy for the so-called-artist’s own personal enrichment. These crass gestures aside, the first real critical strategy, however, is a relatively naked attempt to use art to comment on and critique money’s social and political power. Here I’ll take two examples. Barbara Kruger, for one, has used her iconic and idiosyncratic style, one that developed from her background in print advertising design, to provide a poetic but relatively direct and didactic revelation of money’s social power. Over her forty-year career, Kruger has found an ever broader

Art and Money: Coins of the Realm

63

and more appreciative audience for this work. While once the mainstream artworld saw Kruger’s work as unsightly and pedantic aesthetic activism, today, ironically (or perhaps fittingly?) it hangs in many world-class museums and the homes of wealthy collectors. Another example of this first strategy is Blu, the Italian street artist, whose phenomenal murals have appeared around the world. Emerging from a radical milieu of Bologna (notable as a hub of the radical and militant Autonomia movement of the 1970s and 80s), Blu’s work dramatises money’s power to transform human agency and possibility, often mobilising natural themes to contrast the utterly unnatural or supernatural power of money over our lives and our world. This first strategy, however, is largely within the romantic and modern idiom, even in spite of some more postmodern aesthetic elements. It posits the artist as the autonomous creative subject, revealing the truth of the world. It takes for granted that the representative power of the artist him or herself remains untainted or uncompromised. A second strategy, by contrast, seeks to show that art is not only sullied by but also complicit in money’s terrible power. This strategy itself has at least two angles, one I find laudatory, the other despicable. On the laudatory side, we have the work of artists like the Brooklynbased William Powhida, who uses large-scale pencil and pen diagrams to illustrate the way power and money influence the art world. His works are unapologetically literal, and are aimed at puncturing the overinflated mythology that somehow the realm of contemporary art is based on the noble and unassailable virtues of aesthetic value alone. The more despicable side of this strategy finds its origins perhaps in the work of Andy Warhol and its ultimate apotheosis in the work of Damien Hirst. This is a sort of art that candidly and unapologetically admits the influence of money and, indeed, embrace’s the market’s influence as not only natural but also right and good. Hirst here stands as a key exemplar of what Mark Taylor calls the “financialisation of art,” the transformation of art into a speculative commodity presided over by a cadre of self-aware art superstars who see themselves not merely as “brands,” but as financial impresarios.19 It is, then, no accident that irony, cynicism and self-critique have become common fare in the art market. It finds its buyers in the emergent “high net worth individuals,” the by products of increasing levels of global inequality. These actors drive a speculative fever for the contemporary art commodity, a versatile substance, which they see not merely as a source of “cultural capital” (in Bourdieu’s sense of the term), but also as an

64

Chapter Five

“alternative asset class,” merely one element of larger financial portfolios, mobilised to counterbalance the risks and yields of other investments.20 Whither art then? If revelation of money’s influence is too didactic, and admission of art’s complicity too cynical and mercenary, how else can and should artists address money, the most powerful force of this or any age? After all it is a force so ubiquitous and intimate that we, each of us, now, today, wear it like a hidden badge or charm upon our persons, and which so preoccupies our individual and collective imaginations that we can quite literally not envision a world without it. Artists cannot avoid this theme. The third and final strategy, then, is something more subtle, but also potentially quite radical. It is art that draws specific attention to the deep affinity of art and money as forms of mediation. That is, it seeks to show that the value of money and the power of art are both the products of human cooperation and creativity. In Marx’s terms, money is the ultimate “commodity fetish,” a dead, useless, banal object which, through a sort of secret conspiracy, we endow with almost magical powers.21 Money gains its value and its power only through the continual suspension of our disbelief. What we take to be money’s power to allow us access to the fruits of other people’s labour, whether we buy it in the form of a good or a service, is actually, in Marx’s conception, merely our own creative and collaborative power sold back to us. We (the working class) lend our energies to the dynamo of capitalist production for a money wage; we use that wage to buy back the products of “our” own power. Money is, as David Graeber poetically puts it (quoting Marcel Mauss), the “false coin of our own dreams,” but one whose power over social life cannot be gainsaid.22 Likewise art is itself a mediation.23 We lionise and revere the artist as a unique creative genius, but, in reality, every artist is the product of community, every artwork relies on an aesthetic and conceptual lineage, and every painting, installation, performance or video relies upon an audience to give it meaning and value. Like money, art necessarily beguiles us into an almost spiritual belief in its otherworldly power, yet this power is really our own collective power reflected back to us in the singular aesthetic achievement of the artist. In other words both art and money are holographic shards of a greater shattered and alienated totality. The nature of that totality is not simply the saturation of all social and cultural life with the dictates of capital; it is something deeper. The totality refers to that unimaginable, sublime totality of human cooperation and creativity that capital seeks to discipline, shape, colonise and transform. The third strategy of art and money, I argue,

Art and Money: Coins of the Realm

65

speaks (always in a partial, incomplete way) to this unimaginable totality, and to money’s power over it. But it also speaks to the creative and cooperative potential underneath, which is the source of all our hope and, perhaps, of all beauty (if we can still talk of such a thing). I close with two examples. The first is the work of Italian performance, installation and conceptual artist Cesare Pietroiusti whose work with money has been particularly thoughtful, playful and profound. For instance, Pietroiusti routinely uses his artist fee (transubstantiated into banknotes) as a medium itself, creating work that is difficult or impossible to sell or value. In an October 2007 performance in the context of the group show Looking for the Border (curated by Roberto Pinto, Francesca di Nardo, Luk Lambrecht and Koen Leemans), Pietroiusti invited the audience to lend him banknotes of no less than €20, which he modified with sulfuric acid and returned to the audience member with a certificate of artistic authenticity.

Fig. 5-1. Cesare Pietroiusti, image from a 2007 performance in which the artist treated money with sulfuric acid. Photo by Martina Della Valle. Courtesy of the artist.

In his 2008 installation Untitled (Three Thousand US Dollar Bills to Take Away) installation for the exhibition Art, Price, Value: Contemporary Art and the Market at Centro de Cultura Contemporanea a Palazzo Strozzi in

66

Chapter Five

Florence, Pietroiusti again conducted a series of experiments applying sulfuric acid to three thousand American $1 and $5 bills, then stamped the back with a note explaining that “ogni transazione in denaro riguardante quest’opera invaliderà la firma del suo autore e di conseguenza trasformerà l’opera stessa in un falso” (“each monetary transaction involving this artwork will invalidate the signature of its author and consequently transform it into a fake”). The bills were hung on the wall of the gallery and visitors were encouraged to take one. In these pieces, Pietroiusti draws the audience into a speculative set of relationships through money’s materiality. These complex, multi-layered pieces, which deconstruct the value of both art and money on a number of levels, are not simply satisfied to reveal the contradictions and ironies as per “strategy two.” Rather, Pietroiusti is mobilising art’s peculiar location at the intersection of multiple forms of value to create a temporary space where, for a moment at least, we can pay attention to the work we are all always already doing to reproduce capitalist social relations.

Fig. 5-2. Cesare Pietroiusti and Paul Griffiths, Eating Money—An Auction, 2005-7. Performance at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK. Photo: Caters News. Courtesy of the Ikon Gallery.

More illuminating still is his performance Eating Money, where he (and sometimes collaborators) hosts a gallery-based auction where the audience bids with paper money. The person offering the largest denomination gives it to the artist who promptly swallows it. After it passes through his

Art and Money: Coins of the Realm

67

system, the bill is cleaned, sanitised, framed and given “back” to the original “investor.” Here, the artist digests the object and transforms its economic value into aesthetic value. Given Pietroiusti’s reputation, we can imagine that the art-object-that-was-once-money-and-is-now-art has gained a new economic value in excess of the “face value” of the paper money itself. Pietroiusti is not merely cynically calling attention to the intimate (incestuous) relationship between art and money (as per our “strategy two”), his scatological performance also asks us to consider a deeper question: how do we create value together? How does shit become gold, and gold become shit? How is it that we bestow power on art and money? How are these collective processes? In a sense, this work asks us to recall what we are always otherwise forgetting: that the world of value is something we reproduce on a daily basis, though (to paraphrase Marx), not in the conditions we might choose.

Fig. 5-3. Cesar Pietroiusti, Money-Watching, 2007. Performance and social action at a Birmingham shopfront. Photo: Chris Keenan. Courtesy of the Ikon Gallery and the artist.

In another piece, Pietroiusti used the auspices of a shop front in Bristol to open a money store for one day. Here, passersby were invited to “purchase” a £10 or £20 note in return for fifteen or twenty-five minutes worth of undivided attention, respectively. The “customer” was to stare at the note, placed in a glass display case, for 7.5 minutes or 12.5 minutes per

68

Chapter Five

side, after which it was given to them. Here, Pietroiusti transforms the art event into (or perhaps reveals the art event to be) a scene of almost meaningless commercial transaction. By harnessing the “customer” or audience’s useless, immaterial labour, they become complicit in a ritual for creating value. This potentially reveals the arbitrary nature of both aesthetic and economic value, and the way this arbitrary nature is enforced and encoded through spaces and objects: the disciplinary space of the gallery which encloses the meaning of art; or the aesthetic form of money itself which, unlike any other visual object, so beguilingly convinces us of its value(s).

Fig. 5-4. Máximo González, Big Magma CCCLXX-I, 2011. Installation view. Money and glue. Courtesy of the artist.

Another artist whose work is well worth our attention is the Mexico Citybased Máximo González, who has been working with international bills as artistic media for almost a decade. González joins literally hundreds (probably thousands) of other artists seduced by paper money’s strange and terrible power and beauty, but he ranks among the most conceptually and technically adept. He dedicates a great deal of care and creativity to exploring the formal qualities and potentials of paper money, and his work, which often takes the form of large-scale pieces or installations, is marked by a painstaking attention to detail which other money artists,

Art and Money: Coins of the Realm

69

seduced as they are by the conceptual richness of working with money, all too typically forgo. González has experimented with the textility or textuality of money, transforming bills into thread or yarn with which he weaves elegant tapestries, works which illuminate money’s influence in and reliance on the warp and weft of human activity.

Fig. 5-5. Máximo González, Basura Sin Paisaje (Landfill Without Landscape), 2012. Detail. Out-of-circulation money. Courtesy of the artist.

In several recent pieces, González has experimented with punching holes in, stitching together, and otherwise deconstructing and reconstructing paper bills of various nationalities and denominations, almost to the point of their total dematerialisation. Echoing the decaying and decomposing garbage to be found in dumps all around the world, González’ work demands that we question what gives money value by all but destroying the object, leaving only enough for us to recognise its original form. There

70

Chapter Five

is something post-apocalyptic and melancholy here, as if we are alien visitors observing the wreckage of capitalist totality and the destructive civilisation it has wrought upon the earth, as if this shredded, dirty, decomposed money is a twisted sacrament, a prayer shawl or cleric’s robe stripped of its holy power, left to deconstruct itself in the absence of doting believers. Yet so too is there a sense of tender fragility. Unlike less subtle works, which heavy-handedly seek to reveal that paper money is worthless, this piece seems to allow our disbelief to continue to be suspended, but by just a thread. Here, again, we might be able to move beyond a certain cynicism or pessimism and recognise that, for all the misery it causes, and for all the perversions of value it oversees, money is, in one sense, tremendously creative. I do not mean this in the sense that free market boosters champion the inherent creative power of capitalism, lauding the “creative destruction” the system unleashes that allegedly sweeps away inefficiency and drives innovation. Instead, I am thinking of the constant, everyday, phenomenal creative work we are all doing all the time to reaffirm money’s value. After all, if money is something of a silent public conspiracy to ascribe value to a useless thing, are we not all, on some level, guilty of a certain quotidian artistry, a certain daily work of belief and meaning-making? Just as the 20th century has taught us that the art object makes creative subjects of us all, requiring not only a creative genius as a creator but also creative, active and reflexive audiences, so too might we recognise that money demands of us a creative labour we rarely, if ever, recognise as such. Few things are more banal than the getting and spending of money, but fewer still are more profound, spiritual, and generative. Of course to this we must add that this is not a creativity or artistry we freely chose. We must also add that, while money may indeed be a figment of our imaginations, it is not enough to simply cease to believe in its value for it to cease to control our lives. And we must add that money oversees what I have elsewhere called a global division of creative labour, which sees the vast majority of humanity systematically denied the means to exercise their creativity in any meaningful way, or to have that creativity actually valued. We must add too that, at the same time as it is driven by an everyday creativity, money also stifles, constrains, parches and delimits our imaginations with a feverish intensity. And finally we must add that money, as Marx explained, causes us fundamentally to misrecognise the creativity we all exercise everyday in reproducing society and the capitalist “economy” which preys on it. And yet perhaps in art that mobilises money these more profound realisations have a chance to emerge. Perhaps in their explicit failure to

Art and Money: Coins of the Realm

71

represent capitalist totality, in the way they call attention to both art and money’s inherent limits, these works provide cryptic clues as to how money’s terrible power might, in fact, be challenged.

Notes 1. Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: a Reading of Volume One (London and New York: Verso, 2011). 2. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1991). 3. Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratisation,” Political Theory, 34: 6 (2006) 690–714. 4. Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2013). 5. Etienne Balibar, We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004). 6. Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialisation: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 7. Donald Mackenzie, “The Credit Crisis as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge,” American Journal of Sociology, 116: 6 (May 8, 2011) 1778–1841. 8. Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalisation of Risk (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004). 9. Max Haiven, “Finance as Capital’s Imagination?: Reimagining Value and Culture in an Age of Fictitious Capital and Crisis,” Social Text, 108 (2011) 93– 124. 10. Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis (Boston: South End Press, 2008). 11. Walden Bello, Capitalism’s Last Stand?: Deglobalisation in the Age of Austerity (London: Sed, 2013). 12. Massimo De Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capitalism (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto, 2007). 13. Max Haiven, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (London and New York: Sed, 2014), see esp. Chapter 1. 14. Jameson:2011, 32-48. 15. See also Peter North, Money and Liberation: the Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 16. See also Anitra Nelson, Marx’s Concept of Money: the God of Commodities (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 17. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 18. See Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: the Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press: 2004). 19. Mark C. Taylor, “Financialisation of Art,” Capitalism and Society, 6: 2 (2011).

72

Chapter Five

20. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); see also Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton, NJ and London: Princeton University Press, 2007). 21. David Graeber, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire (Edinburgh, Oakland and West Virginia: AK Press, 2007) 113-54. 22. David Graeber, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value: the False Coin of Our Own Dreams (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 23. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

References Balibar, Etienne, We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004). Bello, Walden, Capitalism’s Last Stand?: Deglobalisation in the Age of Austerity (London: Sed, 2013). Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Brown, Wendy, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratisation,” Political Theory, 34: 6 (2006) 690–714. Bürger, Peter, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). De Angelis, Massimo, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capitalism (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto, 2007). Graeber, David, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire (Edinburgh, Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2007). —. Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value: the False Coin of Our Own Dreams (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Haiven, Max, Cultures of Financialisation: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). —. Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (London and New York: Sed, 2014). —. “Finance as Capital’s Imagination?: Reimagining Value and Culture in an Age of Fictitious Capital and Crisis,” Social Text, 108 (2011) 93– 124. Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Jameson, Fredric, Representing Capital: a Reading of Volume One (London and New York: Verso, 2011).

Art and Money: Coins of the Realm

73

—. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1991). —. The Political Unconscious (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). LiPuma, Edward and Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalisation of Risk (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004). Mackenzie, Donald, “The Credit Crisis as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge,” American Journal of Sociology 116: 6 (May 8, 2011) 1778–1841. Nelson, Anitra, Marx’s Concept of Money: the God of Commodities (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). North, Peter, Money and Liberation: the Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Shiva, Vandana, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis (Boston: South End Press, 2008). Stallabrass, Julian, Art Incorporated: the Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Taylor, Mark C., “Financialisation of Art,” Capitalism and Society 6:2 (2011). Velthuis, Olav, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton, NJ and London: Princeton University Press, 2007). Walia, Harsha, Undoing Border Imperialism (Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2013).

CHAPTER SIX ART EDUCATION AND MONEY ST IN THE 21 CENTURY LEONI SCHMIDT

Introduction

T

his chapter starts with a short story. When I was fourteen, my architect father arranged for me to be apprenticed to PACT, an acronym for the décor workshops of the State Theatre in the northern part of South Africa. I worked there for three years, after school and over weekends, until I completed my secondary education and went to university. I want to take my reader along with me to my first day at the workshops. There was a protest against unpaid labour. All the workers were owed overtime to the extent of two thousand or more hours a year. These dues were never paid. The workers were highly skilled artists, most with their own practices on the side. They worked long hours, often through the night and through whole weekends, to ensure that productions commenced on time and continued for the duration of the performance schedule. Their children lived there at the workshops. They kept their pets there. One worker’s elderly mother slept in a tool room off the props workshop. There were not nearly enough workers for the huge tasks they had to perform. For example, three workers were expected to paint the complex multi-sets for Puccini’s Madam Butterfly in three weeks. As an apprentice I was never paid, although many times I did not go home at night and was dropped off straight at school in the mornings. Many years later, I thought of that time when I read Henry David Thoreau, where he says: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it…” The situation at PACT was, and is, not an isolated case. Research into the lives of writers and artists working in Medieval scriptoria and other workshops attached to monasteries suggests how bleak their lives were;

76

Chapter Six

artisans were protected but also exploited by the guild system of the Renaissance, as were artists within the academies. Stories abound of artists’ precarious dependence on the patronage of kings, popes, aristocrats, and later, on the whims of an uneducated bourgeoisie and ranks of bureaucrats from the 18th to the 20th centuries and into our time. Hans Abbing writes that: “The economy of the arts is exceptional…Not only artists but society as well contributes to this peculiar sector that is dependent on donations and subsidies.”2 The tension between the working lives of artists and funding realities stretch back many centuries, reaching a new level of agitation with the arrival of the avant-garde from the late 19th and early 20th century. Successive aggressive manifestoes were aimed at severing the already tenuous ties between art production and financial remuneration through patronage, sales, public funding and private support. On the one hand the tension was exacerbated through the rise of capitalism in conjunction with the rise of the bourgeoisie: a conjunction, on the one hand, between a drive towards financial quantifiability and the loss of an arts education to which the aristocracy had been privy, and on the other hand, a growing reflexivity in the arts manifested in actions and outputs, which hardly endeared them to the general public—most often the very public which would make decisions about funding. One cannot imagine that the Dada movement’s bizarre performances would have been warmly greeted by the so-called “man in the street,” who would not have been able to consider them as understandable responses to the absurdity of war in the second decade of the 20th century; nor can one imagine that Cubism’s exploration of space and time would easily have been appreciated as early investigations of the space-time continuum researched by Albert Einstein around the same time. Picasso left us a small but significant gesture when he cut out parts from a newspaper and included them in a drawing, thereby heralding a new methodology: cut and paste—a methodology which would have far-reaching implications for many technologies to come in the new century. These technologies would generate unprecedented monetary gains for corporations. However, Picasso’s gesture was interpreted by some as incompetence, as an inability to complete the drawing by hand, and as an act that wilfully challenged authority.3 There were many manifestations of the tension between artists and funding parties throughout the 20th century, with politics on both sides playing an important role in events. A famous example is the rise and closure of the Bauhaus in Germany before World War II. This art school is still revered today for its innovative and cross-disciplinary curriculum, designed and delivered by some of the 20th-century’s highest profile artists,

Art Education and Money in the 21st Century

77

designers and architects. One thinks of Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Lionel Feininger and many others, who contributed to international critical debate around modern industrialisation and how the arts could ameliorate its worst excesses. The Bauhaus flourished in Germany despite successive funding cuts, but eventually closed as Fascism rose in that country in the form of National Socialism. Many of the Bauhaus artists fled to the USA, a migration that led to the prominence of New York in later 20th-century artistic, design and architectural production. Closer to home in the Antipodes, many art schools have experienced lean times and extreme pressure to conform in the first decade of the 21st century. In 2009 Brad Buckley and John Conomos wrote, that since the forced amalgamation of Australian art schools with universities in 1990, a period followed in which they were contorted out of all recognition to mirror the managerial and funding models of their corporatising host institutions, so much so that they now face a bleak and unpredictable future.4 An in-depth analysis hails from Gerald Bast, Rector of the Applied University of the Arts in Vienna, where he wrote in 2012 about relevant issues in an introduction to Art Now: On the Future of Artistic Production Strategies: “The current global financial neglect of art education will turn out to be a fatal fallacy for the functioning of our society characterised by progressive complexity, because creativity means nothing less than the ability to build complex relationships and contexts.”5 Wolf Singer, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Leipzig, agrees: “In a scientific theory, one knows even before it’s proven that it is correct, because it is aesthetically satisfying, it feels right, it comes together. Here we use criteria that go far beyond what is called logical reasoning. In the scientific field, creativity is as a rule the ability to see something together that so far has not been seen together…with everything that is served by non-rational languages—that is the visual arts, music, dance—knowledge is transported that cannot be transported through rational language…but for this to happen, the languages of art must be learned, as is the case with all languages.”6 The bourgeoisie has always had a mistaken idea that art is self-evident and openly accessible to all. This is not the case—the arts have to be learnt, both in terms of production and in terms of understanding.7 This learning is under threat in our times since the advent of Modernism in the second half of the 19th century, i.e. since the rise of capitalism and the heyday of the bourgeoisie. Artists work until something feels right, until it comes together. Thus they do not feel obliged to work within proscribed work hours and they fit

