In July 2006, Sotheby’s proudly celebrated its tenth anniversary of Aboriginal fine art auctions, with a special auction limited to just 131 lots of the highest quality. It was hoped that this would be the most fabulous sale of the era. Menzies wanted to do the same. He instructed his specialists to make a ‘flight to quality’ and expected me to achieve $10 million in Aboriginal art sales by lifting the minimum lot value to $6,000 and cutting the number of lots to just 150, twice a year.
Restricting the number of lots has become common practice since the Global Financial Crisis hit at the end of 2007. But even as early as 2006 I knew that it would be impossible to hold profitable Aboriginal art sales with such a restricted offering. There were not enough paintings worth more than $50,000 each and not enough clients to buy them. He had handed me a poisoned chalice. I refused to drink from it, and Rod was furious. As I’d predicted, Sotheby’s move turned out to be a public relations disaster. By the end of 2006 it had sold $2.6 million less than we had. For the first time in its history, Sotheby’s Aboriginal art department had been relegated to second place. I’d made the right call.
Championing Aboriginal artworks with an expanded band of acceptable provenance had also helped Menzies break Sotheby’s domination. In just three years, our turnover in Aboriginal art jumped from less than $2 million to close to $10 million. Sotheby’s market share had dropped by more than 40%. By the end of 2006, Menzies had won 51% of the market in high-value Aboriginal art at auction – but there were several moves left on the board. Sotheby’s now drew on its considerable media and dealer networks to undermine confidence in the provenance of Lawson~Menzies offerings. I was constantly being phoned by journalists right before a sale looking for quotes to use in articles that questioned the bone fides of particular works. There is a saying in the auction trade, ‘When in doubt, pull it out’, but unless there was definitive evidence against its authenticity, I always stood by the work and let its quality speak for it.
I was only involved in the auction trade between 2004 and 2007, but during this time the entire art market experienced a king tide. Sales of Indigenous art at auction grew to $16.5 million in 2006, yet nothing prepared us for the unprecedented spike of 2007. Total secondary market sales of Aboriginal art now jumped to $26.5 million. Riding on the back of the sale of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s Warlurkulong (1976) to the National Gallery of Australia for $2.4 million, Sotheby’s Aboriginal art department recorded a total turnover of $9.9 million. After achieving $1.058 million for Emily Kngwarreye’s Earth’s Creation I (1995), Lawson~Menzies’s total turnover was $8.9 million that year. These paintings became the two highest-selling Aboriginal artworks in history.
During the brief time I acted as the Managing Director of Deutscher Menzies, 22 Australian paintings sold for more than $1 million each (by comparison, there were only two in 2009). Menzies Art Brands sold 12 of the 22, including Brett Whiteley’s ‘tap’ painting. The combined efforts of Sotheby’s, Mossgreen, Deutscher and Hackett, and Bonhams & Goodman could not match us. Heady days indeed.
Rod Menzies was a restless workaholic by nature and didn’t believe in holidays. He would always find a week or two in December, however, to make a quick trip to New York. In 2006, he paid $US4.6 million for Sylvette, a vibrant cubist work by Picasso, which he later offered for sale in Australia to great effect. He was very clever. But at the end of 2007 he returned from New York in a state of great agitation and wanted to see me urgently. His frantic calls went unanswered. I was out of range. I had chartered a small Cessna aircraft to fly my team across the Central and Western deserts, visiting several remote art centres. We’d returned to Alice Springs and were sitting around a pool drinking Bloody Marys when Rod’s call finally came through to my mobile. He was ropeable. Predicting a major international economic meltdown, he was determined to cut overheads at any cost, and insisted I return to Melbourne immediately.
The next morning I found myself in gloomy Melbourne, sitting across from Menzies and his phalanx of number-crunching MBAs. Despite pulling off one of our most successful sales ever, I was dressed down and handed an ultimatum. He wanted to stop doing stand-alone Aboriginal fine art sales. Instead, I was to find only the most expensive paintings and forget about the rest. I was to fire my most competent assistants, and become a company employee on a reduced but still significant salary.
