A little sugar in my bowl

I've been pondering recently what it must be like to be a curator in charge of buying for a contemporary art collection. How do you spend your budget?

Do you collect horizontally (as widely as possible across the spectrum of art being made at any given time) or vertically (collecting in depth a few artists who you believe to be of greatest importance)? Do you try to represent an artist's oeuvre with a single outstanding (probably expensive) piece, or do you buy around the fringes - a small painting, a set of prints, a couple of drawings instead of the epic canvas?

Do you focus your acquisitions on works to appear in/which have appeared in your exhibitions? I s'pose this is particularly significant when you're commissioning new work for a show - but what do you do if the commission produces a dud work?

How much of a personal take is desirable? And what about staff turnover: are 5 different personal takes in the span of 20 years going to create an invigorated or a haphazard collection? Might buying by committee result in a well-rounded collection, or will the usual death-by-committee rule apply?

To try to answer some of my mulling, I went to some websites. Auckland Art Gallery told me that they were NZ's oldest and biggest arts institution, but didn't give me a collections policy to look at, or an outline of the areas they're actively collecting in. Te Papa has a collections policy page, but it didn't give me any specific information about how works are selected for the art collection (although I did find out that they have a responsibility to "collect works of art and items relating to history and the natural environment" a sentence which puzzled me until I inserted a mental comma after the word 'art'). Christchurch confirmed that they focus on significant Cantabrians, but the link to their Collections Policy brought up a quite terrifying Community Artworks Process Diagram (warning: PDF. second warning: I think this illustrates my 'death-by-committee' point). Dunedin is focusing on contemporary work.

The gallery that gave me the most information was the Govett-Brewster. Even if the recent acquisitions page doesn't appear to have been updated for a while, they give interesting detail, including acknowledging their deaccessioning policy. Normally I find the GBAG site frustrating, but today they win the rosette.

Best of 3: the provincial edition

Welcome back!

Over the next few posts I'll share the fruits of my summer travels around the North Island - the Sarjeant, the G-BAG, the Waikato Museum, and the spanking new Tauranga Art Gallery.

In the meantime.... a while ago I posted about New Zealand art galleries on Wikipedia. Today, while reading up on the Existence show at Waikato Museum, I noticed a link to Wikipedia as 'more info' on Francis Upritchard. Which got me thinking - who else is there?

Quite a few people actually: Colin, Toss, Louise and Rita (but only a little Gordon, and no Milan, Bill or Doris); Ralph and Michael (Smither, that is, no Tony or Allen); Shane and Mike P, but not Michael Stevenson, Peter Robinson or Seraphine. Francis, but no Simon Denny or Dan Arps. Interesting.

And finally: raising the shade of the McCahon/Kelvinator pairing:


on Jen Graves' blog [thanks J]

New Zealand galleries on Wikipedia

There's some fuss in the news at the moment over WikiScanner, a data-mining tool that matches ISP addresses to edits on Wikipedia. Using WikiScanner, people have been able to trace corporations (including Wal-Mart) making changes to pages related to their business. See Russell Brown on Hard News for the New Zealand-related story.

Thinking about this, I decided to check out the Wikipedia entries for various NZ art galleries:

Auckland Art Gallery
Sarjeant Art Gallery
City Gallery Wellington
Christchurch Art Gallery
Dunedin Public Art Gallery

Of these, the DPAG has by far the fullest entry; the AAG, CGW, CAG and Sarjeant are all stubs (and tend to focus more on architecture than art). None of the pages list the directors or other senior staff at the galleries; none provide information about current exhibitions. The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery doesn't have an entry (although there's a full entry on Len Lye).

The Te Papa entry makes interesting reading. The Collections section makes mention only of the giant squid; there are also Controversy and Trivia sections.

Succession planning II

A continuation of yesterday's thoughts about succession planning in New Zealand art galleries:

As reported in the New York Times, Lisa Dennison is leaving the top job at the Guggenheim, after 2 years (although after nearly 30 with the Gugg all up) to join Sotheby's as a international business developer.

This causes Marc Spiegler on Art World Salon to speculate whether these roles are now getting harder to fill, due to scope creep:

So it seems today’s ideal museum-director candidate would have a PhD in Art History, an MBA, plus several years of Foreign Service and corporate experience under the belt. ... perhaps it’s time to widen the notion of how museums are led: Splitting the job into business and art functions, rather desperately seeking candidates combining all the skills required in the modern museum era and paralyzing the institution until the ideal candidate surfaces.

Spiegler points to another recent article in the New York Times, 'Impossible Job. Here’s What You Need for It' about the Getty's Museum Leadership Institute, a yearly three-week crash course for museum directors looking for professional development, and people a level below directors wanting a leg-up. The course has been running since 1979.

Today's reading

A new essay on Yvonne Todd's work.

Justin Clemens - Uneasy Glamour - IMA website

The essay accompanies Todd's show at the IMA, Blood, In Its Various Forms (incorporating Meat And Liquor) which opens on 10 February. The exhibition includes work from three recent series; 'Vagrants’ Reception Centre', 'Blood, In Its Various Forms', 'Meat And Liquor'.

The essay doesn't say a lot that's new about Todd's work. But it's nice to see it up online (although a PDF as well as the webpage would have been useful).

I'd love to see more galleries in New Zealand making catalogue essays available online - surely the benefit of having this writing out there (for the local and international web public, for teachers and students, for the galleries' and the artists' reputations and search engine hits) far outweighs the possibility you might sell a few less catalogues.