78

Chapter Six

uneasily, for example, into corporative systems, funding body requirements and trade union parameters. As J.M Coetzee—a Nobel Prize winning South African writer—said in a recent interview: “That shadowy class— artists—have their own loyalties and these do not answer in the first instance to other concerns.”8 Artists’ loyalties motivate them to work extremely long hours, the workers at PACT being a case in point. As in their case, funding bodies and well-heeled audiences mostly do not understand the extent of the labour that had to be expended to reach a satisfying outcome. There is a real problem here. Karl Marx borrowed the term “surplus labour” from the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and further developed the concept to describe the excess of workers’ labour, which could then be turned into a profit by capitalists. In the case of excess labour expended by artists, however, this excess frustrates capitalism, as it usually cannot be turned into a profit. Rather, the outcomes of this excessive labour support, or embody, other values: making new connections, exploring different solutions, problem-finding, developing criticality, building community, manifesting identity in terms of gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and many other qualitative dimensions of human life which cannot be quantified via capital. This is where the loyalties of the shadow class of artists lie and it is for these dimensions that they accept the conditions of their employment vis-à-vis their excessive labour. Despite financial difficulties faced by artists and art educators Abbing remarks: “…yet they carry on. I don’t understand why they don’t just quit…”9

Models As said earlier, the tension between funding—whether in the form of earlier systems of patronage or in funding via capital—and artists’ loyalties have existed for a long time. Recently, responses to this tension within tertiary art schools have aligned roughly with four main models. I briefly summarise these models with a view to their various problems and potentials. One response has been the instigation of what has since become known as “creative industries,” with art, design and architecture schools being seen by institutions as centres for such a model. This response was mooted around the turn of our century. It was predicated on the core idea that the arts could be turned into profit in the following way: “…by having their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent, those industries have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and

Art Education and Money in the 21st Century

79

exploitation of intellectual property and the sales of its outcomes.”10 The idea here was, and still is in some instances, that artists can generate intellectual property and its outcomes can then be sold by the institutions for which the artists work and thus be turned into profit. The problem with this model is that artists were prepared to benefit their institutions through outcomes—for example PBRF outcomes generated during private as well as in work hours—but would not sign over intellectual property rights related to outputs. This refusal is in line with international copyright laws. The model of “creative industries” has by now been largely discredited as a misguided attempt by managers to profit from the, often excessive, labour of artists, designers and members of architectural faculty through an attempt to bypass these laws. Areas privileged in this model are advertising and web design, those areas without a long history of copyright interests. Another response to tensions between funding and the loyalties of artists has been manifest in the so-called studio sans frontières or “studio without boundaries.” As in the case of “creative industries” this may sound very positive. After all, who wants boundaries or obstacles in the way of learning in tertiary contexts? However, on closer scrutiny, as in the case of “creative industries,” the situation is not that simple. Studios sans frontières effectively removed boundaries between disciplines in art schools, while also removing specialised workshops, specialised staff and dedicated technical support for students. In worst case scenarios, art schools became like office blocks, with offices, administration staff, some “roaming” staff (often generically qualified rather than specialised), while students had to outsource studio facilities, at great expense, to factories or other divisions of industry. Students were under the impression that they would pay lower fees but then found out that they had to pay much more to get work made. In many instances this led to a default to screen arts, as other options became too expensive. With all due respect to screen arts, the whole point of physical, material, experiential involvement—that which draws most students to art schools—was largely lost in the rhetoric of capital savings and a spurious kind of boundaryless freedom. Some, such as Thomas C. Benson, firmly believe that one can only cross the boundaries between disciplines once one has a boundary to cross.11 A third model responded to the tension between funding and artists’ loyalties through focusing on direct lucrative relationships between art and business. This model has flourished in contexts where schools have relationships with wealthy patrons in business, who see the advantage of such relationships for adding art works and services at relatively low prices to their existing stocks and corporative services. Schools in centres

80

Chapter Six

such as Los Angeles, Zurich, Geneva and Brussels have benefited in this regard. Studios such as painting and sculpture are privileged in this model, often at the expense of experimental and conceptual work, for the sake of representational work that reinforces traditional power structures. With respect to this model, Gerald Bast’s argument applies, namely that politics have been replaced in the world of art by capital; the critical artist has very little place in this context, and many art schools and artists are complicit in this process.12 Another response to the tensions between funding bodies and artist loyalties in tertiary art schools has endeavoured to use its own agency to best advantage. This has meant that artists within art schools have organised themselves along the lines of artist collectives, specialised but flexible and multi-skilled, working in specialised but multi-use workshops for the sake of experiential learning across teams and sub-teams. They are lean machines optimising their excess labour for the benefit of the collective, and understand their shadow class existence in relation to those constituents in society that are likely to support their continued existence, constituents they wish to support in the first instance in line with their perspectives on the roles of artists and art schools in the new millennium. Molly Nesbit, the emerging artist awardee at the 2009 Venice Biennale, with reference to issues of sustainability in our times, stated that: “The arts are entering the space outside themselves, looking hard to the future.”13 In Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century (2009), Ann Lauterbach argues that this fourth model is committed to the tools and processes of skills-based and concepts-based teaching, while being mobile and multiple, moving across and through a myriad of synapses in a structure generously open to new synergies. Such schools are calibrated to allow for maximum heterogeneity within a close-knit collective that does not flatten difference in life and in studios, nor in the communities they work with.14

Options Before I arrive at some thoughts on how art schools are moving forward into the future, the third part of this chapter focuses on the tensions between a “commodity economy” and a model predicated on a “gift economy.” This focus acknowledges a very real tension between the world of capital and the loyalties of artists as identified by J. M Coetzee. Whether one agrees with it or not, here Gerald Bast is explaining the basic tenets of a capitalist business model as applied to art schools: “At the beginning of the 21st century, the social and political system finds itself

Art Education and Money in the 21st Century

81

perched conspicuously at the height of a dramatic transformation: in place of the needs of individuals or the interests of certain segments of the population, a seemingly anonymous, even abstract and depersonalised shareholder value is at the centre of economic and political processes. The primary focus of social development is no longer on the personal development potential of human beings…but on the development of capital…Education becomes redefined as training, the curriculum reduced to statistically ascertainable and measurable modules in the service of employability, tied up with the interests of immediate professional usability. Educational institutions are relegated to the role of supplier firms for the economy…this trend towards the commodification of society has also taken hold of the art system in education.”15 In New Zealand we have seen a Minister of Education speak on national television to urge students not to embark on studies in the arts and the humanities, as they would purportedly not be able to find employment that way. This seems hardly the way to support centuries-old discipline traditions and those sectors of the population who value them for themselves and for their children’s education. Furthermore, in New Zealand under the current National Party majority in parliament, a strategic focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) excludes the arts and the humanities. There seem to be two arguments against such an exclusionary strategy. One of these is based in the belief that knowledge and analytical thinking have purposes beyond immediate monetary gain. What would our world be without philosophy, history, literature, the visual arts, social sciences, psychology, music, theatre and so forth? Together they weave a dense cultural tapestry without which we all become one-dimensional. The other reason for not thinking like the Minister of Education is that many students in the arts and humanities actually do find gainful employment and/or support their practices through secondary employment. A recent Forbes Analysis concluded that art students are more likely than others to find employment due to their flexibility, creativity and transferable skills. “It’s become a cliché that the best jobs of tomorrow don’t even exist today. Such is life in a rapidly changing, technologydriven global economy. Remember all those television ads for training in VCR repair that suddenly stopped running a few years ago? The same is currently happening with aspects of communications design as many more people are using smart apps to create their own websites rather than employing a designer to do it for them. That’s the potential risk of degrees that places job training ahead of mind development.”16 In the context of the Dunedin School of Art at Otago Polytechnic in

82

Chapter Six

New Zealand where I work, I sat down and gave myself the task of writing down the main types of employment with which I know actual alumni are involved at this particular point in time. This is what I came up with. A contingent of artists becomes self-employed, often supplementing their sales with secondary incomes. Others train after art school to become teachers in the primary or secondary school sector; some proceed to postgraduate study and may gain employment in tertiary teaching. The sphere of art access for community support of other-abled students attracts alumni; while some train further to work in art therapy contexts. In recent times, social entrepreneurship is becoming a wide field for artist engagement with communities, working to interface arts initiatives with charities and NGOs. Transferable art-design skills allow for alumni to become employed in the design industry, while galleries and museums absorb some alumni who are interested in curatorial and archival activities. Artist-collectives frequently band together and some of these have founded successful publishing companies and project spaces in recent times. With more cities and towns becoming aware of the advantages of arts festivals and community events, some of our alumni now work as city arts coordinators or events managers, while others manage galleries and work as technicians or artist-assistants. Lastly, but not least, growing opportunities for national and international residencies and artist exchanges support a contemporary version of the artist-itinerant. Knowing the particular alumni involved here, it is once again important to note that all of them expend excess labour in order to help maintain the organisations they work for. They are in fact “gifting” their excess labour to those institutions. Some theorists, focusing on the roles of art schools in the 21st century, have drawn attention to the contrast between business models predicated on quantifiable measures, outcomes and figures, with what some view as the “true” economy of the arts, namely a “gift economy.” The theorising of what has become known as a “gift economy” owes much to the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss who wrote the French version of The Gift in 1925, a small book translated into English in 1954. He made a distinction between a gift economy and a commodity economy based on business models. In the commodity economy objects or labour are sold, meaning that the ownership rights are fully transferred to the new owner. The object or labour have therefore been “alienated” from the owner to use a term Mauss borrowed from Karl Marx. In a gift economy, however, the objects and labour that are given remain “unalienated” from the givers. It is the fact that the identity of the giver is invariably bound up with the object that causes the gift to have a power that compels the recipient to reciprocate. This creates a relationship over

Art Education and Money in the 21st Century

83

time between individuals and/or communities. A social bond evolves and leads to a mutual interdependence between parties. Mauss’s argument is that solidarity is achieved through the social bonds created by gift exchange. A small example is that in some African contexts it is normally unthinkable for two friends or colleagues who go out for a meal to pay separately: one pays and the other pays next time; when this is not adhered to it is a clear signal that future social bonds are being severed. The relationship of the gift economy of pre-industrialised communities and the arts of our times is, of course, extremely complex and necessarily adulterated: some artists earn fortunes in their lifetimes from the sales of their work; many artists work in paid jobs; and many gifts go unreciprocated. In his 2008 article titled “Gifts versus Commodity Debate Revisited,” Andrej Rus describes how many recent theorists, such as Alfred Gell, Pierre Bourdieu, Arjan Appadurai and Christopher Gregory complicate the differences between commodity and gift economies.17 Nonetheless, arts people very often seem to identify with the gift economy. Examples abound of so-called “stokvel” arrangements (which get their name from Africa), whereby a collective share saved funds for the benefit of each member at various intervals; types of bartering of goods and labour take place; volunteer work is gladly undertaken; a view of the whole community as a kind of ecosystem rather than focused on the benefit of the individual is common. This has been multiplied exponentially through phenomena such as the Occupy Movement and is of course enormously facilitated by our use of the internet. Some writers, like Abbing, especially in his book translated from the Dutch as Why are Artists Poor: The Exceptional Economy of the Arts (2002), launched into a stringent critique of the myths around the so-called “exceptionality” of artists. He argues that like everybody, artists want things. The difference is that they want different things: community, recognition, being part of the game, being in the middle of debates, finding out new ways of doing and making, problem-finding, thinking imaginatively about the future. On the one hand, Abbing demystifies the arts, concluding, “ordinary interests remain hidden behind high ideals.” On the other, he concedes that while artists in the most prosperous countries of the 21st century are highly esteemed, they are also poor, especially if one keeps in mind how much they have to expend on materials. Abbing concludes, that a gift economy is not so much a choice but essentially the only way for them to survive, a kind of “stokvel” imposed by necessity.18 In “Disaffiliation and the Art of Poverty” (1956), Lawrence Lipton reminds us, however, that artists often choose to be poor: “William Faulkner once said: I was born to be a tramp. I was happiest

84

Chapter Six

when I had nothing. I had a trench coat then with big pockets. It would carry a pair of sock, a condensed Shakespeare and a bottle of whisky. Then I was happy and I wanted nothing and had no responsibility…this was the time I wrote As I Lay Dying”19—a book arguably amongst the literary masterpieces of the 20th century. Boris Groys, in “Art and Money,” argues that art, in large part, freed itself from a commodity economy when it entered the expanded field of which Rosalind Krauss wrote in 1979: who can buy an installation or sell a performance? Groys contends that art in the expanded field, where art becomes spatialised, demonstrates the materiality of the things of this world beyond their exchange value. In this context, the notion of “creative industries” and art schools providing stock for rich collectors are as outmoded as the practices that could support those strategies. Much of what artists make nowadays are to be experienced, not bought.20

Communities Thus, if we subscribe to the fourth model of art school as mentioned earlier, one wherein artists within art schools organise themselves along the lines of artist collectives, specialised but flexible and multi-skilled, working in multi-use workshops for the sake of experiential learning, across teams and sub-teams, lean machines optimising their excess labour for the benefit of the collective and their communities—then what thoughts can one offer around art schools and money in the future? If artists in art schools are gifting excess labour that is hard to quantify in dollars, how can institutions reciprocate this gifting? I would suggest that a serious engagement with the arts is a gift, in and of itself, and is valuing the role art schools can play in society. Andrej Rus points out that artists are often willing to gift labour or to exchange labour rather than sell it for institutional income. He lauds artists for aligning themselves with a gift economy as a way of refusing alienation between themselves and their work. However, he points out that the commodity economy has changed in recent years to include aspects of the gift economy. “Commodities are increasingly marketed and traded in a manner that does not rigidly fit into traditional conceptualisations of commodity exchange. Companies and institutions that understand the gift economy have, in this regard, more chance to succeed in the market economy...”21 They can learn from the field of the arts, as some things should only be gifted and never sold: community engagement through the arts is one of these. The arts and artists can be useful to institutions. If we trust in the work, for example, of brain researchers, who tell us that involvement with the

Art Education and Money in the 21st Century

85

arts actually increases all-round creativity and productivity, critical thinking, abilities to design spatially, to problem-find and problem-solve and to think of multiple possible solutions to real world problems—then I suggest that art schools should be used by institutions in ways which are valuable without being sellable. The Global Agenda Council of the Role of the Arts in Society, part of the World Economic Forum in 2013, states that: “The arts exerts a powerful influence on societal development. Artists challenge commonly held perspectives with innovative thinking. They raise awareness about social issues, break down barriers to cross-cultural understanding and are agents for change…they should be included in multi-stakeholder discussions to find creative solutions and their public art projects should be supported to build community engagement and interaction.”22 Senam Okudzeto, a delegate for Ghana said: “…artists always offers solutions to problems in society.”23 However, artists and art schools are often remiss in not effectively understanding or articulating their roles in society. In “Undesigning the New Art School,” Charles Renfro uses architectural metaphors in a challenge to art schools in the 21st century. He talks about throwing open the spaces of the art school, breaking down barrier walls, letting the public in, embracing the art market, curators and employers of alumni, creating spaces for community projects and open access to exhibition and production workshops. Working with famous architects Diller + Scofidio, Renfro believes that artists and art schools should articulate and understand themselves through architecture and design which is accessible to their communities.24 I close by agreeing with Renfro that the art school of the 21st century should open itself out to mingle with local constituents and local wealth; that the art school is a performance, its buildings and studios are theatre; its aims are to entice an audience which can add value for its students and support their careers. Money is not always filthy lucre within the context of art education—it can also be a gift.

Notes 1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods (Boston: Tickner and Fields, 1854), preface. 2. Hans Abbing, Why are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002) 11. 3. Josh McFee and Erik Reuland, Realising the Impossible: Art Against Authority (AK Press Online, 2012) unpaginated.

86

Chapter Six

4. Brad Buckley and John Conomos, “Introduction”, in Brad Buckley and John Conomos (eds), Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD, and the Academy (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2009) 2-26. 5. Gerald Bast, “Designing the Future against the Pragmatism of the Useful: An Appeal for the Re-Socialisation of Art,” in Gerald Bast and Brigitte Felderer (eds), Art and Now (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2012) 21. 6. Wolf Singer, Ein Neues Menschenbild (Taschenbuch: 2003) trans. J. Heilman, quoted in Bast:2012, see 21, note 5. 7. Bast:2012, 21. 8. J.M Coetsee, quoted in The Pretoria News, 19 April 1978, 21 and in J.C Kannemeyer, J.M Coetzee: ‘n Geskryfde Lewe (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2012) 329. 9. Abbing:2002, 11. 10. UK Government Department of Culture, Media and Sport Report (2001) 4, accessed 7 February 2015. 11. Thomas C. Benson, “Five Arguments against Interdisciplinary Studies,” Issues in Integrative Studies, 1 (1982) 38-48. 12. Bast:2012, 18-26. 13. Molly Nesbit, “Utopia Station Project,” Venice Biennale 2003, see accessed 7 February 2015. 14. Ann Lauterbach, “The Thing Seen: Reimagining Arts Education For Now,” in Steven Henry Madoff (ed.), Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century (Cambridge Mass.: MIT, 2009) 103-12. 15. Bast:2012, 19. 16. Zac Bissonette, “Your College Major May Not Be As Important as You Think,”< http://www.think.stedwards.edu> accessed 7 February 2015. 17. Andrej Rus, “Gift versus Commodity Debate Revisited,” Anthropological Notebooks, 4:1 (2008) 81-102. 18. Abbing:2002, chapter 6.3, 129-130. 19. William Faulkner quoted in Lawrence Lipton, “Disaffiliation and the Art of Poverty,” Chicago Review, 10:1(1956) 53. 20. Boris Groys, “Art and Money,” e-flux, 2011, accessed 7 February 2015. 21. Rus:2008, 98. 22. World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Role of the Arts in Society, 2013, accessed 7 February 2015. 23. Ibid. 24. Charles Renfro, “Undesigning the New Art School,” in Steven Henry Madoff (ed.), Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century (Cambridge Mass.: MIT, 2009) 159-175.

Art Education and Money in the 21st Century

87

References Abbing, Hans, Why are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002). Bast, Gerald, “Designing the Future against the Pragmatism of the Useful: An Appeal for the Re-Socialisation of Art,” in Gerald Bast and Brigitte Felderer, Art and Now (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2012). Benson, Thomas C., “Five Arguments against Interdisciplinary Studies,” Issues in Integrative Studies, 1, 1982: 38-48. Bisonnette, Zac, “Your College Major May Not Be As Important as You Think”, accessed 7 February 2015. Coetzee, J.M., quoted in The Pretoria News, 19 April 1978, 21 and in J.C Kannemeyer, J.M Coetzee: ‘n Geskryfde Lewe (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2012) 329. Buckley, Bard and John Conomos, “Introduction,” in Brad Buckley and John Conomos (eds), Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD, and the Academy (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2009). Groys, Boris, “Art and Money,” e-flux, 2011, accessed 7 February 2015. Lauterbach, Ann, “The Thing Seen: Reimagining Arts Education For Now,” in Steven Henry Madoff (ed.), Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century (Cambridge Mass.: MIT, 2009). McFee, Josh and Erik Reuland, Realising the Impossible: Art Against Authority (AK Press Online, 2012) unpaginated. Nesbit, Molly, “Utopia Station Project,” Venice Biennale 2003, see accessed 7 February 2015. Renfro, Charles, “Undesigning the New Art School,” in Steven Henry Madoff (ed.), Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century (Cambridge Mass.: MIT, 2009). Rus, Andrej, “Gift versus Commodity Debate Revisited,” in Anthropological Notebooks, 4:1 (2008) 81-102. Singer, Wolf, Ein Neues Menschenbild? (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2003). Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, or Life in the Woods (Boston: Tickner and Fields, 1854) preface, unpaginated. UK Government Department of Culture, Media and Sport Report 4 (2001), accessed 7 February 2015. World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Role of the Arts in Society, 2013, accessed 7 February 2015.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE MARKET AND THE ARTIST: POSITIONING ARTISTS INTERNATIONALLY REBECCA HAMID

Introduction

T

his chapter discusses how a dealer gallery can work with artists to position their entry and participation in the international art world. Working with two New Zealand artists, Scott Eady and Darryn George, the author, as Director of RH Gallery, New Zealand, undertook a number of interventions to advance each artist’s practice from an established national to an international practice. The interventions by the Gallery resulted in the artists exhibiting at the Melbourne Art Fair 2012 (George) and the Gwangju Biennale 2012 (Eady). In September 2012, RH Gallery was invited by the Global Arts Affairs Foundation to submit proposals for New Zealand artists to exhibit in the Personal Structures exhibition at the Palazzo Bembo, an official collateral event of the Venice Biennale 2013. Proposals for both Scott Eady and Darryn George were accepted. RH Gallery worked intensively with both artists, undertaking a variety of initiatives to brand both them and the Gallery. Interventions included securing financial backing, achieving art sales, gaining private patronage, public grants and funding, networking with art professionals, setting up and managing the exhibitions, and developing publicity materials—including advertising and exhibition catalogues. These interventions fell within a specific trajectory that characterises interventions taking place at the high value, high profile, “spectacular” end of the international art world. 1

90

Chapter Seven

Fig. 7-1. Darryn George, Kaitiaki, 2012, oil on canvas, dimensions variable, Melbourne Art Fair, 2012, Melbourne, Australia.

