Black Art Gold Rush

Posted by Aboriginal Art Directory | 14.11.07

Black Art Gold Rush, Sunday 25 September 2005 on ABC Radio Background Briefing.

This is a great background briefing program from:

Program Transcript
Lorena Allam: Around the world, Aboriginal art is a phenomenon Paris, London, New York, Japan, it’s being called the most important art movement in the world today.

Auctioneer: Lot No. 34. Rover Thomas thank you, first of them here and I have $10,000 straight away for this …

Lorena Allam: Hello, I’m Lorena Allam. This is Background Briefing.

It’s widely said that Western art has, for the most part, lost its way. Aboriginal art, on the other hand, is important not only for its beauty, but because it has, at its best, authenticity and a deeply-felt spirituality, something the West feels it has lost.

Lydia Miller: It is one of the truly classical art movements from this corner of the globe. Indigenous art is escalating in terms of its value, and essentially it has a market position because it is so unique. People will come here as tourists, they’ll come here and they’ll buy what they consider to be particularly Australian, and Australia is defined by the iconography and through the eyes of indigenous people.

This profound, unique, astounding iconography, stories that have informed the journeys of why this continent is at it is, and that’s fascinating for humanity.

Auctioneer: $38,000 on the phone, against you all, against all the room. $38,000. No more.

HAMMER

John Oster: In many ways Aboriginal art is the face of Australia. Tourism is worth something like $70-billion a year to the Australian economy and the face of that tourism is an Aboriginal art face. Ninety-percent of overseas tourists at survey say that they would like to have an Aboriginal experience. And while that’s not just an art experience, and we’re talking about culture generally, the interest in Aboriginal art from overseas and as part of the Australian culture, is enormous.

Auctioneer: For $750,000, this is $750,000.

Lorena Allam: So heated is the Aboriginal art market, so ravenous for new paintings, new artists, and more and more art, there is concern the whole thing could implode.

People talk of a ‘gold rush mentality’, dots for dollars, the black art goldmine.

In the capital cities, there are four main auction houses at the high end of the market that now do a booming trade in Aboriginal art. Last year, their annual turnover from the sale of Aboriginal art hit a new high of $11.7-million.

Adrian Newstead works for the auction house, Lawson-Menzies.

Adrian Newstead: The art is a modern miracle really. I mean all over Australia in tiny little country towns, non-Aboriginal people, farming families and the like, have struggled to keep their kids on the land, and with 90% unemployment in little country towns, and yet out in the middle of nowhere, people are able to make items with such unbelievable added value, that are culturally-consistent, where they don’t have to compromise their lifestyle, you know, a bit of paint, and a bit of canvas worth $100 can be turned into something worth thousands. It’s a miracle.

Lorena Allam: Adrian Newstead is the indigenous art specialist at Lawson-Menzies.

Adrian Newstead: It’s like the goose that laid the golden egg, and the goose that laid the golden egg is easily strangled, and there’s been a lot of activity that’s undermined it and threatened to strangle it over the years. But I think it says something about the vitality and the richness of Aboriginal culture itself that’s seen it survive, and go from strength to strength, at least until now.

Lorena Allam: What could happen now is that too many fakes, to many paintings of lesser quality, perhaps made under duress in sweatshop conditions, come to light. Unethical conduct and questionable practices are rife.

MUSIC

Lorena Allam: Japan is just one of the countries fascinated by Aboriginal art. Djon Mundine is an Aboriginal curator currently in Japan, teaching at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. He says non-Aboriginal Australians are attracted to Aboriginal art for several reasons.

Djon Mundine: It has a peculiar place in Australia’s history, the history of Australia as a nation. It’s very special for Aboriginal people of course, because this is our place and this is an expression about our continent. The other part of it is, is how white Australians as a nation use Aboriginal art as a mask to deny the racist history and deny continuing racist attitudes. The other side is there is a genuine interest in actually trying to reach the spiritual heart of the continent, which is very un-European, and so this art provides a tool, or a conduit, just some sense of that place.

Lorena Allam: Most Aboriginal art is bought and sold in the Northern Territory, where tourists spend about $50-million a year on Aboriginal art. Seventy-percent of that is traded in the malls, galleries and shops of Alice Springs.

