Wednesday 18 June 2008

Mongering


No official announcement yet, but Overthenet have reported painter Judy Millar as the NZ representative at the 2009 Venice Biennale.

Image
Judy Millar I will, should, can, must, may, would like to express, 2005. Installation at Auckland Art Gallery. Image from the Gow Langsford Gallery website.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Over on the Baa-blog, they are defending their early announcement of the Venice decision based on how public the information already was. This looks like deluded self-justification to me as I can vouch for the fact that at least two of the four short-listed Venice teams knew anything at the time the Baas (Baa & Baa, or Baa Baa?) blabbed. That includes the succesful team. The three unsuccessful teams are now figuring out how to rationalise the enormous amount of time and energy that went into their respective Venice bids, as well as the fact that (thanks to Baa2) they are publically now known as losing teams - this is the first NZ Venice projet to create public losers. Not only that, the unsuccesful teams weren't even allowed the courtesy of being told first-hand because it was already all over the internet before they had officially been told it was all over. Although it had been scheduled for a week earlyier, apparently the Venice decision was only made this Tuesday and by midnight that night it had leaked and was on the internet. CNZ have really bumbled the selection process from Woah to Go and still have yet to make an official announcement. But I'd like to be the first to thank BB for their contribution to this fiasco. Cheers, from one of the Venice Losers!

Courtney Johnston said...

I'm not sure if you're blaming the Barrs for being well-connected speed typers, or CNZ for not being able to control information they felt needed to be controlled?

It's probably also worth bearing in mind that the "losers" in the last NZ outing at Venice were far more publicly outed, when the MSM demanded to be told who was on the short list with et al.

I'm sympathetic though - maybe CNZ should have contacted the unsuccessful artists before confirming the successful artist (which, notably, they don't appear to have done yet).

I'm also curious - would you have applied in the first place, if you knew your application (successful or not) would be public knowledge?

jim and Mary said...

Wow, shoot the messenger - that's a good idea. The problem you have , if you really are who you claim, is not with us, it's with CNZ. Unless they get faster processes (highly unlikely) or open things up (hey, that's a good idea) it's just going to get worse. Besides you went into the thing knowing it was a competition, what did you think they were going to do? "Oh, they're all so good. Let's send everyone". As to our use of the term "losers" that was to show up CNZ's process not to denigrate artists, as you would know if you read OTN regularly. Let's face it "loser" says much more about what was going on than "successful candidate" and "We are returning your proposal with thanks, at this stage we are unable to support your project to represent New Zealand at Venice."
Cheers, Jim and Mary at OTN