Institutionalism and key terms Arthur Danto first put forward the notion of an “art world” in his eponymous article “The Art World,” claiming that it was through their function in this world that objects could claim for themselves the status of “art.” 2 George Dickie’s institutional theory of art expanded on Danto’s ideas. 3 The importance of Dickie’s, and similar theories, is that they provide a useful notion of the art world as a political, social and economic network that, as with all networks, generate their own effects. Howard Becker expands on Dickie using a sociological methodology to define the “art world.”4 With recourse to ideas of “collective activities” and “shared conventions,” Becker defines art by the collective activities that constitute the production of art, rather than by the artwork as the end product.5 He also describes how art world participants co-operate to create and expand an aggregated art world system. Becker’s ideas are useful as an elaboration on Danto and Dickie to the effect that an art object, as such, can only derive its existence from within a specific social system.6 A theoretical approach allowing space for the existence of a number of art worlds and sub-art worlds within the general concept of art worlds, as well as the way their existence affects both the production and consumption of artworks, is directly relevant to the experience of how the

The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally

91

two artists in this study participated, produced and exhibited their work for national, and then international, consumption. Eady and George produced artwork as part of a network of co-operating participants, all making contributions to the final result.7 As the artists participated in this network, becoming more involved and dependent upon it, so too did they become constrained by it—with the need to comply and conform to its norms.

Figure 7-2. Scott Eady, 100 Bikes Project: Gwangju, 2012, dimensions variable, Gwangju Biennale 2012, Gwangju, South Korea. Photo. Scott Eady.

Becker elaborated on the conventions that play a major part in regulating the relationships between artists, their audiences and other players, and the rights and obligations of these parties. 8 While Becker points out that these conventions make it possible for ready and efficient co-ordination of activity between artists and other art world participants, such as their dealers and/or curators, the opposite is also true. 9 Becker illustrates a hierarchy of art worlds and the close and extensive relationships that operate with other art worlds from which they try to distinguish themselves. Discrete art worlds share sources of supply with others, recruit personnel from them, adopt ideas that originate in them, and

92

Chapter Seven

compete with them for audiences and financial support.10 All of which can lead to friction and inefficiencies in coordinating activity. Julian Stallabrass, Ian Robertson, Terry Smith, Don Thompson and Dianne Crane all write about contemporary art, the contemporary art world and art market, and some of the critical issues facing this sector. They apply a broad spectrum approach to their analysis, covering global art movements and trends, employing a wide range of documentary evidence to do so—from interviews, newspaper accounts, reviews and critics, to catalogues and records from primary and secondary sales sources. Drawing on these, they are able to outline the factors that shape ideas of what art (and art history) is—including world political, economic and social trends.

Fig. 7-3. Darryn George, Folder Room, 2013, 2 pot full gloss poly on board, lighting, 629 x 474 x 370, Personal Structures, Palazzo Bembo, Venice Biennale, 2013.

The value of an institutional approach— accounting for complexity In terms of this practice, Terry Smith’s taxonomies, especially his “world currents,” and specifically the top-level current, provide a useful context as to how art worlds, as networks and hierarchies of players, operate as

The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally

93

movements and within institutional frameworks.11 The notion of the “art world” and its constituent parts, including the art market, help to contextualise this practice and provide a valuable resource in terms of understanding institutional, economic and political forces at play, and how to respond to them. The three currents are as follows. First, the Global or top end of the art world, including associated sub-currents, is a mix of the spectacular and avant-garde shock gambits, of re-modernisation and retro-sensationalism.12 The second current, labelled the postcolonial, is defined by diversity, identity and critique.13 The third refers to small-scale, modest, local and grassroots level artist initiatives, encompassing the modest counter-culture and counter-institutional artist-run collectives.

Fig. 7-4: Scott. Eady, Ivan (Calciami!), 2013, powder coated bronze, paper, diameter 36, Personal Structures, Palazzo Bembo, Venice Biennale 2013. Photo. Scott Eady

94

Chapter Seven

To summarise, there are a number of reasons why the institutional art theory approach is relevant to understanding the art world. Firstly it provides a way of describing the social, economic and political conditions that make art what it is today. Secondly, it provides a framework for the analysis of art as encompassed by a complex field of forces that are not visible in the artwork itself. These forces provide the means or the conditions for art to emerge. Thirdly, it contextualises art—its making, exhibiting, collecting, and the sub-currents like the art market, within a larger social and economic field of interdependent networks of participants whose relationships, exchanges and working agreements constitute the entire art world. Even if, as Gerry Bell 14 and Andrew McNamara 15 contend, Smith ill-defines “contemporary art” relative to (post)modern art, he nonetheless provides a compelling account as to how art is produced, consumed and traded in the post-1990 period with which this study is concerned. Smith’s current of contemporary art at the global level is a definitive force in the art markets and the museums of the major art centres. Since the 1990s it has become a global phenomenon as art worlds have connected with each other. New communication technologies and escalating social media are continually shaping the future of contemporary art and expanding possibilities and opportunities.16 It is within this first current, the top-tier, that this study is situated. Smith’s taxonomies of sensationalism and spectacularism17 explain the trajectory of the biennales in which Eady and George participated, past iterations of which have included spectacles like Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005) and Quinn’s major exhibition on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, for the 2013 Biennale.18 Quinn’s art was spectacular in that the number and material value of his sculptures upstaged most, if not all, of the official national and collateral events. They were situated in the most prominent public entry points by air and sea, and were of a scale that ensured they were a spectacle for all to see. The art world’s top tier manifests a monumental phase of modernism that is usefully expanded by others. Robertson holds that it is the “tax havens” and the “free ports” which reflect the movement of global surplus capital that are determining which cities will become the future centres for contemporary art. 19 James Henry traces the world economy and private offshore wealth creation with the vast amounts of untaxed income that it produces. This is the milieu that produces the collectors. They seek commodities with ultra-high price tags. Henry seeks to explain the rationale behind these tax havens, why they exist and why there is so

The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally

95

much surplus cash available in the world to spend on luxury goods such as contemporary art: A significant fraction of global private financial wealth—by our estimates, at least $21 to $32 trillion as of 2010—has been invested virtually tax-free through the world’s still-expanding black hole of more than 80 offshore secrecy jurisdictions. 20

The distribution of wealth in a global economy is crucial to an understanding of why there are super-rich collectors who can spend so much on art, build such huge museum edifices and create such a demand for contemporary art. Thompson provides an economic analysis behind the art market and the branded artists, museums, collectors, dealer galleries, art fairs, biennales and auction houses.21

Artists’ agency The global art world presents a hierarchical and institutionalised setting where the behaviours and actions of a few very powerful participants affect the opportunities available to artists at regional and national levels. The differences in power and cachet at the regional and national levels are magnified in global art world activities. At stake are the economic rewards that take precedence over symbolic rewards as seen in the kinds of culture that circulate in this world and the ways rewards are produced and accessed. This art world is described as a ghetto “powerless in its confinement”—as well as in terms of artists’ agency (and that of other participants): Its functions: to soothe the loss of capacities, autonomy and experience; to gather and channel the pressure for change; to neutralise the desire to actualise the promise by actually changing life. [This art world continues] so long as capitalism calls the shots.22

How do artists know they have made it in this new world? A few individuals and organisations from a select group of countries dominate the global art production and the dispersion of culture. Their activities affect the opportunities for artists, galleries, and collectors at the provincial (regional and national) level. The global art world sanctions sites for art world activity so that artists, galleries, exhibitors and collectors can assemble and advance a consensus around what is being produced and who and what is “the best.” Art fairs have assumed a major role and take up temporary residency in primary locations across the globe, with venues

96

Chapter Seven

reused in successive years. The crucial difference between regional and national art worlds compared to the global art world is the extent to which the latter focuses on achieving economic rewards. In terms of the artist’s agency, this benefits a few branded artists. The majority of artists are excluded. As the extremes of neo-capitalism concentrate ever-increasing wealth in the hands of a diminishing few, so the global art world grows more dominant, controlling the production, sales and profits of art. Artists (along with other art practitioners), appreciative of this global context, are faced with limited choices. Gene Ray suggests that there are three.23 They can opt to participate and, depending on the levels of success or otherwise, journey “back and forth between the inside and outside,” as opportunities arise and allow. Artists may go several rounds before they give up.24 There is a remote chance they may be selected and become a branded artist.25 If they do, this will not be of their own making, nor have much to do with the quality and sincerity of their artworks.26 Alternatively artists may choose to remain inside the art world (to a lesser or greater degree—depending what they can achieve), and settle for adding more critically affirmative art to the quantity of commodity-driven international art styles. Thirdly, they can attempt to remain outside the system and operate in alternative nodes of art activity.27 In reality, as artists lack any real self-determination over whether they are in or out, option one and two are the same. Eventually these artists may realise that “working with the capitalist art system is necessarily a losing proposition.”28 Options one and two reward only the branded artist, branded galleries and branded collectors. For the rest, there is little but accommodation and resignation to neo-liberal global art activities. Artists such as Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami are entrepreneurs producing art priced to match the pockets of their collectors. They are more concerned with building their brand, their name and reputation (superstar status),29 than producing original work with their own hands.30 They often direct the production of art work which is undertaken by the large teams of artists and assistants they employ. The kinds of spectacular wow-factor art they produce require significant financial investment by branded galleries or collectors. These artists get to make what they like, choose which museum they will exhibit in, which branded gallery they will work with, or whether they will work with any, and increasingly, which auction house they will access in order to sell directly to the public. For the vast majority of artists who do not achieve the branded-artist level of agency, the opposite in opportunities, rewards and status is true in every respect. The gallery chooses them, the museum exhibition opportunities are rare and cherished, introductions to wealthy collectors

The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally

97

never happen, sales and publicity are sought-after, and sales of their art by auction houses signal waning collector interest and falling prices. Thompson provides a template of how to become a “hot” artist. They need to pass the first level of gatekeepers—to be shown by a mainstream gallery, then move to a branded gallery, be represented by a superstar gallery, be cleverly marketed in branded collections and with branded museums, and then have work placed in evening auctions with Christie’s or Sotheby’s. Meanwhile artists not at this exalted level content themselves with trying to get included by making it at a lower level art fair. Here symbolic rewards are traded off in favour of financial gains. The agency of the artist to exhibit is compromised. At the Melbourne Art Fair 2012 one New Zealand dealer gallery (which also represents Darryn George) opted to exhibit all its artists with paintings of a uniform metre square. These covered the walls from top to bottom. The aim was to maximise sales, by providing convenience (price and size) to collectors, art sized for cash and carry, hence optimising the costs of the booth. RH Gallery opted to represent George as a solo artist, exhibiting paintings with an overt regionalist content. Hence the Gallery’s financial risks were high. A fourth possible option is where artists remain inside the global art system but attempt to resist or change—for ethical and non-artistic reasons—some of the control and influence of super-rich patrons. A recent example of this is the nine artists who boycotted the Sydney Biennale 2014, forcing the resignation of director Luca Belgiorno-Nettis as the Biennale Chairman. They also forced withdrawal of the major sponsor Transfield Services (owned by the Belgiorno-Nettis family) because of their contracts operating the Manus Island and Nauru detention centres.31 Stallabrass’s comments on this corporate sponsorship migrant link 32 as driven by the globalisation of the art world.

Artists and their dealer galleries Branded dealers often undertake extensive marketing campaigns for their best artists. This includes public relations, exhibitions, museum loans, publications and advertising. In representing George, RH Gallery followed this model. Following George’s Atua exhibition in 2011, and leading up to the Melbourne Art Fair 2012, the Gallery developed a dedicated branding and marketing campaign. This was not for the purposes of sales, but to build the brand of the gallery and the artist. This was intensified when the gallery confirmed representation for George at the Venice Biennale. At an international level there are some critical departures from the above

98

Chapter Seven

model. As Thompson notes, given the levels of financial investment required to represent an artist internationally, no branded gallery will undertake this unless it has sole representation of that artist. This was not the case with George, and the results were damaging to the RH Gallery. George’s response to pressure from his multiple New Zealand dealers was to distance himself from RH Gallery’s brand and attempt to represent himself at Venice. 33 When this was rejected by RH Gallery the artistdealer relationship became increasingly fraught and eventually broke down. The opportunities for RH Gallery to market and promote its brand, and that of the artist, was greatly diminished and then faltered altogether.34 Consequently there were no art sales, no placement in international museums or international dealerships. With no written contract, the parties were reduced to disputing their verbal undertakings and severing their ties.35

The pressures of operating internationally Given the levels of investment required by branded galleries to achieve international status for their artists, it is not surprising that a small and under-resourced gallery failed to achieve this. RH Gallery resorted to an extensive patrons campaign in order to finance George to Venice.36 This took considerable time, resources and energy that would have otherwise been directed to marketing and branding campaigns for both artists. The last three months prior to the biennale were crucial to making media contacts and connecting with international collectors. The Gallery’s attention to this was severely compromised by the size of its operation. In the case of George, success became even more problematic as the dysfunctional relationship with his gallery intensified. Expanding on Becker’s 37 influential writing on art worlds and Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital, 38 Diana Crane explores the premise of two art worlds, one global and the other urban.39 These differ in a number of ways—how they affect opportunities for artists, sellers and collectors; the characteristics of their participants, where the locations of activities occur, the nature and production of the material that is created for display or sale, and in the systems offering varying levels of symbolic or material rewards. Crane examines artist motivations in terms of such rewards, hypothesising that power and prestige at the national level are magnified at the international level where the global financial system dictates that economic take precedence over symbolic rewards.40

The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally

99

I define a global culture world as one in which a small number of organisations from several countries dominate the global production and dissemination of culture. Their activities affect the opportunities for creators, sellers, and purchasers at the urban level. Global worlds need places where producers, sellers and buyers congregate and in the process develop a consensus about what they are doing and who is doing it best.41

Central to this global art world system is the function—role, activities and location—of the art fairs, 42 and in particular the top four of these, Maastricht, Art Basel, Art Miami, London Frieze.43 Art fairs take place in temporary locations but most are repeated annually or biannually in the same location. Over the past ten years the number of art fairs has increased incrementally such that by 2012 there were more than 180 art fairs taking place worldwide and throughout the year.44 Competing with the two top branded auction houses, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, they are a “must attend” for the top branded galleries as they draw the best and richest of art collectors. 45 The rich collectors visit because the superstar dealers are exhibiting their superstar artists.46 Georgina Adam cites the reasons for the proliferation of fairs as: 1) the need to offer a buy-it-or-you’ll-lose-it situation to challenge the auction houses; 2) a way of extending a gallery’s global reach; 3) a way of making contacts with both artists and buyers around the world; and 4) the need to be part of today’s event-driven culture. 47 As only a minority of commercial galleries in New Zealand participate in the secondary market the first of her reasons is not relevant to this study. But the other three are, and provide a major impetus for an increasing number of significant galleries to participate globally. A further more pertinent reason for New Zealand commercial galleries is that their artists want to participate internationally, for 1) monetary gain, 2) exhibitions in international locations both public and private, 3) inclusion in international collections public and private, 4) international publicity, critique and acclaim. For the more established artists, with more expensive artwork, their galleries have to operate where the customers are.

Biennales The global art world accentuates the importance of economic rewards over symbolic rewards. Powerful participants from a few countries dominate the production, exhibition, sales and profits. Fuelled by increasing income disparity concentrated in fewer yet highly mobile hands, High Art has become a vehicle conferring cultural credentials, prestige and sophistication on the one-percent, which form the economic hub of their

100

Chapter Seven

countries. As art fairs have grown and proliferated to support High Art excesses and dominance, a corresponding development of biennales has evolved with counter-exhibition activities that support other parallel art worlds in international communities across the globe. “The tension between the homogenising and anti-homogenising forces of globalisation is captured in the biennial, as it foregrounds both international and local art, and highlights the complex relays between them.”48 Over the past thirty years biennales and triennials have become a major force evolving as a structural exhibition option in their own right. Smith describes a continuum of sites for contemporary art exhibitions with biennales falling somewhere between institutionalised structures such as museums, more specialised exhibition venues such as single artist’s or period museums, university gallery or research collections,49 and the open ended art projects like Oda Projesi—Room Project 50 (New Zealand examples—et al and Pacific Sisters). 51 The important point here is that with the more experimental structures undertaking exhibitions as part of their research, educational activities, temporary and virtual initiatives, the focus shifts—and the “event and the image prevail over the place and duration.”52 At one end of this spectrum biennales offer an open-ended statement clear of curatorial control. They are experimental, radical and innovative, and they challenge new directions for future art practices. The art is more likely to be critical, drawn from symbolic and expressive practices, and displayed via new technology, video, cinema and social media platforms (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.). Biennales facilitate communication exchange and connectivity between local, urban and international communities dislocated and otherwise unknown to the global art world. They are less likely to be tied up by High Art dictates and art market forces, themes, definitive displays and strong curatorial control.53 Some biennales, such as Venice,54 or some Asian or Middle Eastern biennales (Art Dubai), fall more into the spectacular, High Art institutional end of the spectrum. Others, such as Sao Paulo, Havana, Manifesta 55 Documenta and Gwangju 56 are formed around the interconnectivity of local and international communities. There are, however, complex diverging undercurrents in the way biennales develop, deviate and evolve. Before 2000 Venice demonstrated greater global outreach and was freer from institutional bureaucracy to experiment with curatorial arrangements and exhibition structure than since;57 Gwangju 2010 took a step back, as prior to this it had been directed by younger, more philosophically, ethnically and geographically diverse curators; and in 2012 Sao Paulo, retreating from the influence of the international art world, moved from

The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally

101

debating political/artistic questions (2010) to a “‘safer” exploration of poetics.

The regional artist in a changing global art world Are there other ways for artists to work internationally? Artists who are unable or unwilling to pursue the High Art world? Artist residences, crowd funding, new technologies and new gambits by institutions such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid) and the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), are put forwards as examples. Claire Bishop contends that along with initiatives such as “L’Internationale,” including five institutions—Van Abbemuseum, Ljubljana’s Moderna Galerija, Antwerp’s MuKHA, Barcelona’s MACBA, and Bratislava’s Július Koller Society—share their collections, question centralising master narratives of art history, and investigate new paradigms of translocalism, offering real alternatives. She argues that these institutions are asking the “big questions—regarding our relationship to history, our consumption of images, the production of meaningful connections between different generations and geographies, and the envisioning of new social and political possibilities.” 58 Describing themselves as nomads of contemporary art who travel the world from one residency to another, there are artists who exchange their services and art production for accommodation and a studio. Art residencies began to emerge in the 1960s as vehicles for artists to resist the exchange value of art. Given that these residencies mostly focus on the production of site-specific artworks, it is arguable whether they do not in fact form part of the global art world hierarchy. 59 However, often residencies are linked to biennales or art projects. Thus the status of the residency contribution, as an alternative, according to Smith’s spectrum of institutionalised infrastructures, to “open-ended inventiveness,” will depend upon which biennale, museum or project they are assigned to.60 Smith refers to the “under-the–radar proliferators,” which fit into the third section of his spectrum, along with interactivity as alternative spaces and temporary settings. 61 These alternatives are all constantly changing and developing, and are all “entirely experimental.”62 Smith argues that in this section—accessing new technologies etc., although not necessarily the case—are the curators (and artists) most likely to be turning their backs on the global art world.

102

Chapter Seven

Smith’s conclusion on the role of biennales is pertinent here. Is, in naming new technologies as a structural medium for subversive potential, “this mistaking a medium for a subject?” 63 This is an essential point. Whether the medium is biennales or new technology, it is the substance of the art making that matters most and this includes the ability for artists (and other art practitioners) to gain symbolic and financial rewards other than those dictated by globalism and a commodity driven High Art world. Discussing resistance to artworld servility and the predicament of global art and institutionalised practices (of museums, art fairs and some biennales) Julian Stallabrass argues that, as long as capitalism is the dominant world system, art will be forced to toe the line. 64 Smith’s optimism in asking the question—”can curators best advance innovative art by investing their energies in creating new kinds of infrastructure?”—is rebuffed convincingly. Stallabrass argues that the material forces driving biennials are the same as those driving the expansion of museums and other global art world institutions. Spectacular cultural events and institutions compete globally for investment, sponsors and tourists. Dominant art forces prevail and —”Just as business executives circled the earth in search of new markets, so a breed of nomadic global curators began to do the same, shuttling from one biennale or transnational art event to another, from Sao Paulo to Venice to Kwangju to Sydney to Kassel and Havana,”65 like branded artists seeking celebrity status. Curatorial collaboration was key for the “linkages and collisions” of ROUNDTABLE, the theme for the 2012 Gwangju Biennale. This formed the title and a metaphor to describe the working relationship of the codirectors, as well as their expectations for discourse and interaction at the event. While a pair or trio of biennale co-curators is common with biennales, Gwangju, with six curators broke new ground. 66 They selected artists, art works, event design, projects and programmes that would allow for the creation of a unique condition in which dialogue could be furthered around six key sub-themes. With the emphasis on experimenting with the notions of connections as well as collisions (of social, geographical, political and personal histories and experiences) among the co-directors themselves, as much as the selected art works and artists, it was not surprising that the co-directors, not the artists or their artwork, dominated the show. This was confirmed by the experience of Eady.

The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally

103

Figure 7-5. Scott. Eady, Ivan (Calciami!), 2013, powder coated bronze, paper, 36 diameter, Personal Structures, Palazzo Bembo, Venice Biennale 2013. Photo: Rebecca Hamid.