Many of the paintings are wrung out of people brought in from the desert and given pots of paint and canvas, and expected to produce works that can be sold.

Desart is the association of Aboriginal-owned and operated art and craft centres in Central Australia. Executive Officer, John Oster.

John Oster: I’m talking about commercial dealers who encourage groups of artists to come and paint in a shed, for which they are paid wages. These are garages in Alice Springs; they’re very hot places. Artists are not necessarily paid the value of the paintings that they paint, they are paid in terms of slabs of beer, clothing, other benefits like being run around town, having their family looked after.

Lorena Allam: These inducements are attractive to artists, because they promise social benefits that just aren’t available in a remote community.

John Oster: We need to be clear that sometimes Aboriginal people see benefits in relationships, in being helped out with various problems, rather than cash values. But these are desperate places too, and the practice in these places is open to question. And I believe there is regular unconscionable conduct, entrapment, artists placed under legal duress, and fraud.

Lorena Allam: Have the police ever been involved? Has there ever been discussion about pursuing these dealers under the Trade Practices Act, for example?

John Oster: We’ve had a number of discussions with police. We also have had discussions with the AC CC, and you mentioned the Trade Practices Act. But often there is a lack of evidence or a lack of consistent witnesses and a lack of understanding about artists’ rights and the law.

Lorena Allam: The same artists who might paint for a carpetbagger or backyarder in Alice Springs, might also have their work hanging in the National Gallery of Australia, or NGA.

Collecting institutions like the NGA can often add to the pressure placed on artists by the market. Senior indigenous curator at the NGA, Brenda Croft.

Brenda Croft: Giving the stamp of approval to an artist by acquiring their work for public collection then makes other people sit up and take notice, and the positives of that are it’s really fantastic to see that for the artist, their profile rising, and you buy their work, you acquire their work because it deserves to be in the collection, not because you’re doing anyone any favours. But it deserves to be in the collection and it has to stand on its own long after you’ve gone.

Lorena Allam: An artists whose work is suddenly popular can be swamped with commission. Even the NGA has to get in line; in fact Brenda Croft’s been told to take a ticket and stand in line because there are 32 buyers before her, waiting for an artist to fill a backlog of orders.

Brenda Croft: I felt sick, I felt sick not because we weren’t No.1, but I just felt sick because I thought, Oh, what if the artist has been told this? You know, ‘Can you hurry up and paint 33 paintings’, or whatever. It made me feel ill, and I thought I’m complicit in that, even if it’s not intentional, because we’ve raised this artist’s profile, and is this what it comes to?

Lorena Allam: Do you think that that production line that you’ve described, people have also called it ‘sweatshop art’, do you think it affects the quality of the art that people produce?

Brenda Croft: Well people aren’t machines. I mean you can’t just churn out work. But who am I to say to somebody ‘Don’t paint as fast’, or ‘Don’t make work as fast’, if that’s the one way for that person to bring some money into their community.

Lorena Allam: In Sydney’s Bondi Beach, Adrian Newstead is busy unwrapping works for the next big Lawson-Menzies auction.

Adrian Newstead: Well we’re sitting in this beautiful little apartment that my wife and I have created, as part of our new gallery in Bondi, that looks out over the paperbark trees, and a lovely little apartment off it where artists can stay when they visit us from some of the most remote parts of the country; and our home downstairs.

Lorena Allam: Adrian Newstead owns this Aboriginal art gallery in Sydney, and he’s a founding member of the Art Trade Association, an alliance of commercial galleries dealing in Aboriginal art.

Adrian Newstead has been involved in Aboriginal art since the 1970s. He doesn’t agree that Aboriginal artists are being exploited.

Adrian Newstead: I think Aboriginal artists have a great amount done for them. Really, I think they’re on a fantastic wicket. You know, it’s very common to think that Aboriginal people are hard done by by the market. I think nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t believe that Aboriginal people are stupid, far from it. I’ve had dealings with Aboriginal people all my life, and I’ve found them amongst the most canny negotiators. They form relationships based on trust, they’re often not relationships with elite gallerists in the cities, they’re often relationships with the people that elite galleries love to portray as déclassé, and use pejorative terms like ‘carpetbagger’ or ‘backyarder’, which are simply negative terms used by elitists to denigrate their opposition in most cases. Many of these so-called carpetbaggers are the ones that are actually assisting the artist in a far, far, more complex arrangement and relationship than most elite dealers would want anything to do with.