Rod always had a way of destroying my Christmases. Every year I had worked for him, I’d been forced to renegotiate my contract in December. This year I was determined it would be different. I was overweight, overworked and staring down the barrel of a heart attack and early grave. My marriage was straining under the pressures of constant travel and increasing anxiety. Did I really want to end up as a man whose closest friend was his accountant? Ten days later I joined the Menzies team for the staff Christmas party at Rod’s Italianate villa, Noorilim, in the Victorian wine fields. As I entered the baroque vestibule with its mosaic floors and soaring columns, I handed him a beautifully giftwrapped copy of Ken McGregor’s ‘hot off the press’ book on the great Australian landscape painter John Olsen. Inside was my dedication. ‘Thanks a million for the wonderful adventure’.
It was the biggest decision of my life. I’d defended him publicly over the last four years and made his company a lot of money. But I’d come to resent this business. Rejecting beautiful works just because they didn’t have the status, or the artists didn’t have a high enough profile, was eating away at me. The entire elitist approach to art as a commodity had come to feel like money laundering, albeit of the most luxurious kind. Investing in art is about so much more than making money. I decided to strike out on my own once again. On 4 January 2008, as I sat in my rainforest retreat writing the first draft of this book, The Australian announced to the world that I would be moving on. I was just six months shy of my 60th birthday. I didn’t have a crystal ball, and couldn’t have guessed just how far the market would tumble, but I can say I would make the same decision again.
RENEWING THE DREAMING
The rough and tumble of the auction wars are a far cry from the magical setting of the garden beside the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.
At dusk, the sun sets over the Arafura Sea, and the damp mudflats turn from gold to pink and purple. Watching the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards each August has been part of the yearly walkabout for most industry insiders since the early 1980s. Interstate and overseas visitors sit on makeshift stands, while locals picnic under the stars. As night falls, the silhouette of palm trees creates the perfect backdrop for painted dancers, adorned with trailing feathered headdresses and armbands. They dance across the stage to present the winners with their prizes drawn from sacred dilly bags.
That is, at least, how it used to be, until the event was hijacked by political intrigue. When Doreen Reid Nakamarra stood to receive her General Painting award in 2008, she made an extraordinary statement. ‘I always paint my own paintings by myself and I always paint for Papunya Tula.’
I was sitting at the top of the stands with two of my favourite women – the madly enthusiastic collector/interior designer Jacquie McPhee and the vivacious London dealer Rebecca Hossack. Doreen’s statement went right over most of the assembled heads, but we looked at each other in surprise. I couldn’t dissociate this disclaimer, uttered in shy and faltering English, from the political atmosphere swirling around the artist.
The ghost in the room was Makinti Napanangka, that year’s winner of the major award. Papunya Tula’s Paul Sweeney came up to the podium to accept her prize, explaining to the audience that she was too frail to make the journey to Darwin. Makinti may well have been frail, but she had still managed to paint dozens of works for a number of Alice Springs dealers during the previous year. These paintings were, however, markedly less complex than a work Makinti could paint in her prime. Most people at the awards weren’t aware of her decline. She thoroughly deserved the award for a lifetime of achievement. But the dealers who
had purchased her works during that year now openly expressed their belief that she was not capable of having painted her award-winning Telstra work without assistance. Whether there was any truth to it or not is irrelevant. No documentary proof was required from a venerable old artist whose work was entered by Papunya Tula. She, and it, were beyond reproach. The iconic Papunya Tula brand is so strong that it is synonymous with quality control. Everyone else has to supply dozens of working photographs to prove the bone fides of the artworks they sell. But not Papunya Tula.
This is more than just polemic. I have already explained how, during the early years of the Aboriginal art market, thousands of bark paintings and hundreds of desert canvases by important artists were created with the unacknowledged assistance of family members. They have never been reattributed, and regularly appear for sale at auction without comment. Yet when the practice received widespread media attention in the late 1990s with the exposés on Turkey Tolson and Clifford Possum, their reputations and those of the dealers they worked for were mired in controversy. Since that time the industry has been deeply polarised around the issue of assistance and authorship.