104

Chapter Seven

What is meant by globalisation in the context of this practice? In any discussion about art and the global art world the term “globalisation” requires some attention and clarification. Some theories take the perspective of transformation, others of collision. Weibel argues that economic and political forces have led to the hegemony of the West being threatened from within by “creative destruction” and “innovation.”67 With the break up of Western domination, globalisation is giving rise to the spread of a territorial system of nation states which eventually will be included rather than excluded from contemporary global art. This, he argues, is an opportunity—an alternative—for rewriting art, political and economic history on a global scale.68 On the other hand globalisation theories, such as those of Negri and Hardt, 69 hypothesise global domination with diminishing boundaries— and that the emergence of an international contemporary art world has erased the impact of geographical prerequisites as determining factors in the construction of an artist’s success. Biennales serve the medium of exhibition for this development (Smith, 70 Crane 71 ). Resulting global dissemination and the evolution of the biennale model, from an exhibition based on national representation to invited artists, represents the internationalisation of the contemporary art world (Smith, 72 Weibel, 73 Belting and Buddensieg 74). This alternative model covers all countries and enables widespread and non-discriminatory (race, nationality, gender, etc.,) artist participation and recognition. Hans Belting writes: More than one hundred biennales, in which travelling curators operate as global agents, present packages of international plus regional art to cosmopolitan audiences in ever-new venues. This is the quintessential constellation of art’s globalisation.75

Robertson provides a more nuanced view on cultural globalisation and its effects, open to combining elements of the different theories and alternative viewpoints, rather than simple distinctions between the local and the global. 76 He refers to the effects of urbanisation and mass communication, and stresses in particular the capacity of people today to transition between local-, national- or global-orientated levels and thus their involvement in different spheres. Further, he questions the tendency to consider local and global culture separately and as being in conflict.77 However, as argued by Crane, Stallabrass, Ray, and others, increasingly it is the economic power of wealth generators such as Hong Kong ,78 free ports and tax havens ,79 storages for wealth (London, Dubai, Singapore),

The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally

105

that determines which nations or cities can operate as Free Zones (Beijing),80 making themselves dominant centres for art buying collectors. Crane proposes four models of globalisation—cultural imperialism, cultural flows or networks, reception theory and cultural policy. Each of these reflects a specific view on how globalisation has shaped the production, distribution, reception and consumption of culture over the last 20-25 years.81 These four models reflect a current approach to the cultural globalisation debate and usefully clarify and qualify the effects of globalisation on the contemporary art world as a whole.

Contemporary art as a product of globalising economies In order to explore new possibilities Crane, Stallabrass, Ray and others, critique the wider power structure of the capitalist system itself, as one which underpins globalism and the micro-worlds that operate within it, including the global art world. Rather than accommodating to globalism and working within it, they stand back from it and examine alternatives for art in anticipation of a new system where capitalism is replaced by something else. As a consequence, opposition to the status quo is necessary and provides a valuable perspective for critiquing it. Art production can be explained in terms of the business model of modern branded dealer galleries and their commercial goals of creating scarcity by limiting the supply of art to only the wealthiest collectors. Branded artists respond to dealers’ and collectors’ demands and this is reflected in the art produced. Art is a commodity, with exclusivity, novelty and luxury the key elements of this business model. Art becomes a positional good. While status spending is not a new phenomenon (see Veblen’s concept of “conspicuous consumption,” 1889) 82 “recent appropriation of a portion of society’s creative culture to the status of a positional good, affordable to a minuscule fraction of the world’s population, is inherently limiting and elitist.” 83 This is the stereotypical model of cultural consumption of the local by the economic imperatives of capitalism. Alternative and subversive models propose bottom up initiatives based on local initiatives where images, meanings, spatial concepts, aesthetics and values associated with specific localities are produced and distributed within the global art economy. In summary, a macro definition of globalism, as supported by an understanding of how capitalism works, is the preferred critical theory to analyse global art production. Further, that Marxism provides the most comprehensive and sustained critique of capitalism, and is therefore essential to a full appreciation of globalism and by implication, the global

106

Chapter Seven

art world. 84 While Keynesian economic theory also offers a critique of capitalism it is still in favour of capitalism as the preferred economic system. So for example, Tony Judt applies Keynesian economic theory (as opposed to Friedman’s libertarian economics) as a moderating force to limit some of the excesses of neo-capitalism.85 His economic analysis of the failings of neo-capitalism, as it has given rise to globalisation, opts to critique it from within rather than abandon it in preference to an alternative or something new.

Determinates underpinning the global art world Power and prestige at a national level is dominated at a global level in a centre-periphery model in which a few nation states, and more lately, a few private individuals within those states, control and dominate production, sales and profits. The current world order operates as a capitalist economy and since the 1970s this has continued to develop along with globalisation. In the past forty years the West has undergone vital changes, including shifts “to a ‘post-industrial’ culture of consumerism, communications, information technologies and the service industry. Small scale, decentralised, versatile, non-hierarchical enterprises were the order of the day.”86 These changes were followed by deregulation, the repression of workers’ organisations and the development of transnational corporations through the use of new technologies and communications. Manufacturing was increasingly outsourced and investment followed the search for the cheapest source of labour. This lead to mass international migrations to wealthy economies, sweated labour, land acquisitions in poor unregulated countries, the privatisation of public facilities and slashed welfare in developed countries.87 Eagleton notes that all this occurred in response to international competition forcing down profits. What followed was “the displacement of investment from manufacture to the service, financial and communications industries—as a reaction to a protracted economic crisis.”88 The overall global effect is that capital is now more concentrated and predatory than ever before. In an attempt to explain why there is such extreme wealth in the hands of a few—no-longer the 1.0%, now estimated at 0.1%89 —and why the disparity in the distribution of the world’s worth continues to grow, James Henry writes: A significant fraction of global private financial wealth—by our estimates, at least $21 to $32 trillion as of 2010—has been invested virtually tax-free

The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally

107

through the worlds still-expanding black hole of more than 80 offshore secrecy jurisdictions. 90

Henry explores the scope of the political and economic forces operating to expand globalisation, the macrocosm, which envelops and provides the favourable conditions, supporting and expanding the global art world. The global art world does not operate in isolation. It is part of a much wider global economy which, in turn, is determined by global political forces supporting polices of wealth creation and distribution.

Options In “This Way to Exit” Gene Ray considers the writing of Stallabrass’s Art Incorporated and concludes that, of the four options Stallabrass proposes as alternatives to participating in the global art world, it is the fourth that offers the most promise. The second and third options include political activism and the linked exploitation of technology mediums to side step the global art system. 91 These are problematic. While biennales and exhibitions apply thematic and curatorial approaches that explicitly criticise neo-liberalism, they are invariably neutralised by the institutions which host them. If nothing else, the “conventions of passive and isolated spectatorship” neutralise them. 92 While new technologies, such as the Internet, provide a medium to exit the gallery or museum, and have democratised artists’ techniques of appropriation and displacement, they are not without their problems. They too can succumb to passive and isolated spectatorship as well as consumerist activity contrary to politicised participation. Stallabrass’s fourth option Ray redefines as “to challenge the illusion of art’s uselessness by producing works of explicit use.”93 Here Stallabrass means to attack art’s autonomy, as upheld by institutional and global art world hierarchies, by reviving avant-garde options to relink art with the everyday. A revival of avant-garde anti-capitalist struggles on a global scale is considered feasible given current resurgences of political and economic struggle, aided by qualitative increases in global connectivity, such as social media. Stallabrass references Hardt and Negri’s Empire to support his hypothesis. Ray uses Stallabrass’s ideas to suggest organising an avant-garde to neutralise and resist art world institutions through “deliberate rupture.”94 As Ray points out, this cannot be achieved by individual artists working in isolation. It will require collective action by artists (and other art world participants), and there will need to be a critical mass of support.

108

Chapter Seven

Furthermore a call to act collectively cannot be isolated to the art world. It must extend beyond and be linked to live struggles and social movements across the globe. Both Stallabrass and Ray are responding to struggles that are arising worldwide in response to the 2008 global economic crises; collective movements and resistance that have arisen since, such as The Arab Spring—and the use of technologies and social media to communicate and organise such a struggle. Buoyed by the global justice movement, Ray proposes a scenario for resistance and rupture. Firstly, to understand the current situation artists (and other art practitioners) must educate themselves about art under capitalism. Which means getting acquainted with Marxist theory, as arguably this is the only comprehensive critique of capitalism. This first phase will require a “selective and progressive detachment from the most corrupted and neutralising institutions (galleries, journals, art fairs, the worst museums and biennials),” and the organisation of “counterinstitutions”95 for making, exhibiting, appreciating, and selling art based upon new and ethical values.96 These values will be defined in “negating contrast to those that currently dominate the art world.”97 Phase two will continue the evolution of that development, along with the support of collective movements and struggles, to entice a more widespread participation in a “virtuous circle of collective (self) production.”98

Is another world possible? Opposition to globalisation and capitalism will require a rethink of political agency and collective subjectivity. Marxist theory, as the major contribution to theories critiquing globalisation, will be central to this, as will theories that appraise and expand on Marxism.99 This neo-Marxism points to the necessity for liberation from the nation-state, old forms of sovereignty and global domination, in order to create new forms of community and cooperation.100 Networks of alternatives and avant-garde gambits would link up to form collective movements of resistance, which can subvert and disrupt states’ apparatuses and force transformation.101 Drawing heavily on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, Ray hypothesises two ways that current oppositional art practices link with activist networks of the global justice movement. Firstly he cites Critical Art Ensemble102 and Baghdad Snapshot Action Crew103 as collectives of artists carrying on the battle of images and representations, actively engaged in experiments developing oppositional practices using digital paradigms, technology and new media. 104 These have been effective interventions that Ray characterises as crucial “forms of contestation.”

The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally

109

The second direction addresses art as commodity production and nonalienated productivity. Ray terms this “catalytic art” (borrowing Mel Chin’s term). 105 Again, drawing on Hardt and Negri, Ray references “biopolitical” activists’ understanding of the workings of capitalist processes and responds by developing subjective forms and sophisticated strategies to avoid and bypass co-operation with constructions of commodity labour. Artist Mel Chin’s catalytic strategy, including a series of virus infiltrations of television soap opera, were created in order that they could be subsequently reactivated by events and in unpredictable ways. Ray appreciates the value of Chin’s project as eventually having impressive results when this viral infection of the “global electronic net” becomes a model (along with others) of new collaborative forms and strategies. The aggregate of these two models of resistance, linking up with networks of resistance beyond the art world, become rhizomatic. 106 Paradoxically, they mimic and adopt the strategies of capitalism itself, applying complex strategies of doubling and masking, as evident in corporate organisational theory. “By doing this, by overcoming their isolation through productive practices of collaboration based on solidarity, the subjects of postmodern work are actively producing the desires and forms of subjectivity that push beyond capitalism and can eventually destroy it.”107 Ray’s two models overlap, and become increasingly subtle, intensive and more pervasive. He urges oppositional practices and rhizomes of resistance to become more militant in order to put an end to the capitalist world system. This is a discourse proffering hope that another art world is possible. While it supports Stallabrass’s model for change, as outlined above, it goes further by advocating an end to capitalist domination, not simply of the art world, but the economic and political world systems of which this is a part. To respond to this challenge artists will require considerable courage. They will also need to be well informed and have a commitment that extends beyond their own self-interest, in Ray’s words, their “delusional individualism, toxic careerism, submissive opportunism and impotent cynicism.”108 The choice to abandon a trajectory in the High Art world, offering rich financial and symbolic rewards, as sanctioned by the institutionalised art hierarchies, is a difficult one. If opportunities present themselves, as they did in Venice, the slim odds of succeeding are unlikely to deter artists from trying. Being marginalised at a local or regional level may seem a far worse option. Ethical or moral considerations may well to be overtaken by pragmatic choices to earn a living, produce art, secure opportunities to exhibit and achieve acclaim.

110

Chapter Seven

Conclusion This chapter set out to examine how two regional artists working with their gallery could exhibit, sell art and develop careers internationally. Ironically, the trajectory of their success, including securing exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, has developed from being an exercise motivated by marginalisation and a longing for international representation, to one critiquing the cultural, political and economic hegemony dominating the global art world that seemed, in part, to contribute to that marginalisation. This shift of ideas and purpose has given an opportunity to question this marginalisation. In trying to understand how the global art world works, this experience has provided the impetus to explore alternatives for artists, galleries, and other art practitioners, to develop strategies to exit what is essentially an ethically corrupt and bankrupt art world system. Given how the global economic system works, how wealth is derived and distributed, and who benefits, major ethical considerations confronted the artists and their gallery on whether or not to participate. Despite claims to the contrary, art and the art world should not act as amorphous autonomous entities that absent and shield artists and their dealers (and other art professionals) from political acts in pursuit of their art selfinterests. Ultimately political decisions determine the structure of the global economic system and these in turn determine the nature of the international contemporary art world, how it operates, who participates and who benefits. With this in mind, it is hoped that this chapter may inform critical, political and ultimately ethical decisions about whether to participate, with eyes wide open both to the dilemma of our current circumstances and to opportunities for change. It remains to be seen whether the options for change proposed by theories presented above will eventuate, but it is the commitment of this writer to participate and contribute to this change as it unfolds and opportunities present themselves.

Notes 1. Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) 7. The “Spectacularism” of the top tier of the art world includes the extravagant, overstated and monumental manifestations of museums, art auctions, art fairs, biennales and other institutional structures. 2. Arthur Danto, “The Art World,” The Journal of Philosophy, 61:19 (1964). An example is provided by Danto’s visit to Andy Warhol’s exhibition of Brillo Boxes at the Stable Gallery in New York. He asked himself what made Warhol’s

The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally

111

Brillo Boxes different from commercial Brillo boxes and concluded that it was the functioning of “The Art World.” 3. George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974) and Art Circle: A Theory of Art (Chicago: Spectrum Press, 1997). 4. Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) 1; “Hypertext Fiction,” in Cultura & Economia, Maria Lourdes Lima dos Santos (ed.), (Lisbon: Edicões do Instituto de Ciências Sociais, 1995) 3-5. 5. Becker:1982, 25-30. 6. Becker:1982, 29 and Becker:1995, 3. 7. Ibid. 8. Becker:1982, 29. 9. Ibid., 30. 10. Ibid., 36 11. The term “current” is often a somewhat clumsy descriptor employed here. It could be replaced by “trend,” or more often simply “section” or “scene” within the contemporary art worlds. 12. Becker:1982, 265. 13. Ibid., 252. 14. Gerry Bell, “Terry Smith—What Is Contemporary Art? (Review),” accessed 25 March 2014. 15. Andrew E McNamara, “What Is Contemporary Art? A Review of Two Books by Terry Smith,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 12 (2012) 252-8. 16. Smith:2009, 267. 17. Ibid., 265. 18 . Alison Lapper Pregnant, 2005, a huge purple air-inflated sculpture that dominated the entrance to Venice for the duration of the 2013 Biennale. Quinn’s solo show, curated by Germano Celant, including sculptures, paintings and other art objects, provided an extensive retrospective of more than fifty works, including fifteen new works. 19. Iain Robertson, A New Art from Emerging Markets (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2011) 192-6. 20. James S Henry, “The Price of Offshore Revisited,”

accessed 22 March 2014. 21 . Don Thompson, The $12 Million Dollar Stuffed Shark; The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art and Auction Houses (London: Aurum Press, 2008). 22. Gene Ray, “Avant-Gardes as Anti-Capitalist Vector,” Third Text, 21:3 (2007) 242. 23. Ibid.,254. 24. Terry Smith, “The Provincialism Problem,” Artforum, 13:1 (September 1974) 57. 25. Thompson:2008, 64.

112

Chapter Seven

26. Ibid., 58. “Those who have broken the bind have done so largely because the system is structured so that several artists every few years have to break the bind.” (original italics). 27. Diana Crane, Culture Worlds: From Urban Worlds to Global Worlds, ESA Research Network Sociology of Culture Midterm Conference: Culture and the Making of Worlds, (October 14 2010) 2, accessed 27 June 2014. Whereas Crane (referencing Bathelt and Schuldt, 2008: 864-5) refers to “nodes” in respect to trade fairs, in terms of “a temporary microcosm of an entire industry,” Smith applies “nodes” to areas of activities where artists make their accommodations, adapting and trying to survive outside the global art world. Terry Smith, “Contemporary Art: World Currents in Transition Beyond Globalisation,” The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press for SKM, Karlsruhe, 2013) 186-192. 28. Ray:2007, 254. 29. Thompson:2008, 64-5 and 80-91. 30. Crane:2010, 7. 31. Mike Seccombe, “Biennale of Sydney Patron Luca Belgiorno-Nettis under Fire,” The Sunday Paper, 28 February 2014, accessed 21 July 2014. “In one day this week, Luca Belgiorno-Nettis made more money than most of us will see in a lifetime. The share price of Transfield, the company his father started, soared almost 25 per cent. The spike on Monday followed the announcement that the company had won a $1.22 billion, 20-month contract to take over the running of the Manus Island immigration detention centre, in addition to its existing contract, entered in 2012, for the centre on Nauru.” 32. Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) 4. “The daring novelty of art, with its continual breaking with convention, is only a pale rendition of the continual evaporation of certainties produce by Capital itself, which destroys all resistance to the unrestricted flow across the globe of funds, data, products and finally the bodies of millions of migrants.” 33. Ibid., 51. 34. Ibid., 51. “Artists may think there is an incentive to sell through multiple dealers, because competition would improve the terms offered by each. They quickly realise that without exclusive representation, a dealer’s promotional efforts would also benefit any other dealers handling the same artists—and so no dealer would do any promotion.” 35. Thompson:2008, 49. 36. Given the lesser costs of this exhibition, and support from patrons, a Trust and his employer, it was not necessary to organise a patrons campaign for Scott Eady. 37. H.S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 38 . Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) 74-111. 39. Crane:2010, 1-2. 40. Crane:2010, 1.

The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally

113

41. Ibid.,1. 42. Ibid., 2. 43. Crane includes the New York Armory Show and FIAC in Paris, but excludes Maastricht. 44. Georgina Adam, “Fair or Foul: More Art Fairs and Bigger Brand Galleries, but is the Model Sustainable?” The Art Newspaper, 236 (June 2012). accessed 9 July 2014. “The explosion in the number of art fairs is the most significant change in the market since the turn of the century. The numbers tell the story: in 1970, there were just three main events (Cologne, Basel and the Brussels-based Art Actuel). But the number has mushroomed in the past decade: from 68 in 2005 to 189 in 2011.” 45. “Air Service Basel handles record aircraft numbers during Art Basel 2014,” in

accessed 9 July 2014, recording over three hundred private jets handled at the airport during the 2014 Art Basel art fair. 46. Thompson:2008,101. Thompson lists the top twenty wealthy active collectors. 47. Adam:2012. 48. Terry Smith, “Biennales and Infrastructural Shift Part 1,” ArtAsiaPacific, 79 (Jul/Aug 2012) 3. 49. Examples of single artist collections—Eastern Southland Gallery, Gore (Hotere collection) and the proposed Len Lye Museum in New Plymouth, New Zealand. Also foundations which include exhibitions as part of their research or artist programmes, such as the Hocken Library, University of Otago, and Wellington City Art Gallery or Dowse Art Gallery specialising in exhibiting changing and special travelling and co-shared curated exhibitions. 50. A collective of women who staged community art projects between 2000 and 2005 in Istanbul. 51. A collective of Pacifika artists staging events and art projects between 19982004 in Auckland. 52. Smith:2012, 1-4. Smith's uses as an example Oda Projesi's “Room Project,” a collective of three Istanbul-based women artists who staged nearly thirty shows between 2001 and 2005. 53. For example Massimiliano Gioni’s preference for definitive and theme-curated exhibitions as Director of the Venice Biennale 2013 and Gwangju Biennale 2010. 54. The primogenitor of biennales, the Venice Biennale, was first held in 1889. Over the period since its inception Venice had offered a global reach and a degree of freedom from institutional red tape and historical baggage. However, critics observe that since 2005 Venice has become more institutional in its approach. Over the past three decades the other biennales (and triennials) that have followed have a very distinctive format departing from the spectacular and the grand national, collateral and private events that now sprawl across the city of Venice for its six months duration. 55. Manifesta is a nomadic biennale, changing location from one event to another, as it is intended to engage countries at the volatile borders of the European Union. .

114

Chapter Seven

56 . Founded in memory of the repression of the Gwangju Democratisation Movement in 1980 when over 3,000 people were killed, wounded or went missing, the Gwangju Biennale has had a mixed history of being one of the more experimental biennales (with innovative curators such as Charles Esche, Hou Hanru, Yongwoo, Okwui Enwesor). Gwangju, like Havana, Taipei and Istanbul, takes place on the margins, “where the economic stakes are lower but where the intellectual and the political stakes have never mattered more.” 57. Claire Bishop, “Venice’11: Safety in Numbers”, Artforum (2011), accessed 23 July 2014: 1-3. 58. Bishop:2011, 3. 59 . Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel (eds), The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press for SKM, Karlsruhe, 2013) 432-5. 60. Smith:2012, 4. 61. Smith:2012, 2. 62. Ibid., 63. Smith:2012, 3. 64. Stallabrass:2004, 193-5. 65. Stallabrass:2004, 33. 66. Nancy Adajania (India), Wassan Al-Khudhairi (Qatar), Mami Kataoka (Japan), Sunjung Kim (Korea), Carol Yinghua Lu (China) and Alia Swastika (Indonesia). 67. Peter Weibel, “Globalisation and Contemporary Art,” in Belting:2013, 20. 68. Ibid., 27. 69. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 70. Smith:2012, 1-4. 71. Crane:2010, 1-2, accessed 27 June 2014. 72. Smith:2012, 3. 73. Weibel in Belting:2013, 20-1. 74. Belting:2013, 28 -9. 75. Ibid.,29. 76. Ibid.,53. 77. Ronald Robertson, “Glocalisation: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity” in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995) 34. As emphasised when discussing cultural flows theory, new cultural forms may emerge as a consequence of the mixing of global and local culture, called hybridisation. The two notions sometimes overlap and represent what is referred to as the particular in the universal. As an example, Robertson refers to the nation-state, which is universal in its organisation, yet clearly marked by its unique or particular features. Accordingly, Robertson proposes considering globalisation as “glocalisation,” in which the global and the local are combined. 78. Robertson:2011, 193-4. 79. Robertson:2011, 194-5. 80. Robertson:2011, 195-6.