Lorena Allam: Adrian Newstead, indigenous art specialist at the auction house, Lawson-Menzies.

The big event in the Aboriginal art calendar every year is the National Art Award held in Darwin.

The award gets bigger every year. Crowds gather in the grounds of the museum and art gallery of the Northern Territory, where the winners are announced during a spectacular Arafura sunset.

This year there were 369 entries, shortlisted to 119, and out of these there are four prizewinners.

The big winner was Tjanpi Grass Toyota, an almost life-sized 4-wheel drive, make out of woven grass, by a group of women from the remote community of Blackstone in Western Australia.

Another of the winners was Banduk Marika.

MC: …. bark painting award, and the winner is Banduk Marika.

APPLAUSE

Lorena Allam: Banduk Marika is a highly respected artist from Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land and her work is known around the world. Her winning bark painting is an intricate design from her Rirratjingu clan. It tells the story of her ancestors travelling by canoe and landing at her homeland of Yalangbara, where they created the first Yolngu or Aboriginal people. The clan design depicts the salt drying on their skin as they sit in the sun.

The bark painting, Yalangbara, is hanging on the wall behind us as we speak.

The questionable authenticity of much of what passes for ‘Aboriginal’ art, and the misrepresentation of her culture makes Banduk Marika angry.

Banduk Marika: Aboriginal art is too big. Look at the didgeridoos, massive productions now for didgeridoos, you know? Every tourist or backpacker or anything is making didgeridoo, and they’re selling them as Aboriginal art. It’s false. There’s a lot of people living on false out there, it’s just not right. It makes you sick, because you think, Well he’s not an indigenous, he doesn’t have a culture, he doesn’t have a language, he doesn’t have a country, and he’s someone who’s selling a cultural object that doesn’t have any attachment to any of those things I’ve just mentioned, just because it’s sellable item.

Lorena Allam: Banduk has herself experienced that dark side of the art market. Without her knowledge, or her permission, in 1993, a West Australian carpet company used her sacred clan designs for patterns on a carpet. The carpets were made in Vietnam, they were imported into Australia and exhibited and sold here.

The case is recognised as one of the largest copyright cases to come before the Federal Court, and it drew attention to the rights of indigenous artists. Banduk was successful against the carpet company, but the experience made her stop painting for ten years.

Banduk Marika: I am my country. Person who are creating something that they don’t know nothing about, that is damaging you, yourself as person and spirit, and your country. That person doesn’t know what lies beyond this design. There’s more to it than anybody can read. Only myself and my family knows that, and it’s our map, it’s our map of our country, particular site, particular story, mythical story, it’s a creation story, and there’s lots of depths and depths, and layers and layers, and when Aboriginal people see their things on something, you’re hurting those people by ripping their art off.

SINGING

Lorena Allam: Speaking on the phone from the Museum of Ethnography in Japan, Aboriginal curator Djon Mundine says that Aboriginal art today is authenticated, priced, marketed and exported by non-Aboriginal people who operate on a series of false assumptions.

Djon Mundine: What generally I think the marketplace and outside people think about Aboriginal art is they think of it in that dichotomy of traditional, which is those people who live out in the bush or live out in the country, old men who paint these very neat pictures, guru-type looking people, men and women, older women who also paint these mystical pieces, versus these people or urban people who are almost cast in the image of some sort of ghetto black American-type person who’s very political, very loud, out there and so on.

Lorena Allam: According to Djon Mundine, the market has very little to do with reality for Aboriginal art or artists. Like oil explorers, consumers, dealers and critics need to keep looking to more remote areas to satisfy the needs of the market. Everyone hopes to find the next ‘undiscovered’ wellspring of elderly, remote-living, ‘authentic’ Aboriginal artists to delight jaded Western eyes.

Djon Mundine: Why it’s valuable is as some sense of fetish, as an object that has virtual powers, or as an investment. That market is controlled by white people, that’s unfortunate, that’s unrealistic in a sense.

Lorena Allam: But Djon Mundine says the proliferation of bad art on the market isn’t necessarily cause for concern.