By 2000, it was no longer acceptable for assistants, including close family members, to complete the decorative infill or fields of dotting, even under the direction of the ‘auteur’ of a work. Institutions, elite galleries and the media insisted that the industry’s reputation hinged on the artist who painted alone. It got to the point where assistants like Clifford Possum’s daughters couldn’t help the family breadwinner without risking his reputation and devaluing his art. Several of Clifford’s paintings completed with assistance from one or both of his daughters were actually withdrawn from sale and treated as if they were fakes.
Meanwhile, an international megastar such as Damien Hirst could employ any number of unacknowledged assistants, white or black, male or female, to realise his own works. Hirst has admitted in interviews that he cannot paint and that a buyer would get an inferior painting if he did it. With four studios and forty assistants he likes the idea of factory-produced work, as this separates the actual work from the ideas behind it. Similarly Andy Warhol only needed to see and approve a work on its way to his dealer. From Rembrandt to Picasso and through to Lin Onus, artists have worked with assistants who received no more credit than a chop mark usually hidden beneath the mount. We accept that printmaking, cast metal sculpture, installation art and video are all created through a collaborative process, yet credited to a single author.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye is a case in point. She is recognised as one of the greatest creative whirlwinds in art history and a major international star.
Emily installation in Osaka, Japan.
A decade after her death, more than 100,000 people filed through her solo exhibition in Tokyo in 2008. Yet throughout her career many reputable dealers accused each other of selling fake or ‘assisted’ ‘Emilys’. While Damien Hirst’s factory-made ‘dot’ paintings sold for millions, they bickered over whether Emily actually painted every single dot on every one of her works. At the Tokyo opening, several of these dealers still refused to speak to each other. Ironically, the curators, Margo Neale and Tatehata Akira, had made a point of choosing works based on merit, not on the reputation of the dealer. The exhibition was such a revelation of Emily’s genius precisely because it illustrated the variety of effects she could achieve when experimenting for different dealers.
The curators were absolutely right to ignore the myopic infighting that has relegated so much Australian Aboriginal art to the commercial backwater. For me, personally, Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye stands out as the most moving and powerful exhibition of a single artist’s work that I have ever seen in my life. The colours, the passion, the scale were all mind-boggling. I recall seeing elderly Japanese women sitting stunned, with tears welling in their eyes. The eight magnificent rooms in the ultra-modern gallery designed by Kishô Kurokawa were the perfect setting for Emily’s ultimate achievement.
Meanwhile, back in Sydney town, The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend colour supplement featured an article by Janet Hawley in which she wrote about how the market had developed around one of the most successful contemporary art movements of the 21st century.
Art magazines and catalogues are multiplying but are filled with flattering essays usually paid for by the artists or dealers. Fearless critics who slash and analyse don’t exist. The way they sell their art can be described as a sort of cowboy capitalism. While there are tales a plenty about artists being burned and tricked into selling at a discount, many play the dealers off against each other. As the market matures artists are becoming more wary and savvy. While most Western artists avoid speculators, and are handled exclusively by commercial galleries that help to develop their careers, many of these artists prefer to sell direct to dealers who manipulate the market with bravado.53
No, this was not written about the Aboriginal art market. It was a cover story on Chinese contemporary art. My point in referencing this quote? Australia may be a tiny pond compared to the ocean of international art. The Aboriginal art market is unlikely to become bigger than the Chinese, British or American markets. But a large part of what keeps it small is the narrow-mindedness and lack of imagination of an industry that fails to do justice to the talent and relevance of Aboriginal artists.
In an era when marketing rather than achievement has made the Kardashians famous, the target market is the rich collector, and the way to attract the collector is through the cult of the personality. The genius of the super-brand artists, such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, lies in their ironic commentary on art as a commodity in a global capitalist culture.