The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally

115

81. Diane Crane, “Culture and Globalisation: Theoretical Models and Emerging Trends,” in Diana Crane, N. Kawashima and K. Kawasaki (eds), Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalisation (New York: Routledge, 2002) 1-25. 82. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1899) 3. 83. Ibid., 48. 84. Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (London: Yale University Press, 2011) 7-8. 85. Tony Judt, So Ill Fares the Land (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2011) 44-58. 86. Eagleton:2011, 4. 87. Ibid., 3-5. 88. Ibid., 5. 89 . Andrea Fraser, “Are We Happy Yet? 1% Art. Who are the Patrons of Contemporary Art Today?,” Artbusters Magazine, 100 (14 February, 2012) 1-4, accessed 4 August 2014. 90. James Henry, “The Price Of Offshore Revisited: New Estimates For Missing Global Private Wealth, Income, Inequality, and Lost Taxes,” Tax Justice Network (2012). accessed 22 March 2014 91. Stallabrass:2004, 188. 92. Gene Ray, “This Way to Exit: On Julian Stallabrass’s Art Incorporated,” Third Text, 21:4 (July, 2007) 392. 93. Stallabrass:2004, 195. 94. Ray:2007, 394. 95 . Ibid., “reinvention of previous models of radical culture: collectives and cooperatives, online journals and podcasts, arts of living and modes of making.” 96. Ibid., 395. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Gilles Deleuse, Felix Guattari, Michal Foucault and Hardt and Negri. 100. Hardt and Negri:2000, 346-7. 101. Gene Ray, “Avant-Garde as Anti-Captislist Vector, ” Third Text, 21:3 (May, 2007) 244-5. 102. accessed 26 July 2014. 103 . accessed 25 July 2014. 104. Ray:2007, 568. 105. Mel Chin, “My Relation to Joseph Beuys Is Overrated,” in Gene Ray (ed.), Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy (New York: DAP Ringling Museum of Art, 2001) 133-7. 106. Hardt and Negri:2000, 152-3. Ray also applies this terminology. 107. Ray:2007, 571. 108. Ray:2007, 387.

116

Chapter Seven

References Adam, Georgina, “Fair or Foul: More Art Fairs and Bigger Brand Galleries, but is the Model Sustainable?” The Art Newspaper, 236, June 2012.

accessed 26 June 2014. Bathelt, H. and Schuldt, N., “Between Luminaries and Meat Grinders: International Trade Fairs as Temporary Clusters,” Regional Studies, 42:6, 2008, 853-68. Bell, Gerry, “Terry Smith—What is Contemporary Art? (Review),” accessed 25 March 2014. Belting, Hans, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel (eds), The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press for SKM, Karlsruhe, 2013). Becker, Howard, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) 1. —. “Hypertext Fiction,” in Cultura & Economia, Maria Lourdes Lima dos Santos (ed.), (Lisbon: Edicões do Instituto de Ciências Sociais, 1995) 3-5. Bishop, Claire, “Venice’11: Safety in Numbers,” Artforum International, 50:1 (September 2011) 1-3. accessed 23 July 2014. Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Chin, Mel, “My Relation to Joseph Beuys is Overrated,” in Gene Ray (ed.), Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy (New York: DAP Ringling Museum of Art, 2001) 133-7. Crane, Diana, Culture Worlds: From Urban Worlds to Global Worlds, ESA Research Network Sociology of Culture Midterm Conference: Culture and the Making of Worlds (14 October, 2010) 1-14. accessed 27 June 2014. —. “Culture and Globalisation: Theoretical Models and Emerging Trends,” in Diana Crane, N. Kawashima and K. Kawasaki (eds), Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalisation (New York: Routledge, 2002) 1-25. Danto, Arthur, “The Art World,” The Journal of Philosophy, 61:19 (1964).

The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally

117

Dickie, George, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974). —. The Art Circle: A Theory of Art (Chicago: Spectrum Press, 1997). —. “Defining Art,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 6:3 (1969). Eagleton, Terry, Why Marx Was Right (London: Yale University Press, 2011). Enwesor, Okwui, “The Politics of Spectacle: The Guangju Biennale and the Asian Century,” Invisible Culture Journal, An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, 15 (2010). Fraser, Andrea, “Are We Happy Yet? 1% Art. Who are the Patrons of Contemporary Art Today?” Adbusters Magazine, 100 (14 February 2012) 1-4,

accessed 4 August 2014. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, Empire, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Henry, James, “The Price of 6 Revisited: New Estimates for Missing Global Private Wealth, Income, Inequality, and Lost Taxes,” Tax Justice Network (2012). accessed 22 March 2014 Judt, Tony, So Ill Fares the Land (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2011). McNamara, Andrew E., “What Is Contemporary Art? A Review of Two Books by Terry Smith,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 12 (2012) 252-8. Ray, Gene, “Avant-Gardes as Anti-Capitalist Vector,” Third Text, 21:3 (May, 2007) 241-55. —. “Another (Art) World is Possible: Theorising Oppositional Convergence,” Third Text, 18:6 (2004) 565-72. —. “This Way to Exit: On Julian Stallabrass’s Art Incorporated,” Third Text, 21:4 (July 2007) 387-95. Robertson, Iain Alexander, Understanding International Art Markets and Management (New York: Routledge, 2005). —. A New Art From Emerging Markets (London: Lund Humphries Publishers Limited, 2011). Robertson, Iain Alexander and Derrick Chong (eds), The Art Business (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008). Robertson, Roland, “Glocalisation: Time-Space and HomogeneityHeterogeneity” in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995).

118

Chapter Seven

Seccombe, Mike, “Biennale of Sydney Patron Luca Belgiorno-Nettis under Fire,” The Sunday Paper, 28 February 2014. accessed 21 July 2014. Smith, Terry, “The Provincialism Problem,” Artforum, 13:1 (September 1974) 54–9. —. What is Contemporary Art? (London: University of Chicago, Press, 2009). —. Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International (ICI), 2012). —. “Biennials and Infrastructural Shift, Part 1,” ArtAsiaPacific, 79 (July/August 2012), accessed 10 May 2014. —. “Biennials and Infrastructural Shift, Part 2,” ArtAsiaPacific, 79 (Sept/Oct 2012) 56-7. accessed 11 May 2014. —. “Contemporary Art: World Currents in Transition Beyond Globalisaton,” in Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel (eds), The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press for SKM, Karlsruhe, 2013) 186-9. Stallabrass Julian, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). —. “Manifest Opulence” [Frieze Art Fair], London Review of Books, blog, 18 October 2013. accessed 2 July 2014. —. “Elite Art in an Age of Populism,” in Alexander Dumbadse and Susanne Hudson (eds.), Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2013) 39-49. Korean translation: Visual, 9, 2012 (Korea National University of Arts, Seoul) 39-69. —. “Rhetoric of the Image,” review of Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012) and Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), Artforum (March 2013) 712. —. “A Sad Reflection on the Art World,” The Art Newspaper, 241 (December 2012) 41. —. “The Hollow Triumph of Contemporary Art,” The Art Newspaper (June 2011) 7-8.

The Market and the Artist: Positioning Artists Internationally

119

—. “Brand Identity,” review of Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture, Sternberg Press, Berlin 2009, Artforum (Summer 2010) 79-80. —. In conversation with Malcolm Bull, “Money and Attention on the Global Art Scene,” Immediations: The Courtauld Institute of Art Journal of Postgraduate Research, 2:3 (2010) 105-12. —. “Partying,” review of Jonathan Harris, Art, Money, Parties: New Institutions in the Political Economy of the Arts (Liverpool University Press: Liverpool 2004),

accessed 23 July 2014. Thompson, Don, The $12 Million Dollar Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (London: Aurum Press Ltd, 2008). Thorstein. Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1899). Velthuis, Olav, “Globalisation of Markets For Contemporary Art: Why Local Ties Remain Dominant in Amsterdam and Berlin,” European Societies, 15:2 (2013) 290-308, accessed 4 August 2014.

CHAPTER EIGHT ART AND MONEY: WHAT IS REALLY BEING BOUGHT AND SOLD? JEWELL HOMAD-JOHNSON

Fig. 8-1. John Zinnanti, [email protected].

T

Untitled,

photograph,

2013.

Phoenix,

Arizona.

he Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911. This did not stop the queue of people who arrived to look at the empty space where she had hung, as if there was something of her still there, if not to see, to feel. When she

122

Chapter Eight

was recovered in Florence, “crowds gathered at Italian train stations to salute her on her way back to Paris.”1 It was the time when Kandinsky wrote On the Spiritual in Art (1912) to address the growing materialism to which many artists had surrendered, and to highlight the artist’s spiritual life. In other words, he confronted the relationship of “art and money” at his moment in modern history: The artist seeks for material reward for his dexterity, his power of vision and experience. His purpose becomes the satisfaction of vanity and greed. In place of the steady co-operation of artists is a scramble for good things. There are complaints of excessive competition, of over-production. Hatred, partisanship, cliques, jealousy, intrigues are the natural consequences of this aimless, materialist art…If the emotional power of the artist…can give free scope to his finer feelings, then art is on the crest of the road by which she will not fail later on to find the “what” she has lost, the “what” which will show the way to the spiritual food of the newly awakened spiritual life. This “what?” will no longer be the material, objective “what” of the former period, but the internal truth of art, the soul without which the body (i.e. the “how”) can never be healthy, whether in an individual or in a whole people.2

As over cited as these sentiments may be, no discussion of “art and money” can take place without including the two poles of reference: the dead master, and the living “brand.” Van Gogh sold only one painting while he was alive: Red Vineyard at Arles sold in Belgium to another artist for four hundred francs (1890).3 Damian Hirst has a new nine thousand square metre “Science Gallery and Studio” in Stroud, planned to open in 2014, and his personal art collection will be shown at his Newport Street Gallery in Lambeth in 2015. Stroud, as some may be aware, is where the British television series The Office was set, an irony undoubtedly not lost on Damian, who, after Jeff Koons, has been the most assiduous acolyte of the Warhol school and philosophy that “making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”4 In an interview with Sean O’Hagan, on the event of his career retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2012, Hirst confirmed this inheritance: I thought, “OK, I've got to deal with the world I live in—advertising, TV, media. I need to communicate the here and now.” I realised that you couldn't use the tools of yesterday to communicate today's world. Basically, that was the big light that went on in my head.5

Hirst answered his world by placing a shark in a large formaldehydefilled vitrine, or with pill paintings, pharmaceutical installations and, most

Art and Money: What is Really Being Bought and Sold?

123

recently, For the Love of God, a skull covered in diamonds. Rather than works outliving him, at only forty-seven he’s outliving his works, with many of the formaldehyde works deteriorating to the point of needing repair or replacement. On the other hand, by donating Mickey Hirst helped raise £902,500 to benefit Kids Company, a London-based charity (2014).6 As if to confirm that indeed fact is ever stranger than fiction a Miami pastor was convicted in a New York City court for “peddling fake Hirsts.”7 In a world addicted to material spectacle Hirst never fails to deliver another performance, more media hype, another twist to the spiral of art and money. It is the sharp contrast between Van Gogh and Damien Hirst that is symbolic of less than a century of change in the artworld, and why it’s nearly impossible to discuss art today without mentioning money. The debate between Van Gogh’s immaterial commitment to art and Hirst’s thirst for pecuniary enrichment has been waged throughout the past one hundred years. Hirst sold The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living in 2004 for six and a half million pounds. He sold US$198 million worth of his own art at a single 2008 Sotheby’s auction, directly to the public, bypassing the galleries who represent him.8 Awe of Van Gogh’s mastery as an artist continues. We are faced with the painful paradox of his poverty and torment while making the paintings in his lifetime, paintings which now consistently break records in the market. In contrast, Hirst’s critics have gone as far as publicly to advise anyone owning a Hirst to sell it now while it’s actually worth something. Robert Motherwell, one of the five founding artists of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, indirectly commented on “art and money” in an interview in 1954: I believe that painters’ judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context. Doubtless no painter systematically thinks this way; but it does seem to me to be basically what happens when modern painters judge any new manifestations of painting…An artist’s “art” is just his consciousness, developed slowly and painstakingly with many mistakes en route. How dare they collect those ugly early Van Gogh’s like trophies…9

To put Van Gogh’s work in some financial context, in 1987, one year shy of a century on from when he painted it, Van Gogh’s Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers sold at Christies in London for US$39.7 million. It was a turning point in the artworld, one that was witnessing young living artists sell for unheard of prices. Eric Fischl was one of those artists. This market later underwent a severe correction. Fischl commented in his recent autobiography Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas:

124

Chapter Eight …in October 1987 I was selling new work at $350,000…[After the correction] My India show, the first real test of my prices, opened in May 1990…Taking the weak market into account, Mary (Boone) had priced the big canvases at $250,000, a healthy cut from my high…In the end, the show sold out. All the paintings went to name collectors, and the big ones fetched $150,000. I don’t know how Mary did it. But then, I’ve never understood the business side of art. How do you put a value on a piece of art?10

The “weak market” was exacerbated by cliques of collectors who owned artists like Bleckner, Clemente, Fischl, Salle and Schnabel. Some of these collectors formed groups among themselves to drive up the prices of artists they owned at auction, to benefit the value of what they possessed. It was an activity that ultimately came to light, denting the trust of collectors, and droving down prices as a result. Artists and galleries, large and small across the USA weathered a slightly nervous market throughout the 1990s, as the Clinton-era recovery slowly but surely buildt the foundation for the lucrative high-end art market and “branding” we see today. Recently The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF) set the 2012 global art market sales at €46.1 billion or US$57,546,900,000.11 If this sounds like a lot of money, it is. Yet it isn’t when going beneath the surface of the market illusion to examine the earnings of the majority of artists. If we divide the reported global sales by just the 2.5 million American artists noted in a Princeton study, which includes actors, directors, announcers, architects, authors, dancers, designers, musicians and composers, painters, sculptors, craftsmen, photographers, teachers of art, drama and music, and other unclassified artists, and the TEFAF estimated annual market, then the average income is $24,586, $2000 less than the over-sixteen minimum wage in New Zealand. Hirst’s US$198 million Sotheby’s haul is equal to 8053 of those artists’ incomes. What exactly is anyone paying for when these billions change hands? “Global Power Players” can buy pretty much anything they want, so, what’s left to want? Why buy art? Buying art offers the opportunity to buy what money can’t buy. Objects of art are the evidence of alchemy, as much today as they were in medieval times. In a world of material mass production in the Second Machine Age, artists create the objects or experiences that become the collectors’ personal “holy grails” of desire and acquisition. The market in stolen masterpieces is the ultimate proof of the ethereal quality of art powerful enough to attract millions of dollars in high-risk theft, only to enjoy these treasures in utter secrecy. One can only imagine how tempting the urge to show them off must be.

Art and Money: What is Really Being Bought and Sold?

125

Jean Paul Sartre wrote, “that the painter creates an imaginary house on the canvas and not a sign of a house.”12 German professor of Comparative Picture Theory and Phenomenology Lambert Wiesling asserts that while perception theory acknowledges there is a difference between the real thing and the artificial presence of an image object, there is in fact a presence in images—a worldly kind of present-ness.13 In a flood of mass reproductions and digital imagery, original art is the last king of the inimitable unique. Six centuries after the paint dried, seven million people still make the pilgrimage annually to be present with Leonardo da Vinci’s La Giaconda, considered a masterpiece amongst masterpieces, whose irreproducible aesthetic presence would surely inspire a financial brawl in the auction house that would surpass the billion-dollar mark. Because money can’t reward you with the abilities of the artist, owning art brings the non-artist closest to the ability to do it. The thirst for proximity to the “Masters” of the past or present increases commensurately with the perception of how extraordinary and rare that ability is valued to be. For collectors with deep pockets and money to lose, the art market offers more thrills than risks in the gamble to anticipate who the “Masters” of the future will be. Ultimately most art lovers must be satisfied with inspiring visits to galleries or museums, free or for the price of admission, until per chance we can afford to live with it as well.

The perfect paradox Money allows us to live with art. Living with art reminds us that money is not the reason to live. Artists manifest the mysterious across genre, form and aesthetics with a relevance that transcends yet reflects its original historical context. While auction house record breakers may argue otherwise, digital technology and a generation who consign yesterday to the irrelevant bin will eventually come to blows. As it should be! Each movement in art was the result of the particular momentum created by what preceded it, with both a short and long arm of contributing influence. How will traditional practices look in reaction to a world of images more Photoshop than photo, and where “apps” inform us of our needs before our thoughts do? Do digital aesthetics mean self-censorship for the artist seeking contemporary relevance or is it just a variation on the electric or acoustic music debate? There’s room for both, but this is not the heady stuff of auction house excitement, galleries, museums and art schools, where, across art forms, many patiently still wait and watch for exceptional artists to reveal themselves. Who, they hope, will raise a new aesthetic voice of “authenticity” amidst the Hi-Tech illusion?

126

Chapter Eight

Until the close of the 1980s art directors’/designers’ time was consumed by brainstorming ideas, developing concepts, drawing thumbnails, and comps. Clients could still visualize from a pencil sketch rather than expecting to see exact finished designs to choose from, which current technology provides at the expense of the “art” in the design. Speaking with graphic designers today, technology has robbed most in the design world of the swing between being laid back while waiting for inspiration to strike and intuitively guiding the creative outbursts of brilliance, or adrenaline fuelled thrills of collaboration under deadline. Consciously for some, subliminally for others, the success of the TV series Mad Men could be explained by the notepads, drawing boards and typewriters that defined a very human process at the time. When advertising reached the creative level of an art form, nary a computer was in sight. Theatre, even at its most overblown, continues to offer a low-fi answer to hi-tech isolation. When British director Peter Brook provided a carpet in the dust of Africa to manifest the theatrical space and curious spectators gathered round, he utilized the power and potential of the empty space.14 The empty stage, a blank canvas or sheet of paper, all wait to be creatively brought to life, however minimally or detailed. In theatre, money expands access to the latest lighting, sound and special effects equipment, while it just as easily causes creative limitations as profitability pressures inevitably rise with the budget. LED technology offers a range of colours at the touch of a button, all from a single unit, quickly changed, that can’t be accomplished so simply any other way. But this technology can’t imitate the warmth of its incandescent predecessor, and remains incapable of replicating such effects as basic as an immediate fade, but the cost of replacing old stage lighting is becoming prohibitive, and its discontinuation is ever looming. On the art end, insurance and government regulatory laws and rulings prohibit most of the theatrical magic of the Elizabethan era on the basis of open flame candles and lighted exit signs alone. Generously funded state and public theatre companies are bound by factors of economic rationalism to cast big name TV and film actors, to induce full season subscriber-only programming. Committees approve and restrain other casting and design decisions months before rehearsals begin. Anything but spontaneous, this is more about financial control than creativity. It can be lucrative in exchange for a more limited creative process. First world mentality is that more money means more creative freedom. Not so in much of the theatre world. At the community, co-op, or independent level, budgets are smaller, while costs are covered, and thanks

Art and Money: What is Really Being Bought and Sold?

127

to volunteers, a $3000 set build gets what $50,000 at the State union wage level might. The main advantage of this love or money exchange is that often no prior approval dictates the set, costumes and lighting, which can all be altered even beyond “Opening Night.” In search of creative freedom, many trained and experienced actors, directors and designers seek out these “amateur” spaces, which increasingly provide highly professional productions, albeit manifested by volunteers. Because theatre is about scale, space, human interaction and the physical and the emotional relationships between all parties on stage and off, it remains the most distant of the artistic experiences. The benefactors of performance appreciate what cannot remain on their wall, like Yves Klein’s performance Immaterial Sensitivity Zone 5, casting gold leaf into the Seine. The supporters of live performance make it possible to manifest elusive waking dreams the audience awakens from at the end of the performance, or for those involved in the production, at the end of the run. A photograph or a filmed record is proof it occurred, and nothing more.

The hi-def lie Photography achieved with original camera technology was the nearest to reproducing copies of the original image without sacrificing what originally made each image unique. Light “exposed” imagery via a mirror in the camera onto the film’s emulsion could be enhanced by filters and techniques manipulating light in the darkroom, but the “uncontrollability” of the process produced a photograph that was un-fractured by dots in the Ben-Day printing process of 1879, or pixels and computer resolution today. The original negative film was re-lit for each print not unlike the original image exposure. This is real time Highest Definition. Our HD is only relational to analogue television or computer screens or produces the best imitation of what was caught on actual film by great filmmakers, master cinematographers and special processes such as Technicolour. Series creator Matthew Weiner refuses to shoot Mad Men except on film, a process hanging on for dear life in an artistic last gasp. Except in only the best photographers’ hands, the warmth of still photography done on film is technically more elusive using digital equipment. From phones to professional digital cameras, images are processed mathematically and translated through enhancement equations limiting artistry of the happy “accidents” achieved through the inconsistent, emotive efficacy of response, time, focus and light. But digital images are cheap. Instead of the cost of a roll of 36 exposure film, developing and a set of 4x6 prints, the same $20 will provide 3000 12-megapixel images on a 16GB flash

128

Chapter Eight

card, perfectly geared for social media uploads. When taking photos was relatively costly each picture in a 24 or 36 roll involved a degree of due consideration, memory was still the primary repository for the ebb and flow of one’s life experiences and events. Linda Henkel of Fairfield University studied the psychological effect of our reliance on “the camera to record the event and thus not needing to attend to it fully themselves” providing modest proof of the digital “photo-taking impairment effect.”15

Smelling the paint Every brush stroke of paint is an anarchist in the face of reproducibility. But something more than acquisitive zeal inspires the folly to sequester a masterpiece for the private domains of wealth and privilege, or create soidisant immortality for the collector bequeathing them to museums. For the super rich, the money isn’t even a sacrifice. Is consolation to be found in the hope global auction results will somehow inspire collectors to invest in local artists? To be honest, this hope is vital to the artist. Novelist Jeanette Winterson writes: I cannot afford a Constable, or a Picasso, or a Leonardo, but to profess a love of painting and not to have anything original is as peculiar as a booklover with nothing on her shelves. I do not know why the crowds and crowds of visitors to public galleries do not go out and support new work. Are we talking love-affair or peep-show?16

In 2012 alone the relationship between art and money resulted in an exodus from the artworld. Dave Hickey, art critic, professor and author, says the artworld has become calcified, self-reverential and hostage to rich collectors who have no respect for what they are doing. His change of heart came when he was asked to sign a ten-page contract before he could sit on a panel discussion at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. New York dealer, Nicole Klagsbrun who has since closed her gallery, spoke on her plans: I’m not sick and I’m not broke. I just don’t want the gallery system anymore. The old school way was to be close to the artists and to the studios. Nowadays, it’s run like a corporation. After 30 years, this is not what I aspire to do. I’m not quitting the business—I want to be involved and engaged, but from a very different angle. It’s been my forte to find artists and I want to do that. I want to connect things in a way that’s not just a conduit for a marketplace.17

Art and Money: What is Really Being Bought and Sold?