Djon Mundine: I tried to explain that with someone. I was in London and Lord Newfield had a breakfast at the Hayward Gallery, and he said to me, ‘Isn’t it terrible about all these poor quality artworks that are produced, Aboriginal art that is. It’s really terrible.’ And I said ‘There are a million Sunday painters next to the Eiffel Tower, they’ll even paint you into the picture if you want, but it doesn’t mean that French culture is being threatened by that.’ So you’ve got to see it in that sense.

Auctioneer: Lot No. 22, thank you, is Emily Kngwarreye here, thank you, that one there. And a nice early work, this one; and I have $25,000 for it, $30,000, $35,000, $38,000 and at $38,000 ….

Lorena Allam: Like in the white art world, great Aboriginal artists can produce works of wildly varying quality. One of the biggest names in Aboriginal art is Emily Kngwarreye. A prolific and gifted artist, Emily died in 1996, after a brief but impressive career. She was 86 and only started painting in the public arena in her 80s.

In her last years, Adrian Newstead says, she was coerced into producing work after work, even as her health deteriorated.

Adrian Newstead: That old lady died of exhaustion more than anything else. She was absolutely stuffed at the end, and yet as soon as she died, the industry, the family, everybody, had to throw up another; they’re looking for the next one, the next one, the next one, because no matter how much a tribal Aboriginal person can earn from their painting, it’ll never satisfy the need of the large number of people that can’t earn that.

Lorena Allam: Researching for Background Briefing turns up many stories of dodgy practices, rumours of exploitation, accusations of fraud, allegations of unethical practices, but putting it on the public record is another matter.

Several things prevent people speaking out: they don’t want to damage the precarious livelihoods of artists who live in poverty, and they don’t want to make enemies in the inner circles of the business, where the big money changes hands.

And the stakes are high.

Deutcher-Menzies made its first foray into the high end Aboriginal art market in the late 1990s and held two mid-year auctions.

The Deutcher-Menzies closed its specialist Aboriginal art section in 2000. There was concern in the industry about some of the works being offered for sale. Adrian Newstead says the auction house was unable to procure enough quality work to make its Aboriginal art sales financially viable.

They started up a year later. Adrian Newstead had just closed his art gallery in Sydney.

Adrian Newstead: When out of the blue I was visited by a friend from London, Rebecca Hossack, who’s very well-known over there, has a gallery, and she stayed with us. And one of the people from Deutcher-Menzies said, ‘Do you know someone that could possibly help us out with Aboriginal art? We’ve got a bit of a problem.’ And she said, ‘Talk to Adrian.’

Lorena Allam: What problem did they have?

Adrian Newstead: Well they had a lot of Aboriginal art sitting in their stockrooms etc., that they knew very little about, had no idea of the worth of it, didn’t know what was good and what was bad, so I went through something like 140 paintings and said, ‘Look, get rid of these, but sell these 39’. I catalogued them and everything, and they put them into their Deutcher-Menzies sale.

Lorena Allam: Waterloo in Sydney was once a poor Housing Commission area. Now it’s one of the smartest art districts in Sydney. Here you find coffee houses, gourmet delis and furniture stores among the chic new apartments.

Inside the Danks Street complex is the Utopia Gallery, owned by Christopher Hodges.

Christopher Hodges: The thing that I miss out on is somehow I don’t get all those people who want to buy an opportunistic picture, I’m not sure why. The auction market tends to attract people that want to get a bargain. They think that that’s the place to go for a bargain, and it often gets people who think that maybe the auction hasn’t sorted out the pictures for them, so all the pictures there have to be the good ones. So I can’t get some of those people into the gallery, I don’t know why, it eludes me. And the unscrupulous tend to not get the best work because their principles are based on making money more than it is on nurturing talent or nurturing art. And so therefore, on the whole, most people tend to get what they pay for.

Lorena Allam: Chris Hodges sold Emily Kngwarreye’s first paintings, and represented her all her life.

Several big-name artists are hanging on his walls, and the storage area is crammed with Aboriginal art from all over Australia.

Buyers and lookers are wandering about. Some of the paintings on show are worth $40,000.

