Friday, January 31, 2014

Year of the Horse


Celebrations are underway in New Zealand to mark the arrival of the Year of the Horse. Communities here join over a billion Chinese around the globe celebrating the Chinese New Year, which falls on January 31.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Hedge-fund managers throwing their weight around in the art market


A decade ago only a handful of Wall Street investors, such as Steve Cohen and Daniel Loeb, were collecting art, but now dozens of hedge-fund managers are joining the fray, applying their day-job tactics to their art buying.

The Wall Street Journal says: "Hedge-fund managers, who play a vital but disruptive role in the broader financial markets, are increasingly throwing their weight around in the art market. They are paying record sums to drive up the values for their favourite artists, dumping artists who don't pay off and offsetting their heavy wagers on untested contemporary art by buying the  reliable antiquity or two. Aggressive, efficient and armed with up-to-the-minute market intelligence supplied by well-paid art advisors, these collectors are shaking up the way business gets done in the genteel art world." Read more...

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

The homecoming



Two of our best curators have returned to New Zealand to take up new positions. After a stint as director of Brisbane's Institute for Modern Art (IMA), Robert Leonard arrived in the New Year to take up the position of senior curator at the City Gallery Wellington (he is also the curator of the New Zealand pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale), and Simon Rees has just arrived back in the country to take up the directorship of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth.

Leonard will bring a fresh approach to curating and programming at the City Gallery. He says: "I want to balance my love of detailed exhibition making with coal-face responsiveness, high turnover and direct collaboration with artists. I am interested in the radical relativism of contemporary art, the fact that everything is up for grabs, but also understand that all new moves are always read against a tradition, a canon, and will transform or succumb to it. I appreciate art that stands the test of time, but I am equally into art that is right here, right now."

You can read more about Leonard's approach to curating here.

Rees returns to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (GBAG) as director this time - he was curator there during Greg Burke's directorship - to oversee the building of the Andrew Patterson-designed Len Lye Centre (LLC) and launch the combined GBAG/LLC in 2015. We'll have wait to see what kind of project and programme he rolls out, but he brings a wealth of ability and experience to the task. He is, for instance, the only New Zealand curator to have won a prize at the Venice Biennale. In 2007 he curated the award winning Lithuanian pavilion with artists Gediminas & Nomeda Urbonas. Rees is also a regular contributor to frieze and frieze d/e.
Image: Robert Leonard (top) and Simon Rees (bottom)

Friday, January 24, 2014

New Zealand outpaces crawling world economy


Our first post for 2014 is a good news story for those following trends that will impact on the performance of the New Zealand art market this year.

After five years in the doldrums the New Zealand economy is on the rebound. At the end of 2013 economists were predicting GDP growth of 3% or more and even the IMF expected growth to pick up to 2.9% - ahead of our Western trading partners (including Australia) and not far behind Asian nations like South Korea and Singapore.

And consumer confidence in New Zealand has climbed to a seven-year high in the monthly ANZ-Roy Morgan survey where the index stands at 135.8, up from 129.4 last month and its highest ever since February 2007. A net 50% of the respondents think it is a good time to buy a major household item, up from 39% last month.

The prevailing sense of optimism is reflected in a piece published this week in the Wall Street Journal where Rebecca Howard writes:

"In a world still limping its way out of the global financial crisis, New Zealand's economy is looking remarkably zippy.

"The small Pacific nation of around 4.5 million people expanded by 3.5% in the this quarter from a year earlier, a good deal faster than many other developed economies, including its larger neighbour Australia.

"The Organisation for Economic development, or OECD, expects New Zealand to grow by 3.3% this year, compared with an estimate of 2.9% for the U.S. and a mere 1.0% in the euro area.

"New Zealand's economy is performing so well that some economists expect the central bank to raise interest rates as early as this month - which would put it among the first developed nations to tighten monetary policy since Lehman Brothers Inc collapsed in 2008 and sparked a global recession."
Read more...
Image: Jae Hoon Lee, Farm (2005), digitally manipulated photograph, 800 x 1200 mm