129

Jerome Noirmont and his wife Emmanuel decided to close their twenty-year-old Paris gallery after identifying two choices they were faced with: lightweight structures supporting young artists with few, but essential, costs, or the “mega-gallery,” which meant the investment of millions of euros and recruiting dozens of new collaborators, which was a risk too big to take at this time.18 One could argue these are individuals the artworld cannot afford to lose. For Klagsbrun getting back to artists in the studio is a step all involved in the artworld, including curators, collectors and art lovers, should take up again. When I raised the subject of “Art and Money” with artists in America, they echoed what many critics and galleries are also saying. Kate Petley, whose work is exhibited in galleries, museums and art fairs across the U.S.A. offered: Money has allowed artists to produce more than they imagined possible... which may or may not be good and advanced the rapid growth of the contemporary market, never mind the old masters. Money has always been married to art. It is a timeless historic partnership. But the market became a big mess of corruption when the big bucks came in. At the subterranean level, we don't get that. We just try to pay our bills and keep working.19

In Australia critically and financially successful artists voiced a call to action: “As artists, we have to bring the artworld back to life.” Many factors contribute to this atmosphere in the Australian arts: the reality of living in a country the size of America while less populated than Los Angeles; the political and creative effects of the power shift to the curators; artist lay-offs from “last hope” gallery mergers; and all while watching others in creative commas as a result of capital success both at home and abroad. No doubt, artists always face the challenge to excel individually, at the same time as feeling the need to collaborate and show support for other artists, thus fostering the larger community, artistic and not. This demand increases relative to the lack of money, and while the lucrative few maintain the high-flying image of art and money in the global campaign to maintain the financial momentum of the élite, demands on the rest of the artworld participants has never been greater. It is a demand that must be answered with interdisciplinary support irrespective of one’s own area of practice. Money is a factor, but it will not lead the way. There couldn’t be a growing library of books on the death of art, or the death of beauty or painting, or after the death of art, and what is art, if artists were providing a convincing alternative. Jed Perl, art critic, is damning in Magicians and Charlatans convicting laissez-faire aesthetics not only for “everything to do with an emotional promiscuity, with the ability to be all things to all people” but in these days

130

Chapter Eight …any artist who manages not only to maintain a personal vision but also to build a solid critical reputation becomes a paradoxical figure—an anomaly, if not a freak. 20

ART and money Even if “Art” is dead, there will still be “art” products to buy. Returning the emphasis to “art,” and its qualities that transcend its role limited by object/product and artist branding, requires more than the subjective “I,” because the “I” is most vulnerable to the influence of the dollar. Collectively artists already are of artistic and economic value within any culture. T.S. Eliot recognized the presence of all members of society, in this light the inclusion of the arts would increase in value if its benefit were acknowledged: The culture of the individual cannot be isolated from that of the group, and that of the group cannot be abstracted from that of the whole society. Individual, group, society! Our notion of “perfection” must take all three into account as one.21

Philanthropy through funding is required, yet it is the philanthropists’ vision that has provided the platform for creative innovation and access throughout history in the arts, just as creative inspiration resulted in new philosophical understanding, theoretical and entrepreneurial developments in all areas of endeavour, as well as scientific innovation. Technology has opened borders to create the continuous exchange between all Others and ourselves and nation. Artists have always been “other” in society, sometimes beloved, and often a danger to the status quo. The Jewish community has often contributed to the philanthropic support of the arts in the twentieth century. New York became the centre of the arts in part because of the contributions of the immigrant and native-born Jewish community, seeking refuge from two World Wars and the Holocaust, to their new home. At Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of this Century, the masters of Surrealism, Dada and the New York Abstract Expressionism were introduced to the American artworld and further evolved through the presence of new Modern movements in art at the Guggenheim Museum. Peggy Guggenheim’s money backed the introduction of a new artistic vision within America, and she witnessed the effects of art and money first-hand: “Fifty per cent of the people who come here genuinely want to see my collection; the others to meet what they consider a celebrity.”22 Robert Motherwell related that “I came to New York in 1940 to study with Meyer Schapiro simply because he was the only man in America teaching

Art and Money: What is Really Being Bought and Sold?

131

modern art from the standpoint of modernism. Now there must be 2,000 … ”(1982).23 The titans of art theory and criticism, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, laid the foundation for serious contemporary art criticism. Today Leo Castelli’s heirs are Barbara Gladstone, Larry Gagosian, Charles Saatchi and David Zwirner, among those guiding the artworld from their position at its apex. Nick Paumgarten quoted the artworld mega dealer David Zwirner: “One of the reasons there’s so much talk about money is that it’s so much easier to talk about than the art,” Zwirner told me one day. “You meet a lot of people in the artworld who are exhausted and dismayed by the focus on money, and by its dominance…Of course, many of those who complain— dealers, artists, curators—are complicit. The culture industry, which supports them in one way or another, and which hardly existed a generation ago, subsists on all that money—mostly on the largesse and folly of wealthy art lovers, whether their motivations are lofty or base.”24

Zwirner’s world is art as the heroin of materialism, a very expensive and addictive rush that quickly becomes more about getting more, as the collector of anything would attest. What Petley noted seems that money is keeping a golem alive as the artist’s well-funded doppelganger with a slow drip feed to the “subterranean level.” To “bring the artworld back to life” returns us to the challenges of materialism, from Kandinsky one hundred years ago to James Turrell, who has continued to paint with light and collaborated with physiognomy since the 1970s, confronting materialism by revealing it in an immaterial way. Re-invigorating individual and collective contributions to the arts will always occur through defying financial limitations, just like Van Gogh, and as most artists still do. Charles Saatchi bankrolled Hirst, while remaining capable of seeing the real relationship of art and the artist…and money: I hate to sound like a romantic adolescent, but I believe artists don't generally see art as a career choice; they simply can't overcome their desire to make art, and will live on little income for as long as they have to, before they start to sell their work—or give up and get a paying job.25

For those artists who remain, regardless of wealth or poverty, the continuing pursuit of creative honesty becomes increasingly brutal. The passion-fuelled process of one’s early years must evolve into creative perseverance in the face of critical and financial challenges, most often endured in relative obscurity. For this reason all artists must stand together. Hickey is not a fan of the damage “identity politics” can do: “It

132

Chapter Eight

tribalised and broke up the art underground,” he said. “It turned it into a tribe of women, a tribe of black people, a tribe of gay people. It used to be all of us, together, just down in the dirt."26 It’s precisely these gaps that must be closed, and everyone is watching. Why would anyone support “art” and artists, with or without money, if the only ones at the party are little more than the token few outnumbered by those who pay the bills? The support of gallery directors, artist representatives, curators, collectors, and art lovers contribute to the success of reshaping the local and global cultural and humanitarian experience. British film director, Ken Russell sought throughout his creative life “even greater heights of abandon.”27 Yes, and for that, we must share the wealth. Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent masterpiece, closed with an epigram that amidst a Second Machine Age serves as a timely reminder what Art, with or without Money can be: The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart.28

Notes 1. Colors Magazine, “When the Mona Lisa Was Stolen,” accessed 4 April 2014. 2. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1977) 3-4, 9. 3. Other than work his brother Theo purchased as a way to support him. 4. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1975) 92. 5. Sean O’Hagan, “Damien Hirst: ‘I still believe art is more powerful than money’,” The Observer, 11 March 2012. 6. . 7. Jennifer Peltz, “Florida Pastor on Trial in NYC Fake Hirst Art Case,” Yahoo News, 7 April 2014, accessed 7 April 2014. James McKinley Jr., “Florida Pastor Convicted of Trying to Sell Counterfeit Art,” New York Times, 8 April 2014, accessed 9 April 2014. 8. Today, “Entertainment,” Hirst art auction rakes in $198 million. accessed 12 November 2014. 9. Robert Motherwell, quoted in The New American Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art 1956) 56. 10. Eric Fischl, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012) 236-7. Note: Fischl was 39 years old in 1987. 11. Rachel Corbett, “How Big is the Global Art Market?,” Artnet Magazine, March 2012, accessed 12 June 2013.

Art and Money: What is Really Being Bought and Sold?

133

12. Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature: and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) 27. 13. Lambert Wiesling, trans. Nils F. Schott, Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 14. Peter Brook, The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate, first publ.1968 (New York: Touchstone, 1995). 15. James Vincent, “Is Facebook Making Us Forget? Study shows that taking pictures ruin memories,” The Independent UK on-line. Gadgets and Tech. 10 December 2013 accessed 30 March 2014. 16. Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1995). 17. Charlotte Burns, “Nicole Klagsbrun to close gallery after 30 years in the business,” The Art Newspaper (on-line edition), 28 March 2013, accessed 7 July 2013. 18. Céline Piettre, “‘We Want to Invent a New Model’: Why Jérôme de Noirmont Closed His Paris Gallery,” Blouin Art Info International, 2 April 2014, accessed 15 August 2013. 19. Email to the author, 23 March 2013. 20. Jed Perl, Magicians and Charlatans (New York, Eakins Press Foundation, 2012) 11-23. 21. T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1949) 24. 22. Business and Finance Quotes, “Art Collectors,”

accessed 5 July 2013. 23. Barbara Flug Colin, “An Interview with Robert Motherwell,” Evergreen Review, 122, March 2010, accessed 12 Nov 2013. Note: Schapiro taught at Columbia University in New York City. 24. accessed 20 January 2013. 25. “Interview: Charles Saatchi, Art Collector,” The Daily Beast, 31 May 2010. accessed 20 July 2013. 26. Deborah Vankin, “Dave Hickey is Back—and He’s Still Stirring Things up,” The Los Angeles Times, 30 January 2014. accessed 4 April 2014. Note: Dave Hickey was interviewed while on a book promotion tour for his new collection of essays Pirates and Farmers.

134

Chapter Eight

27. Quoted by the actor Paul McGann, accessed 15 February 2015. 28. Fritz Lang, Metropolis, accessed 7 July 2013.

References Brook, Peter, The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate, first publ.1968 (New York: Touchstone, 1995). Burns, Charlotte, “Nicole Klagsbrun to close gallery after 30 years in the business,” The Art Newspaper (on-line edition), 28 March 2013. Colin, Barbara Flug, “An Interview with Robert Motherwell,” Evergreen Review, 122, March 2010. Corbett, Rachel, “How Big is the Global Art Market?,” Artnet Magazine, March 2012. Eliot, T. S., Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1949). Fischl, Eric, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012). “Interview: Charles Saatchi, Art Collector,” The Daily Beast, 31 May 2010. Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1977). Lang, Fritz, Metropolis film, 1927. O’Hagan, Sean, “Damien Hirst: ‘I still believe art is more powerful than money’,” The Observer, 11 March 2012. McKinley Jr., James, “Florida Pastor Convicted of Trying to Sell Counterfeit Art,” New York Times, 8 April 2014, The New American Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art 1956). Peltz, Jennifer, “Florida Pastor on Trial in NYC Fake Hirst Art Case,” Yahoo News, April 7, 2014. Perl, Jed, Magicians and Charlatans (New York, Eakins Press Foundation, 2012). Piettre, Céline, “‘We Want to Invent a New Model’: Why Jérôme de Noirmont Closed His Paris Gallery,” Blouin Art Info International, April 2, 2014. Sartre, Jean-Paul, What is Literature: and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Today, “Entertainment,” Hirst art auction rakes in $198 million. accessed 12 November 2014.

Art and Money: What is Really Being Bought and Sold?

135

Vankin, Deborah, “Dave Hickey is Back—and He’s Still Stirring Things up,” The Los Angeles Times, 30 January 2014. Vincent, James, “Is Facebook Making Us Forget? Study shows that taking pictures ruin memories,” The Independent UK on-line, December 10, 2013. Warhol, Andy, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1975). “When the Mona Lisa Was Stolen,” Colors Magazine, 23 September 2013. Wiesling, Lambert, trans. Nils F. Schott, Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Winterson, Jeanette, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1995).

CHAPTER NINE IMPLICATIONS AND IDEALS OF ARTIST-RUN INITIATIVES AS AN ALTERNATIVE ECONOMY OF THE ARTS: A STUDY OF NONE GALLERY, DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND BRENDAN PHILIP

Fig. 9-1. The None Gallery building at 24 Stafford Street, Dunedin, New Zealand

138

T

Chapter Nine

his paper is a personal narrative in two parts woven into a braid. The first part documents my engagement with None or None Gallery/Project Space, an artist run initiative in Dunedin, New Zealand. The second part of the narrative is a personal reflection on methods or modalities of artist-run initiatives, be they spaces or collectives, through the lens of the precarious economic situation of late capitalism. I am not attempting to speak on behalf of any organisation, nor am I attempting to ascribe any particular ideology to anyone else or to any group. I have been a practicing artist for around fifteen years. In 2003 I was part of a group of artists from varying disciplines that began renting a building at 24 Stafford Street, Dunedin. Originally a pharmaceutical factory for Kempthorne Prosser & Co, the space has six large rooms upstairs as combination living and studio spaces with a kitchen, bathrooms, lounge, and smaller studio spaces downstairs and a large, Lshaped foyer that became the gallery. There is also a large basement that has served as storage, gig/performance space and workshop at various points over the last decade. In our initial discussions about how we, as a collective, wanted to make the best use of the resources of this building a deliberate decision was made to keep the space and our activities as undefined as possible. This decision was made explicit in the name chosen for the space, None, a refusal of identification in one short word. Although eschewing specific definition as a method of maintaining fluidity of operation there were two points that drove the impetus of this project: 1. to be a place where things can happen that may not fit in other spaces, 2. to keep the processes of the space as far removed from money as possible. This refusal of definition and engagement with monetary concerns, however, should not be seen as a denial of something as much as the pursuit of an Other. It is an attempt to find a different method of operation in terms of art production and consumption than that of established modes of the political economy of the arts. It is with this pursuit of the Other way, a self determination of artistic endeavours in the face of the seeming immutable dominance of global capital, that this paper is primarily concerned. Artist-Run Initiatives, particularly those anchored to specific physical spaces, on the whole tend to be somewhat temporary affairs, lasting for a couple of years at most. None is something of an anomaly here, in that the space has been operating for just over ten years as of 2013, despite a

Implications and Ideals of Artist-Run Initiatives

139

constantly changing roster of personnel moving through shifting levels of engagement and activity.

Fig 9-2. The Raw Gallery Space.

I believe a major contributing factor to this longevity is that the rent on the space is covered by the residents of the building. This means that the gallery is under no demands to pay for itself. Generally it seems to be making the rent, which is a primary interface with the machinery of capitalism, or the failure to do so, that is the downfall of many such independent spaces. It is perhaps also worth noting that 24 Stafford Street is an old building of slightly uncertain stability, and to a certain extent the longevity of None can be attributed to the fact that for the landlord to develop the property into a more lucrative venture would cost more that it is worth. However, this may also apply to the current demand for earthquake strengthening, making the Sword of Damocles loom ever closer for the space, perhaps only giving us a couple more years at most. This notion of the Artist-Run Initiative as a short-lived entity, to my mind, places it within the realm of what Peter Lamborn Wilson identifies as a Temporary Autonomous Zone, emphasising the fact that the zone, or place where one expresses autonomy is by its nature a temporary one.1

140

Chapter Nine

I believe this to be a salient point in discussing the economy of the arts and the relationship between art and money in terms of our contemporary situation. Since the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of European Communism we have found ourselves in the arena of globally dominant capitalist economics. This is the realm of Fukuyama’s End of History and Negri and Hardt’s Empire,2 which has gone largely unchecked by mainstream narratives until the last five years or so and the economic crisis of 2008. There is still no “outside” of this system, only spaces within the margins and stolen moments in the shadows, not where money is resisted but where it can be at best effectively ignored for however short a time. The byword of capitalism is excess. It is the need for more; more commodities, more profit, to receive back more than is put in. It is constantly overextending itself and although it may seem to be an inescapable mode of being it is in this overextension that we find these evanescent spaces for fleeting moments of self-determination. So while we may not at this point be able to step completely outside of the system, nor find autonomy through symbiosis with it, we are able to carve out spaces now and then, here and there, where creative practices can thrive on their own merits. It is a righteous form of parasitism, if you will. This temporality maybe somewhat telling in the kinds of art and creative practices that flourish in these spaces. None, for the majority of its existence, has been a hub of the experimental music scene in Dunedin. This is relevant in that music is a time-based art form. Exhibitions in the space tend to be of short duration, typically only lasting three days to a week and mainly focussed around the event of the opening which quite often also tends to involve a performance element. It is in the ephemeral that we find our freedom. Returning to the loosely defined impetus for the space—to be a place where things can happen that may not fit in other spaces and to keep the processes of the space as far removed from money as possible, a major part of allowing things to happen that cannot happen in other places is to remove practice as much as possible from financial constraints, not in terms of being able to activate a vast array of resources but in terms of allowing creative practices not to have to be financially accountable or commercially viable. So here we start getting into the existentialist agenda of why we make art. I’m fairly sure that almost everyone who has chosen to spend their short time on the face of this planet engaged in creative practices has been told at some point, “Well that's great but what are you going to do to make money?” Certainly there are much easier ways to make a living, but for

Implications and Ideals of Artist-Run Initiatives

141

Fig 9-3. Stairwell at None with posters relating to ten years of events.

some reason we still seem to keep making art. So what happens if, as much as we can, we take money out of the equation? This is the moment for confession because None, for all our highminded yet undefined ideals, still needs to interface with systems of capital. The rent on the building needs to be paid somehow, we need to pay the bills and feed ourselves. There is a consolidation of needs here, the rooms we live in also serve as studios, so that in one weekly payment we get a place to sleep, eat, and work, as well as maintaining a community arts venue. There is also a small fee charged to exhibiting or performing artists to help cover these costs, which there wasn’t at the beginning. Also the rent of the space has escalated somewhat over the last ten years. Admittedly there is a sub-rosa reliance on the state here. The majority of people who have been through the space have been beneficiaries or on student allowances, working part-time jobs in the hospitality industry, or maybe some kind of freelance design gig. Though no one would identify primarily as unemployed, or as students or baristas, or whatever. They identify primarily as artists. And this is something that is not emergent from the privilege of living in a welfare state, this making do with what is available. The Dole is no way to live but it is there and we'll take if we

142

Chapter Nine

can. The point is: Art finds a way. It should not be surprising that no one does this for the money. Nor for adulation or praise. Although all these things help but what they help is simply the making of more art. There is a joke that goes, “How many Anarchists does it take to change a light bulb? Well, it's not so much a matter of changing the lightbulb as it is a matter of rewiring the whole house.” This is where I find myself. There are those that are driving for creative labour to be recognised and rewarded within the strictures and structures of our economic system as it is. This is a fine idea, a noble sentiment, and I would be behind it one hundred percent if I thought for a moment that our economic system as it is was in any way sustainable. But it is not. The cracks have been showing for a long time and we find ourselves in an increasingly precarious global situation. It is seeming less and less the rhetoric of the conspiracy theorist to describe our global economic model as a giant Ponzi scheme. This idea of economic meritocracy, where if you work hard enough you can rise to the top of the pile and we can all do it if we play the game and buy all the new toys, just doesn't work. I recognise that this a pretty naive summation but for the purposes of this argument it will have to do and I trust the reader is intelligent enough to grasp the wider point I'm driving at. There is no denying that there is a growing resistance to this dominant Neoliberal model of global capital that goes beyond mere hegemonic negotiation. Describing our situation as “The End of History” is the naive position. The “Empire” is burning and building stadiums is going to do as much to save it as it did for Rome. So where does this leave art? What are we doing in this world of riots, black blocs, and black-dressed riot control cops? Well, we are planting the seeds of something better. If we look at the trajectory of art history in the Western narrative, art has moved from something in the service of the Church, which we can read at that time as also being the state, to something that exists under the aegis of a plutocracy which has steadily, since the Renaissance, moved to surpass the state until we get to where we are now with our precarious situation of late capitalism and its attendant cultural logic (with a nod to Fredric Jameson) that finds artists themselves immediately presenting their work to the public. Art has moved from an accessory of power to a mobilising presence. So, I put it to you, with an air of hopeful speculation, that the power base of art has moved away from the hands of the patrons and into those of the artists themselves. As we still find ourselves, while still approaching some kind of endgame, in a place where hegemonic negotiation between

Implications and Ideals of Artist-Run Initiatives

143

the demands of capital and the needs of the individual permeates every arena of experience, the number of Artist-Run Initiatives is on the rise. Artist-Run Initiatives allow and encourage creative practices that are not dependant on generating a saleable commodity. In many cases the art object, as such, is transient (performance/installation) or ephemeral (documentation) but weaves its way into the fabric of life. Art is not an immutable Other, precious objects to be traded amongst the elite, but something to be experienced, taken on board, and then we move on to the next experience. At the same time we see an increasing number of co-operative ventures, such things as community gardens, or at the very least more and more people growing their own vegetables in their backyards. And this is a resistance to the dominating, dehumanising power of global capital. As over-riding power structures become destabilised the most effective response is that of self-determination. To reach for something that I believe is still a somewhat relevant example, and I have this from first hand reports, in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake neighbourhoods and communities began to organise themselves. People engaged with their neighbours to make sure everyone was accounted for. They collectivised resources of food, water, and first aid supplies, and self-organised neighbourhood watch patrols and so forth. Then when organised authority did arrive, in the form of police imported from Australia, they subverted the work these communities had done to take care of themselves. In terms of getting things done at None, I for one have maintained that it is not a matter of someone having power over a particular area of operation as much as it is having responsibility for making sure something gets done. This may seem to be a petty semantic distinction but I believe it speaks volumes in terms of maintaining a collective endeavour. There is no absolute power residing anywhere, only a negotiable level of responsibility. That is the idea, everything is transitory and up for negotiation. None has changed and mutated over its life, something that has been wonderful to witness from being there at the start then going away and coming back at the beginning of 2012. This mercurial nature I also credit with giving the space some of its longevity. Most certainly this model proposed by None is in no way perfect. It is a highly intensive undertaking to have a group of creative individuals both living and working in such close proximity, being the strange and mercurial creatures that we are. All it takes is for one person to be in a foul mood to throw a dark cloud over the whole operation. I fully admit that I have been that black cloud more often than not. I take full responsibility

144

Chapter Nine

for that because responsibility is the key to self-determination. Responsibility is the only price of liberty. If you want to do something, you take that on board and you step up and do it. And that I believe is where we find ourselves now. As artists and as citizens of this planet. To look around ourselves, figure out what we want to do and to take the responsibility for doing it. All bets are off. The shit is most indeed hitting the fan but Art will find a way.