Christopher Hodges says the market is a vicious beast. It gives great rewards while something is in fashion, but then can turn its back just as quickly. And when the rush is on, some people will buy anything just for the name. But those paintings don’t stand the test of time.

Christopher Hodges: Emily Kngwarreye painted some amazing pictures for some bloody awful people, but those pictures have a life, you know, those people won’t continue to benefit at all from it, in fact it’ll probably make them sick.Because the best of those paintings still get out and get above everything else. That’s the power of art. But there’s an awful lot of very ordinary paintings that a lot of very naïve people, sometimes greedy people, sometimes people that just don’t know what art is, but they’ve read the publicity and hype and they think that they’d better buy one. And some of those people will buy something without doing any market research but they’ll end up with a picture, some of them will have it on their wall and they will love it, and another bunch of those people who bought for nothing other than making money, and they’ll get a big shock.

Lorena Allam: The bigger the earning power of an artist, the more they are a target for forgers.

One of the most-faked artists is Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Tjapaltjarri’s work hangs in galleries all over the world, and he’s regarded as one of the greatest Australian artists of the 20th century. But before his death in 2001, Tjapaltjarri became famous for being forged, rather than for the brilliance of his art.

Wollongong, on the south coast of New South Wales, was badly stung during the 1990s. John O’Loughlin came to Wollongong claiming to be selling paintings on behalf of Tjapaltjarri, for $1500 each. At the time, the going rate was four times that, about $6,000. There were many takers. Wollongong University, the Wollongong City Gallery, and a couple of prominent locals were conned.

At Wollongong University, the curator, Glenn Barkley, takes up the story.

Glenn Barkley: We’ll talk about one fake that we have here, which is a painting by Clifford Possum. I’m sort of interested in fakes personally, so I’m quite happy to talk about it. I know that there’s other institutions and collectors out there who aren’t; and I think it’s a fantastic learning experience, in terms of what not to do when buying a painting. So we can take it out and have a look.

Lorena Allam: Well let’s have a look.

Glenn Barkley: So here’s the painting. I think the title is on the back. It’s titled ‘Carpet snake dreaming’, and it’s a picture of a serpent encircling a central round circular form which could be a campsite. There actually is a fantastic story that the person we purchased off just sort of made up. So not only has he done the painting, but he’s quite good at telling stories as well.

Lorena Allam: You’re not tempted to write on the back?

Glenn Barkley: I’ve written on the back. I’ve written ‘fake’ on the back with the date. That was against a conservator’s advice, but I thought Well I’m not going to be here forever, anything could happen to the file, so I thought the best thing to do is just write ‘fake’ on the back of it, and then if some one found it in the collection 100 years from now, they’ll know that that’s probably what it is.

Lorena Allam: How did they get conned?

Glenn Barkley: I think they thought they were getting a bargain, and if it looks too good to be true, it probably is, so, yes.

Lorena Allam: Glenn Barkley from Wollongong University.

All up, there are 20 fake Tjapaltjarris in the Wollongong area, owned by the upper echelons of Wollongong society. Four are in public collections.

Sydney-based writer and academic, Vivien Johnson, is a foremost authority on Tjapaltjarri’s work. When O’Loughlin was charged with obtaining benefit by deception, Vivien was a witness for the prosecution.

Vivien Johnson: The case only concerned a particular group of works that were the subject of the complaint, that Tjapaltjarri made to the police. There was an exhibition which purported to be a retrospective of his work.

Lorena Allam: Where was it?

Vivien Johnson: It was here in Sydney, and he came down from Alice Springs and looked over the paintings and declared most of the works in that exhibition to be, in his words, ‘not mine’. One of them he actually said, ‘Nice painting, but not mine’. So the police then accompanied Tjapaltjarri on visits to a couple of public institutions, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art, and there in the works that went under his name, he discovered that two were ‘not mine’, and five more at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Several of these paintings were part of the court case.

Lorena Allam: Vivien Johnson says that sometimes the dealers are themselves the forgers.