‘Let’s short-circuit the process,’ says Hirst. ‘Let’s begin with the commodity.’54 He and Koons revel in multiples, assisted works and mass manufacture which are channelled through the most elite galleries and dealers.
Aboriginal artists also have personality, or point of difference, in spades. Rover Thomas and Clifford Possum, in particular, knew this and willingly performed their part. So why can’t Aboriginal artists also participate in making multiples, ‘assisted’ and factory-made works? Because the minute Aboriginal painters are seen to ‘produce’ art for money, rather than for art’s sake, they are accused of selling out, and demeaning their culture in the process. No points for irony here. An urban Aboriginal artist like Richard Bell, who refers to so-called ‘traditional’ people as ‘ooga boogas’, may get away with it, but the traditional artist cannot.55 Even the illustrious Germaine Greer has suggested that Aboriginal people who commodify their art, ‘debauch’ their culture.56
To Warhol the process of mass manufacture was equally as valid as the process of the individual artist. The art world agreed, and there has been nothing since to rival the glamour of his Factory. Today, Damien Hirst can sell a ‘spot’ painting made by his assistant, Rachel, as his own work. ‘The best spot painting you can have by me is one by Rachel,’ he once said. ‘It accrues rather than loses value’. But when Turkey Tolson or Clifford Possum turned their families into art factories, they were accused of passing off fakes. The auction houses do not recognise these works, and their owners cannot sell them.
Then there is the issue of copyright. Hirst claimed ownership of the ‘concept’ of spot paintings, and once sued a British Airways subsidiary after it used an advertisement containing coloured spots. Immediately after the global firestorm of publicity, he sold a spot painting for $1.5 million at Sotheby’s New York.57 Aboriginal artists too have been aggressive in protecting the copyright of their clan designs, but has it made these more valuable? Should they lay claim to every dot or raark on the planet? Would it be ludicrous for them to sue Hirst? I would suggest they should. It would certainly grab the attention of the international contemporary art world. Would the work escalate in value as a result? I suspect the double standard would still apply.
Hirst and Koons are postmodernists who make art to stimulate ideas. It may be the title or the cont
ent that makes the piece work. Hirst’s platinum and diamond studded skull titled For the Love of God and his stuffed tiger shark floating in a vitrine of fomaldehyde named The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living are both comments on the human condition.
Aboriginal art has a message that is equally as potent as anything Damien Hirst has to say about death and impermanence. It evolved into a contemporary movement after the elders decided to defy imminent cultural disintegration by sharing their deep spiritual knowledge and connection with the land, the environment and each other. Afraid their culture would die out with them, they used art to pass on vital knowledge to the generation that would become its custodians. With the increasing likelihood of dramatic climatic instability, the custodial voice of the world’s most ancient culture can be interpreted as a complex response to their most prescient challenge, and coincidentally that facing all human kind: survival. Yet it is most commonly presented and promoted as ‘landscape’.
It’s my belief that the movement of Aboriginal art into the finest international contemporary art spaces, and the cooling of the market due to the global economic downturn, has actually created a window of opportunity. It is time to recognise and validate the collaborative production of Aboriginal art, and reconsider the way it is interpreted and promoted to an international audience.
RECKON SILLY NATION58
I n the eight years it has taken me to write this book, I’ve had far too many phone calls from the Tiwi Islands to tell me that a young man of my acquaintance is dead. In this seemingly idyllic setting, the preferred method of suicide is to climb up a telegraph pole and grab hold of the wires. In 1999, the ABC’s 7.30 Report revealed that the Tiwi suicide rate was over ten times the national average. Thirteen years later in 2012, a Sydney Morning Herald story noted that girls as young as eleven were committing suicide at an unprecedented rate. The suicides actually escalated after the so-called ‘Intervention’ instigated by Prime Minister John Howard, in 2007. At various times the Tiwi Islands have been cited as the suicide capital of the world.59
The Dealer is the Devil Page 53