Notes 1. Hakim Bey, pseudonym of Peter Lamborn Wilson, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn, New York: Automedia, 1991). 2. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, Toronto, London, Sydney: Free Press, 1992): Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

References Bey, Hakim, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn, New York: Automedia, 1991). Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, Toronto, London, Sydney: Free Press, 1992). Negri, Antonio and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

CHAPTER TEN COINING NEW ZEALAND: PROJECTING NATIONHOOD AND MONEY, 1933-1940 MARK STOCKER

Introduction: reproduction breeds contempt

A

s with stamps, which have been likened to the business card of a country, coins provide significant visual insights into a nationstate and its sense of identity. Yet philately and numismatics are consistently overlooked and underestimated in art history. An explanation is hinted in the title of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). With millions of fingered coins and licked stamps, familiarity has bred ignorance if not contempt for them. The plethora of world stamps issued over the past half-century in particular often bears negligible relationship to their issuer’s national character, culture or postal need; one such example is the 1979 Sherlock Holmes stamp issued by San Marino. In 2004, it was estimated that 10% of the government revenue of that republic was generated by the sale of its attractive pictorial postage stamps, a marriage of art and money if ever there was one.1 Conversely, the designs of circulating coins are necessarily more permanent and hence generally more conservative, although those of the Irish Free State (1928) by Percy Metcalfe and Australia’s decimal issue (1966) by Stuart Devlin, exert a strangely timeless, or as Benjamin might say, “auratic” appeal.2

Heads or tails? Tails! What might a coin tell us about the national identity of Aotearoa New Zealand? The answer lies jangling in our pockets—unless the bearer has converted to the plastic economy of EFTPOS, credit cards and online

146

Chapter Ten

banking, all part of what Max Haiven called the “dematerialization…of money into digital symbolism.”3 This essay will emphasise the formative

Fig. 10-1. Percy Metcalfe, after Bertram Mackennal, Head of King George V, 1932 (original 1911), The National Archives, U.K.

years of the New Zealand national coinage issued in the 1930s, most of which remained in production until decimalisation in 1967. It will deliberately focus on the reverse designs, not because of any lèse-majesté on this writer’s part, but because they are more obviously relevant to a specifically New Zealand context than the obverses. The latter, with their focus on the head of state, are common to other Dominions and colonies. In 1933 New Zealand adopted the same obverse as that of Southern Rhodesia, an updated version of Bertram Mackennal’s 1911 head of King George V (Fig. 10-1). Similarly generic effigies of his successors are found on subsequent obverses. The reverses, by contrast, tell tales about what symbolises and defines New Zealand in the governmental and, by extension, the popular mind, and what makes its culture and natural world so distinctive. The designs aim to do so in an accessible, everyday and— even before the term was widely adopted—bicultural way, without sacrificing dignity or propriety of design.

Coining New Zealand: Projecting Nationhood and Money, 1933-1940

147

Coates’s coins The “nationalisation” of the currency, applicable to coins and banknotes alike, and implemented in the Reserve Bank Act (1933), was prompted more by economic factors than by what Ken Matthews has described as “a growing feeling that New Zealand had matured to the point that it should have it own major currency.”4 While this was periodically expressed, it represents wisdom after the event, and exaggerates the significance of national identity to an extent that was hardly envisaged before 1930. Apart from coin smuggling, there would have been little reason to abandon British Imperial coinage, the assumed legal currency since 1840. However, since their introduction in 1910, Australian coins—although not legal tender—had also been in circulation, causing some degree of political resentment in the process.5 Following the devaluation of the Australian pound by 10% in 1930, this trickle became a flood, with an estimated 30-40% of the coinage in circulation in 1931 having crossed the Tasman Sea. The monetary situation took on a new and alarming turn at the height of the Great Depression. In January 1933, Gordon Coates, Minister of Finance and deputy Prime Minister, devalued the New Zealand pound at the rate of £125 to £100 sterling in order to boost export credits. While it proved a wise economic move, the immediate consequence was a flood of silver coinage to Britain and Australia and an ensuing shortage of specie. “No law stands between the merchant and his profitte,” as Gresham’s law advises; coins were thus illicitly secreted in the oil sumps of cars and motorcycles shipped to Australia and even conveyed in refrigerators to England labelled “frozen duck.”6 Four weeks after devaluation, Coates cabled the High Commissioner in London, Sir Thomas Wilford: “Only effective remedy appears to be establishment distinctive New Zealand silver coin and desire to have information from Royal Mint urgently as, if required, coin legislation should be passed during present parliament.”7 If I have elsewhere dubbed the 1967 decimals “Muldoon’s Money”8 then the 1933-4 issue is surely “Coates’s Coins.” Coates, and his appointed coinage committee, overruled the designs initially selected by the Prime Minister George Forbes, who had evidently been lulled by the exalted atmosphere of the Tapestry Room in St James’s Palace, London, where he had met with the Royal Mint Advisory Committee in June 1933. A power game ensued when the formidable Deputy Master of the Royal Mint, Sir Robert Johnson, attempted to capitalise on Forbes’s protracted voyage home to forestall Coates, urging the designer to press on with the work as originally determined. Johnson claimed “We cannot serve two

148

Chapter Ten

masters in NZ,” asking what was the Prime Minister doing if he could not overrule Coates?9 Forbes eventually capitulated, telling Wilford: “Please carry out as a matter of urgency instructions issued by Minister of Finance.”10 This episode not only has a direct bearing on what the eventual coinage would look like, but it also reflects the political balance of power best described by the leading Labour politician Walter Nash: “Mr Coates ought not to pretend he is only Minister of Finance when he is really Prime Minister.”11

Fig. 10-2. George Kruger Gray, designs for New Zealand coinage reverses, 1933, The National Archives, UK.

Coining New Zealand: Projecting Nationhood and Money, 1933-1940

149

Fig, 10-3. Percy Metcalfe, designs for New Zealand coinage reverses, 1933, The National Archives, UK.

Kruger Gray or Metcalfe? The designs resulted from a limited competition between two leading English designers who, during the interwar years, were frequently commissioned by the Royal Mint, George Kruger Gray (1880–1943) and Percy Metcalfe (1895–1972) (Figs. 10:2-3). The urgent timeframe ruled out entries from local designers who would almost certainly have been outclassed in any case; there was no tradition of coinage or sophisticated medallic design in New Zealand.12 The government provided no specific information to the Royal Mint about preferred subjects. However, the High Commission supplied a mass of illustrated books and other assorted publications “concerning New Zealand in all its aspects,” with “the artists being left free to select their own subjects.” Johnson recommended the adoption of heraldic motifs as well as “typical designs,” and suggested: “It is just possible that New Zealand would like to have the animals of New Zealand [sic] instead of a mere treatment of Arms.”13 George Kruger Gray was the more traditional and historically minded of the two designers, although by no means a reactionary. His work, in a wide diversity of media, is often graceful, elegant and beautifully judged.14

150

Chapter Ten

Metcalfe, fifteen years his junior, was more radical, modernist and erratic. His sow and piglets, and hen and chickens reverses for the Irish Free State reflect that country’s rural economy and, at the time, humble living standards, yet do so with panache and surprising dignity. Johnson was certainly thinking of these when he proposed further animal designs for the New Zealand coins. Although Johnson warmly supported Metcalfe, New Zealand’s premier numismatist Allan Sutherland was altogether less complimentary. He dubbed the designer “an impressionist,” finding his style “a little in advance of what the New Zealand public expects at the present time.”15 While his hammer and sickle design for a sixpence must have been tantamount to a numismatic suicide note in the eyes of the conservative Forbes, Metcalfe’s designs look fresh and exciting today. But they were altogether too uncompromising even for most members of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee to stomach. Metcalfe’s stark, bold lettering was “compared with the paste capitals often to be found in clear soup.”16 It was therefore hardly surprising that the initial selection instead endorsed Kruger Gray who would go on to design the eventual coinage, albeit in a considerably modified form following Coates’s interventions (Fig. 10-4).

Fig. 10-4. George Kruger Gray, New Zealand coinage reverses, 1933. Photo: Mark Stocker.

Coining New Zealand: Projecting Nationhood and Money, 1933-1940

151

A kiwi for Kiwis The inclusion of a kiwi was effectively obligatory for both designers, and each initially applied it to the shilling, probably because it was pivotal to the pre-decimal coinage (£sd) system. However, the progressive-minded Coates, who supported decimalisation, stipulated the kiwi for the florin, as it was worth a tenth of a pound. Metcalfe’s kiwi is a boldly Art Deco creation, more clockwork toy than secretive nocturnal flightless bird, making few concessions to ornithological naturalism. The counterpoint between the curved back and the coin, together with the bold horizontal line creating the exergue for the date, reveals the method in Metcalfe’s madness. While at the time, the design appeared merely outlandish—the New Zealand Numismatic Journal dismissed it as “hardly recognisable as such”17—today it looks stylish and funky. In comparison, Kruger Gray’s trial kiwi and kowhaiwhai design— which would have been adopted had Forbes prevailed—looks somewhat ludicrous. It has been likened to a pinecone, and its feathers to fish scales, with Sutherland claiming that “the average New Zealander would not accept this as an accurate representation of the national wingless bird.”18 Sutherland recognised, however, that “the kiwi is not a handsome bird,” and he appreciated the challenges that the shape and proportions posed to non-“Kiwi” designers.19 Despite these extenuating circumstances, Coates’s response was terse and damning: “Kiwi design…not acceptable. Pending the receipt by you of sketchings, please see…Oliver’s New Zealand Birds.”20 The versatile Kruger Gray accordingly traced the North Island kiwi from the photograph in W.R.B. Oliver’s recent book, copying it in reverse for his design, lowering the head and bill, and making the motif larger and stronger at the expense of the original kowhaiwhai border (Fig. 10-5). The result snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and is surely a “kiwi icon.” Of Kruger Gray’s designs, only the handsome and refined halfcrown—which convincingly combines heraldic and pseudo-MƗori elements—passed Coates’s scrutiny unscathed. In turn, he rejected Kruger Gray’s adaptation of Metcalfe’s lymphad (heraldic galley) design for the florin because he found it insufficiently New Zealand in character, and this despite its role in the pale (vertical strip) of the national coat-of-arms. With the kiwi being used for the florin, a fresh design was therefore required for the shilling, depicting at Coates’s insistence a MƗori warrior in a vigilant pose. Here he enlisted specialist advice from his colleague and friend, the Minister of Native Affairs and cultural leader of MƗori, Sir Apirana Ngata. Allan Gairdner Wyon’s Hector Memorial Medal, awarded

152

Chapter Ten

by the New Zealand Institute (1911), provided an important visual precedent.

Fig. 10-5. George Kruger Gray, designs for New Zealand florin reverse, 1933: George Kruger Gray, copy after W.R.B. Oliver, North Island Kiwi, 1933. The National Archives, UK.

The MƗori figure was reversed in the coin probably because of Wyon’s understandable suspicions of incursions on his intellectual property (Fig. 10-6).21 Although the Mint initially despaired of being able to shrink a relatively complex pictorial design down to the size of a shilling, this proved possible and it would become a popular coin. A rather bland fern frond for the sixpence was rejected in favour of what was widely regarded as Kruger Gray’s daintiest design, a huia perched on a branch.

Coining New Zealand: Projecting Nationhood and Money, 1933-1940

153

Fig. 10-6. Allan Gairdner Wyon, Hector Memorial Medal, 1911, University of Canterbury, New Zealand; George Kruger Gray, design for New Zealand shilling reverse, 1933, The National Archives, UK.

“A very satisfactory series” The hei tiki threepence design, initiated by Metcalfe and adapted by Kruger Gray, was rejected because of Sutherland’s (and presumably Coates’s) endorsement of the ethnographic theories of Elsdon Best then current. Sutherland told Johnson: “The MƗori tiki proposed…for the 3d.… is not favoured by me as it is supposed to represent a human foetus and is worn by native women—so we are told—to induce fertility…It has a

154

Chapter Ten

significance that is inappropriate in these times!”22 Instead a patu (MƗori club) was requested. This Kruger Gray resisted, claiming that it could not work on such a small scale unless it was turned into a double motif, as seen in the saltire Matabele axes on his 1932 Southern Rhodesia sixpence. Therefore the patu were crossed and the finest of incised ornament applied to them. The result is not altogether unsuccessful, but the irreverent popular response that likened the coin to ginger-beer bottles annoyed Johannes Andersen, ethnologist, librarian and numismatist: “Only…those who do not know what they are would say such say a thing,” he wrote. Moreover, “ignorance of the characteristics of the country in which they live does not give weight to the criticisms of such people.”23 The coins were gradually released between November 1933 and April 1934, which probably limited their newsworthiness. Their instant acceptability reflected the refined reticence of the designs. King George V described them as “a very satisfactory series,”24 while Sutherland declared: “the subjects were well balanced, the relief was bold and effective and the designs faithfully typified New Zealand.”25 Although numismatic uniformity, or indeed “closure,” would only come with the introduction of the 1940 penny and halfpenny, the issue of a distinctive and successful national coinage in 1933-34 hastened this process. While economic factors were more important than burgeoning national identity, we cannot dismiss the latter altogether. “All numismatists would rejoice in the fact that at last New Zealand was to be placed on the numismatic map of the world,” enthused Rev. D.C. Bates, president of the New Zealand Numismatic Society,26 while the Society’s annual report excitedly announced “the numismatic birth of the Dominion.”27

A new crown coin New Zealand’s rarest and most politically interesting coin is the 1935 “Waitangi Crown.” Its documented origins came in a letter from Allan Sutherland to A.D. Park, Secretary to the Treasury, suggesting that a set of specimen or collectors’ coins be issued to complete the new silver denominations following the British precedent, headed by a crown piece. By stating that “the profit to the State is considerable” (in the event it proved anything but), Sutherland was surely making a calculated appeal to the Treasury mindset. It would be wrong, however, to discard an element of idealism in his approach: “the demand for specimens of an entirely new coinage, such as the New Zealand issue, should be…great…if the designs are attractive.”28

Coining New Zealand: Projecting Nationhood and Money, 1933-1940

155

Fig. 10-7. Percy Metcalfe, Waitangi Crown trials, 1934-5, The National Archives, UK.

The likelihood of a new crown coin was known by members of the New Zealand Numismatic Society in January 1934, and even at this early stage the reverse was evidently intended to “bear a Waitangi design” to honour the name, location and political significance of New Zealand’s formative constitutional document, the Treaty of Waitangi (1840).29 Waitangi dominated the news at the time and marked a welcome diversion from the economic depression. The Governor-General, Viscount Bledisloe, had organised and personally contributed towards the purchase of the Mangungnu Mission House, where the Treaty was signed, together with surrounding land. The site was formally dedicated to the people of New Zealand at the anniversary celebrations of 5-6 February 1934. Before a

156

Chapter Ten

crowd of some six thousand MƗori and four thousand PƗkehƗ, Bledisloe laid the foundations of a new whare runanga (meeting-house) on which was inscribed “Ko te paepae tapu o te tiriti o Waitangi” (“the sacred threshold of the treaty of Waitangi”).30 This event is widely regarded as marking “the modern history of Waitangi and of the Treaty.”31 Coates capitalised on the occasion by going public on the proposed coin. Under the headline “Waitangi Emblem: New Five Shilling Piece,” the Auckland Star reported the decision to launch it had been made “early that morning” and that “the representation of the treaty scene would include the figures of the first Governor of New Zealand, Captain William Hobson, the Rev. Henry Williams, one or two missionaries, Tamati Waka Nene and other chiefs. The pictorial representation would convey the message that the treaty meant everything to the people of New Zealand.”32

Fig. 10-8. Percy Metcalfe, Waitangi Crown reverse, 1935, Noble Numismatic Pty, Sydney, Australia.

Trials and errors As with the 1933 coinage, the evolution of the design was far from straight forward, but the outcome was less visually satisfactory. The preliminary, overcrowded designs by the New Zealand-based James Berry soon proved unworkable for Kruger Gray. Berry’s alternative concept of “two figures keeping the crown between the heads”33 was subsequently delegated to Metcalfe. On these lines, a more simple, austere design showing Hobson

Coining New Zealand: Projecting Nationhood and Money, 1933-1940

157

and Waka Nene shaking hands was adopted. The documented precedent was John Flaxman’s neo-classical Wedgwood jasper relief, Mercury Uniting the Hands of Britain and France (1787), where personifications of the two nations, rendered in strict profile and equality, shake hands to commemorate the Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786.34 As Minister of Finance, Coates again played a central role in the design, exasperating Johnson and Metcalfe in the process, especially when he rejected the fourth version—ready for the first, symbolic strike—whilst on a visit to London in June 1935.35 As sometimes happens in art history, the earlier versions tend to be better, in this case the second and third (Fig 10-7). There is a certain vigour and freshness even in Metcalfe’s original design, notwithstanding its historical inaccuracies: Waka Nene appears untattooed and his cloak looks as if it was made from neat rows of plantains. The crown motif shrank in size, only to be slightly enlarged in the final design. Its protracted history meant that the date was changed from the annus mirabilis of Waitangi, 1934, to the following year, running perilously close to the Treaty’s centenary (1940). It was finally released very late in 1935, but by the time shipments reached New Zealand in the New Year George V was dead, Coates was out of office, his successor Walter Nash was uninterested, and the coin was rendered instantly and strangely anachronistic and unloved (Fig. 10-8).

A numismatic rarity Why were only 1128 crowns struck, as against the 10,000 originally envisaged by Sutherland? One immediate question that was never satisfactorily resolved was whether the crown was intended as “a commemoration of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi,”36 as Coates had earlier suggested, or whether it would serve as the largest and most prestigious value coin of a complete set of distinctive New Zealand silver denominations. Some authorities claim that in 1936 the country was still psychologically in the grip of the Depression and that the two-shillingsand-sixpence (or 50%) premium placed on the coins was steep.37 Anecdotal evidence from a veteran Royal Numismatic Society of New Zealand member, George Barr, records his friend John Lawson, a Bank of New Zealand teller, being instructed to sell five crown pieces. Saving one for himself, Lawson targeted public houses in the Wairarapa, where the response was lukewarm.38 Perhaps this was partly attributable to the design’s lack of visual appeal as well as to tightness of budgets. Certainly there is little aesthetic consistency with the other reverse designs. As Sutherland had been fearing when he saw the second design in October

158

Chapter Ten

1934, Metcalfe’s “style is not in keeping with Kruger Gray’s more natural style…The series should be uniform in treatment.”39 Comparison in turn with the commemorative half-crown of 1940—which is discussed below —reveals the latter as a more attractive coin, whose rapid disappearance from circulation, as well as its availability at face value, testify to this. Although it was a numismatic embarrassment, some good did perhaps emerge out of the Waitangi Crown. It provides visual instantiation of the proto-biculturalism espoused by PƗkehƗ (New Zealanders of European descent) and MƗori of the period and an eloquent symbol of New Zealand’s climate of race relations as articulated by Ngata: “by and large, take it over the century, no native race has been so fortunate as the MƗoris of New Zealand in having come in contact with…the pick of the British race as we have it in New Zealand.”40 Echoing Ngata, Sutherland used the coin as a basis for an article in the New Zealand School Journal, in which he explained the significance of “the joining together, under the crown, of the MƗori and British races.”41 The coin’s rarity has given it considerable numismatic mana and value. A virtually unmarked proof specimen offered on a Queensland online auction at the time of writing carries an estimate of $AU10,000-12,000, making it easily New Zealand’s most valuable coin, and thus of central relevance to the “Art and Money” symposium which prompted this essay.42 In the shorter term, its long delay enabled the future halfpenny, penny and half-crown to be planned “sufficiently far ahead to enable the best designers to compete, and to enable the coin to be issued in good time for the Centennial celebrations”.43

Completing the change In contrast to the issue of 1933-4, the bronze coins of 1940 were not monetarily essential. Economically and socially, New Zealand could have managed adequately with the existing, regularly replenished supplies of Imperial coin. However, both numismatically and in terms of national identity, the realisation of a full set of coins was repeatedly deemed desirable. Besides this, the New Zealand Numismatic Society was instrumental in pressing for a commemorative 1940 half-crown. Its sixth annual report approvingly noted that the National Historical Committee, appointed by the government, “proposes to co-operate freely with the suggested issue of a Centennial coin…and that a member of the Society [Sutherland] is to be appointed to a sub-committee of that body.”44 In September 1938, “competitive applications” were “invited for suitable designs from some twenty designer/modellers resident in New Zealand”

Coining New Zealand: Projecting Nationhood and Money, 1933-1940

159

for halfpenny, penny and commemorative half-crown coins.45 In addition, Metcalfe and Kruger Gray were also invited to participate. The response rate is unknown, but surviving evidence indicates that at least five New Zealand-based artists submitted entries: James Berry, Thomas Hugh Jenkin, Leonard Cornwall Mitchell, H. Linley Richardson and Francis Shurrock, together with both Kruger Gray and Metcalfe. All the New Zealanders apart from Mitchell were first-generation migrants from England, while Jenkin, Richardson and Shurrock were experienced art instructors. Documentation of the entries is sparse because both the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs and the Treasury contrasted lamentably with the Royal Mint in their attitude to archive preservation. Visual records do however exist of at least some of the designs of most of the above-mentioned artists. Kruger Gray’s and particularly Metcalfe’s designs are a considerable disappointment compared with those of 1933, while Berry’s are relatively undistinguished and derivative.46

Fig. 10-9. Leonard Cornwall Mitchell, designs for 1940 New Zealand coinage reverses, 1939, The National Archives, UK.

160

Chapter Ten

The hei-tiki and the tui From what has survived, Mitchell’s designs appear the deserved winners (Fig. 10-9). His hei-tiki halfpenny raised interesting reminders of the 1933 precedents discussed above. Sutherland somewhat moderated his misgivings over its symbolic connotations, although in his Numismatic History of New Zealand (1941), he still asserted that “the hei-tiki has been described as a charm or symbol of fertility or vitality, and has been referred to as an embryo child which it resembles.”47 Mitchell’s design is neat, simple and direct, an effective and appropriate one for a coin of this denomination and scale. Although the Royal Mint Advisory Committee recommended the removal of the simplified kowhaiwhai (rafter pattern) scrolls around the hei-tiki, such an effect would have looked somewhat stark, certainly to contemporary tastes, on a coin of this size. Mitchell’s large-scale design for the penny reverse only survives as a pair of photographs in the Royal Mint album.48 The subject is the tui, the native songbird, perched on a branch of a kowhai tree. Like the hei-tiki, both the bird and the tree would have been instantly recognisable to most New Zealanders. Not only was the theme suitable for this denomination, but it also fitted the permutation of designs. Native birds featured on the new penny, the sixpence and the florin. These would alternate with MƗori related designs on the new halfpenny, the threepence, the shilling and, in its framing ornament, the standard half-crown. The original source of Mitchell’s tui was almost certainly the illustration by J.G. Keulemans to the second edition of Walter Buller’s classic A History of the Birds of New Zealand (1888), which also incorporates a kowhai. But a more immediate—and likely—source for Mitchell was The Three Castles Book of New Zealand Birds (1930), whose illustrations were crude derivatives of Keulemans.49

Fig. 10-10. Percy Metcalfe, after Leonard Cornwall Mitchell, plaster models of 1940 New Zealand coinage reverses, 1939, The National Archives, UK.

Coining New Zealand: Projecting Nationhood and Money, 1933-1940

161

The main problem with Mitchell’s design paradoxically lay in its attractively pictorial qualities; it was more obviously an illustration than it was a coin. This posed a greater challenge than the relatively simple and flat halfpenny design for Metcalfe, who had been commissioned by the Mint to translate the drawings into viable plaster models, from which matrices and punches could in turn be made (Fig. 10-10). Metcalfe rendered the feathers more robustly, giving the foliage bolder relief, and simplifying the twigs and clusters of blooms. What emerges, however, is the remarkable faithfulness of his differing textures, indeed the spirit of the design, to Mitchell’s original drawing.

“A memorial on the past and an incentive for the future” The design of the commemorative half-crown posed the greatest problems, both for the selection committee in New Zealand and, technically, at the Mint. Metcalfe was obliged to work speedily on the model during the politically tense summer months of 1939 in order to have the coins minted and shipped over in time for their release early in the following, centenary year. A sticking point was the piupiu or flaxen kilt of the MƗori maiden who dominates the design. Sir James Elliott, an eminent medical administrator and numismatist, who was coincidentally visiting London at the time, gave the Mint invaluable advice about the rendition of the piupiu. He insisted that “the pattern of the skirt” should convey authentic, MƗori weaving rather than the more classical, fluted rendition favoured by Metcalfe.50 This was achieved despite initial scepticism about its technical feasibility from J. McCutcheon (later Sir John) Craig, Johnson’s successor as Deputy Master. The result was a vindication both of Elliott’s insistence but also of the Mint’s—and especially Metcalfe’s—proficiency. The episode nicely echoes Johnson’s earlier discussion of precisely this kind of issue: Difficulties…naturally arise and the client, especially when he represents a great foreign country or a Dominion with strong national feelings and a critical public to appease, must, above all things, be suited. The various problems as they present themselves give zest to our work at the Mint and keep us up to the mark, and there is a real satisfaction in surmounting them.51

The half-crown is the most obviously Art Deco coin that New Zealand issued, both in its formal qualities—the symmetry and the sunrays are typical stylistic characteristics—and in its embodiment of progress and modernity. The New Zealand Centennial Exhibition in Wellington (1939-

162

Chapter Ten

Fig. 10-11. Leonard Cornwall Mitchell, New Zealand coinage reverses, 1940. Photo: Mark Stocker.

40), held when the new coins were released, was hailed by Elliott as “a memorial of the past and an incentive for the future. We face it with hope.”52 MƗori made their distinctive contributions to the centennial through their traditional arts and culture and their perceived progress from a stone-age civilisation to modern New Zealanders. Mitchell’s MƗori woman, with her expansive body language, epitomises this. Her piupiu, rendered with its geometrical patterns at Elliott’s insistence, appears traditional, but its proximity to 1939 PƗkehƗ hemlines makes it slightly too short for historical authenticity, while her pari (bodice) is surely a concession to Christian and colonial perceptions of modesty and civilisation. Mitchell’s design risked being too complex and finicky, and without doubt the success of the coin owed much to Metcalfe’s powers of compression. Yet its creator must take credit for the word “CENTENNIAL,” centrally placed over the head of the figure. This, together with the dates on the ribbon below, admirably coheres, underscoring the coin’s commemorative significance. Less comfortable is the dislocation between the symmetrical figure and the MƗori buildings, which appear to rise up to the left of the

Coining New Zealand: Projecting Nationhood and Money, 1933-1940

163

coin. The relationship between positive and negative space is likewise somewhat uneasy, the modern buildings appearing chock-a-block, whereas a fairly sizeable space appears on the left. Perhaps, though, this conveys the urgency of a modern, urbanised New Zealand, contrasted with the romantic expanses of the MƗori land of Aotearoa.

Art and New Zealand money Once the 1940 coinage was in circulation (Fig. 10-11), and the commemorative half-crown consigned to the desk drawer, it was largely ignored. Little has been subsequently published about it before this author’s research, and Mitchell would enjoy a far lower profile than that of his friendly rival in the fields of stamp and coinage design over the next thirty years, James Berry.53 Yet the coinage of 1939-40 deserves a higher status than that of numismatic “infill.” It is another story, but clamorous public demands in the mid-1960s context of decimalisation for the retention of all the original designs, from the half-crown down to the halfpenny,54 surely constitute a tribute to Leonard Cornwall Mitchell, George Kruger Gray and—somewhat less directly—Percy Metcalfe. If our coinage is also art, then New Zealand ought to remember it better.

Notes 1. Europe Review 2003/04: The Economic and Business Report (London: Kogan Page, 2006) 313. 2. See W.B. Yeats, Coinage of Saorstát Éireann (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 1928); The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, 25 Years of Stuart Devlin in London (London: Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, 1983) 10-11. 3. Haiven, M., “Money as Artistic Media: Coins of the Realm,” unpublished conference paper, “Art and Money,” Dunedin School of Art, 30 August 2013, an earlier version of Chapter 5. 4. Matthews, K., “The Legal History of Money of New Zealand,” Reserve Bank of New Zealand Bulletin, 66:1 (2003) 47. 5. New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 228 (25 June–31 July 1931) 923. 6. Sutherland, A., Numismatic History of New Zealand: History Reflected in Money and Medals (Wellington: New Zealand Numismatic Society, 1941) 267. 7. PRO MINT 20/1265, National Archives (United Kingdom), Gordon Coates to Thomas Wilford, 25 February 1933. 8. Stocker, M., “Muldoon’s Money: The 1967 New Zealand Decimal Coinage Designs,” History Now/ Te Pae Tawhito o te Wa, 7:2 (2001) 5-10. 9. PRO MINT 20/1265, Robert Johnson to H.W.F. Evans, 23 August 1933. 10. PRO MINT 20/1265, George Forbes to Thomas Wilford, 4 October 1933 (copy).

164

Chapter Ten

11. Bassett, M., Coates of Kaipara (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995) 195. 12. Morel, L., Medallic Commemoratives of New Zealand, 1865–1940: A detailed listing of all known official and private issue of numismatic pieces covering historical and commemorative events in New Zealand (Christchurch: L.G. Morel, 1996). 13. PRO MINT 20/1265, Johnson to Wilford, 7 March 1933. 14. See Laver, J. and Christopher Marsden, “Gray, George Edward Kruger (1880– 1943),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed 28 January 2014. 15. PRO MINT 20/1266, Allan Sutherland to Johnson, 5 January 1934. 16. PRO MINT 25/2, Royal Mint Advisory Committee, 79th meeting, 28 June 1933. 17. “Denarius,” “The Maori on the Shilling,” New Zealand Numismatic Journal 11 (1966) 246. 18. Sutherland:1941, 274. 19. PRO MINT 20/1266, Sutherland to Johnson, 11 April 1934. 20. PRO MINT 20/1265, Gordon Coates to Wilford, 14 October 1933 (copy). Coates was referring to W.R.B. Oliver, New Zealand Birds (Wellington: Wellington Fine Arts, 1930). 21. PRO MINT 20/1265, A.G. Wyon to Johnson, 13 July 1933. Wyon refused to lend the Mint his copy of the medal. 22. PRO MINT 20/1265, Sutherland to Johnson, 14 August–7 September 1933. Sutherland was referring to Elsdon Best, The Maori (Wellington: Government Printer, 1924), 1, 124-6. 23. Dominion (Wellington), 26 April 1934. 24. PRO MINT 20/1266, D. Collis, Privy Purse Office, to Johnson, 5 February 1934. 25. Dominion, 26 April 1934. 26. “Proposed New Zealand Coinage,” New Zealand Numismatic Journal 1 (1933), unpaginated. 27. “New Zealand Numismatic Society: Second Annual Report,” New Zealand Numismatic Journal 1 (1933), unpaginated. 28. Allan Sutherland Archive, Special Collections, Auckland Central Library. Allan Sutherland to A.D. Park, 17 October 1933. 29. Numismatic Society of New Zealand, 15th Meeting, 15 January 1934. The New Zealand Numismatic Society Transactions Volume 1: 1931–36 (Wellington: Royal Numismatic Society of New Zealand, 2005), unpaginated. 30. Renwick, W., “Reclaiming Waitangi,” in W. Renwick (ed.), Creating a National Spirit: Celebrating New Zealand’s Centennial (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004) 103-4. 31. Renwick:2004, 102. 32. Auckland Star, 7 February 1934. 33. Allan Sutherland Archive, James Berry to Sutherland, 6 March 1934. 34. See David Bindman (ed.), John Flaxman, R.A. (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1979) 48, 64-5. 35. PRO MINT 20/1266, Johnson to A.D. Mackay, 14 June 1935 (copy). 36. PRO MINT 20/1266, Coates to Wilford, memorandum, 13 April 1934 (copy).

Coining New Zealand: Projecting Nationhood and Money, 1933-1940

165

37. Humble, M., “The Waitangi Poof Set Revisited,” New Zealand Numismatic Journal 70 (1992) 15. 38. George Barr, interviewed by Mark Stocker, 20 January 2010. 39. Allan Sutherland Archive, Sutherland to Mackay, 25 October 1934 (copy). 40. Orsman, H. and J. Moore, Heinemann Dictionary of New Zealand Quotations (Auckland: Heinemann, 1988) 500. 41. Allan Sutherland Archive, Sutherland, “The New Zealand Crown Piece. Commemorating the Treat of Waitangi,” typed MS., undated [1936]. 42. International Auction Galleries, Sale 78, Lot 29, accessed 28 January 2014. 43. Allan Sutherland Archive, Sutherland to J.W. Heenan, 12 September 1936. 44. Numismatic Society of New Zealand, Sixth Annual Report, 28 June 1937. The New Zealand Numismatic Society Transactions Volume 2: 1936-41 (Wellington: Royal Numismatic Society of New Zealand, 2005), unpaginated. 45. PRO MINT 20 20/1714, Mackay to William Perry, 16 February 1939. 46. See Sutherland:1941, 278; J.R. Tye, The Image Maker: The Art of James Berry (Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984) 38. 47. Sutherland:1941, 278. 48. PRO MINT 24/289. 49. See Walter Buller, A History of the Birds of New Zealand (London: Taylor and Francis, 1888), 51-4, pl. X; The “Three Castles” Book of New Zealand Birds (Dunedin: Coulls Somerville Wilkie, 1930) 1, pl. 1. 50. PRO MINT 20/1714, William Jordan to J. McCutcheon Craig, 17 July 1939. 51. Annual Report of the Deputy Master and Comptroller of the Royal Mint for the Year 1932 Comprising the 63rd Report (London: HMSO, 1933) 13. 52. Elliott, J., The Hundred Years (London: Robert Hale, 1939) 320. 53. Mitchell’s sole obituary notice in the Wellington Evening Post, 23 September 1971, carried the headline “NZ’s Top Stamp Designer Dies” and made no reference to his coinage designs. 54. Stocker, M., “‘Coins of the People’: The 1967 New Zealand Decimal Coin Reverses,” British Numismatic Journal 70 (2000) 124-5.

References Allan Sutherland Archive, Special Collections, Auckland Central Library. Annual Report of the Deputy Master and Comptroller of the Royal Mint for the Year 1932 Comprising the 63rd Report (London: HMSO, 1933). Bassett, M., Coates of Kaipara (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995). Best, Elsdon, The Maori (Wellington: Government Printer, 1924). Bindman, David (ed.), John Flaxman, R.A. (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1979).

166

Chapter Ten

Buller, Walter, A History of the Birds of New Zealand (London: Taylor and Francis, 1888). “Denarius,” “The Maori on the Shilling,” New Zealand Numismatic Journal 11 (1966). Elliott, J., The Hundred Years (London: Robert Hale, 1939). Europe Review 2003/04: The Economic and Business Report (London: Kogan Page, 2006). Haiven, Max, “Money as Artistic Media: Coins of the Realm,” earlier, unpublished version of Chapter 5. Humble, M., “The Waitangi Proof Set Revisited,” NZ Numismatic Journal 70 (1992). Laver, J., and Christopher Marsden, “Gray, George Edward Kruger (1880–1943),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. accessed 28 January 2014. Matthews, K., “The Legal History of Money of New Zealand,” Reserve Bank of New Zealand Bulletin, 66:1 (2003). Morel, L., Medallic Commemoratives of New Zealand, 1865–1940: A detailed listing of all known official and private issue of numismatic pieces covering historical and commemorative events in New Zealand (Christchurch: L.G. Morel, 1996). The New Zealand Numismatic Society Transactions Volume 1: 1931–36 (Wellington: Royal Numismatic Society of New Zealand, 2005). New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 228 (25 June–31 July 1931). Orsman, H. and J. Moore, Heinemann Dictionary of New Zealand Quotations (Auckland: Heinemann, 1988). PRO MINT 20/1265-6, 1714, 25/2, National Archives (United Kingdom). Renwick, W., (ed.), Creating a National Spirit: Celebrating New Zealand’s Centennial (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004). Stocker, M., “‘Coins of the People’: The 1967 New Zealand Decimal Coin Reverses,” British Numismatic Journal 70 (2000). —. “Muldoon’s Money: The 1967 New Zealand Decimal Coinage Designs,” History Now/ Te Pae Tawhito o te Wa, 7:2 (2001). Sutherland, A., Numismatic History of New Zealand: History Reflected in Money and Medals (Wellington: New Zealand Numismatic Society, 1941). The “Three Castles” Book of New Zealand Birds (Dunedin: Coulls Somerville Wilkie, 1930). Tye, J.R., The Image Maker: The Art of James Berry (Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984).

Coining New Zealand: Projecting Nationhood and Money, 1933-1940

167

The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, 25 Years of Stuart Devlin in London (London: Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, 1983). Yeats, W.B., Coinage of Saorstát Éireann (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 1928).

CONTRIBUTORS

Laura Fisher is a sociologist and art historian based in Sydney, Australia. She has published on Aboriginal art, public art and visual culture and has a book forthcoming with Anthem Press based on her doctoral research into the ethical issues surrounding the Aboriginal art phenomenon. She is currently pursuing two collaborative projects with scholars at UNSW Art & Design: Veloscape: a Curating Cities Project (with Jill Bennett and Volker Kuchelmeister), which is exploring the emotional and sensory dimensions of cycling in Sydney, and an historical study (with Gay McDonald) of the curation and brokerage of overseas exhibitions of Australian art. [email protected] Max Haiven is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Art History and Critical Studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Canada. He is author of Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power (2014), The Radical Imagination (with Alex Khasnabish, 2014) and Cultures of Financialization (2014). [email protected] Rebecca Hamid is the Director of RH Gallery in Nelson, New Zealand. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree and qualifications in art history, philosophy and law. She has extensive experience in project management, and strategic and business planning. [email protected] Jewell Homad-Johnson is a visual artist, theatre director and production designer. As Artistic Director of Songe Arts/Theatre Songe, she has premiered over 40 new plays in the US and Australia. Her Art Direction/Design/Illustration work won awards in the New York Art Directors, Art Directors of Los Angeles and Society of Illustrators Annuals. Exhibiting as an artist for more than thirty years, her paintings are in private and corporate collections in Australia, Europe and the United States. Writing on the arts since co-founding Black on White in Seattle (1981-4), articles include Taxation Without Representation (Houston, 1998), Fear and Wizardry: From Oz to Elysium (Sydney, 2014) and Free

170

Contributors

From Words: Illustrating the Invisible (Oxford, 2013). She holds a research MA on Robert Motherwell: The Artist, The Spiritual, The Modern from the University of Sydney (Studies in Religion) where she is currently undertaking a PhD investigating Kandinsky, his theories, collaborators and their influence throughout the last century on contemporary perception of the spiritual and art. Jewell lives in Sydney with her husband, playwright Jeremy Johnson. [email protected] Estelle Alma Maré obtained doctoral degrees in Literature, Architecture, Art History and a master’s degree in Town and Regional Planning. She practiced as an architect from 1975-1980 when she joined the Department of Art History at the University of South Africa. As an academic she published widely in the field of art and architectural history, aesthetics, literary subjects and cartography. She has edited various books, proceedings and accredited journals and is present editor of the SA Journal of Art History. She received various awards from the University of South Africa and the National Research Foundation. The most prestigious award was a bursary from the Onassis Foundation for Hellenic Studies in 2001. In 2002 she was awarded an exchange scholarship by the French National Research Institute and in 2003 the Prize for Art History by the South African Academy for Arts and Science. She is at present an extraordinary professor of Architecture at Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria. [email protected] Joy Monteath is a former medical laboratory scientist with experience in research and author of a number of scientific papers. She has been privileged to travel extensively through Europe and the UK pursuing her interests in art, architecture and music. Her particular interest is the Italian Quattrocento. [email protected] Brendan Philip was a member of the founding collective of None Gallery in 2003 and remained part of the initiative until late 2005. In 2012 he returned to None Gallery in a voluntary curatorial role. The intervening years were spent in Wellington as an arts educator and in various capacities involved with several ARIs (Spacething, JJ Morgan & Co, DAF106, Frederick Street Sound and Light Exploration Society). [email protected]

Art and Money

171

Dr Leoni Schmidt is the Head of the Dunedin School of Art at Otago Polytechnic/Te Kura Matatini ki Otago in New Zealand. She is a full professor and academic leader for postgraduate studies in the School. [email protected] Dr Mark Stocker, FSA, is Curator, International and Historical Art at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. He has published numerous articles on coins and medals in the British Numismatic Journal and The Medal. [email protected] Peter Stupples is currently Senior Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the Dunedin School of Art at the Otago Polytechnic He was formerly Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Otago. He has written widely about Russian visual culture, his research speciality, and the social history of art. Peter has organised five symposia from 2010, including “Art and Money.” He edited papers from the 2012 symposium published as Art and Food by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2014, the same year as his own book The Social Life of Art was published. [email protected]