Vivien Johnson: Private dealers have actually been a problem for the desert art movement since the beginning.Well at least ever since the market took off. It is a goldrush mentality that’s operating here. I suppose when the boom really started to occur in the late ‘80s, is when the first private dealers came along, in fact one of these people is someone who later became notorious as a fake Aboriginal artist, namely (SUPPRESSED). He started out as a private dealer. Or carpetbagger, as they were known in those days. But the operations have become much more sophisticated over the last decade and a half, to the extent where the carpetbaggers, or there are still carpetbaggers around, but a lot of the original carpetbaggers morphed into what we call backyarders. They were people who had operations in their backyards in Alice Springs, and they’ve gone on climbing the ladder of legitimacy ever since.

Lorena Allam: The case against John O’Loughlin was the first successful art fraud case in Australian legal history. He was given a three-year good behaviour bond.

Through a quirk of the law, the paintings are still in circulation, which Vivien Johnson says caused Tjapaltjarri great distress.

Vivien Johnson: In some ways I think it killed him. I think the stress of being involved in that court case, in a way of coming to nothing, in the sense that he wanted to clear his name, but all the court case and the publicity surrounding it did for him, was to take his name lower, and not to clear it. And so you can’t say that it was directly responsible, but I think he was very deeply depressed by it, and he returned to live much more amongst his own people, he kind of withdrew from the art world.

Lorena Allam: Vivien Johnson also believes more than one person was forging Tjapaltjarris. If she suspects a forgery is about to go in an auction sale, she’ll alert the auction house, and the work may be withdrawn.

This happened at the Christie’s auction in Melbourne last month. Lot 90 and 91 were paintings by Tjapaltjarri which had come from a highly respected private collection.

Auctioneer: Next two ’90 and ’91 are withdrawn, so we go straight to Lot 92.

Lorena Allam: Vivien Johnson asked for them to be withdrawn from sale because she couldn’t conclusively say they were his. (Subsequently Vivien Johnson has pointed out the decision to remove the paintings was left to the auction house, Christie's.)

MUSIC

Lorena Allam: The stakes are high and the competition is fierce in the auction houses. The curator of Aboriginal art at Lawson-Menzies, a subsidiary of Deutcher-Menzies, Adrian Newstead.

Adrian Newstead: My brief is to do two $3-million auctions a year, preferably on one night each, which means that I need about 300 works with $3-million, at the low estimate is average price $10,000 and I’m expected, working for Deutcher-Menzies, which is by far and away the most successful auction house for art in Australia, to get close to an 80% clearance rate, while Sotheby’s and Christie’s are lucky to get 60%. You know, I’m sitting back there saying, ‘Is this painting likely to sell?’ because if it’s likely to fail, I don’t want it.

Lorena Allam: One way buyers check on the value of a painting is through its provenance. Provenance is the pedigree of the painting: who did it, where and when, and its history in the market.

Adrian Newstead: I would stress that both Christie’s and Sotheby’s take provenance to a ridiculous extreme, and it will count against them in the end because they’re not taking into account the way the industry has been changing. In fact, we like to think of Aboriginal culture not as something fixed in time, but in a constantly dynamic –

Lorena Allam: But in terms of provenance, if work comes to you from a private collection in Melbourne for example, how do you establish its bona fides, because that surely must be of great importance to you, to your reputation or to the reputation of Lawson-Menzies?

Adrian Newstead: Absolutely. But first of all there’s other ways of establishing that something is genuine. Sotheby’s take a much more stronger line on provenance. That’s because they’re protecting an international brand like Christie’s and also because the people that run the Aboriginal art departments for Sotheby’s and Christie’s didn’t have a background in the field like I did. They weren’t around on the ground, on the grassroots for 25 years, didn’t know all the personalities, all the skeletons in the closet etc., so they err on the side of safety. Whereas I know the scuttlebut, I know where all the problems were, and I know the circumstances under which a lot of the artists painted.

Lorena Allam: Adrian Newstead says that when a curator is as knowledgeable as he is, after 25 years in the business, then his word is good authority. Yet things do slip through.

At Lawson-Menzies, Adrian Newstead says he’s well aware of these sorts of possibilities.

Adrian Newstead: This is a difficult issue. I’m sure there’ve been rakes sold through auctions, and you know, auction houses seek the best advice and do the best they can, but they’re not infallible. But there’s a golden rule in the auction business, that if you have any doubt about the painting at all, pull it.

Lorena Allam: A number of people have told Background Briefing of ways a painting’s provenance can be embellished. A common method is to take a photo of an artist standing next to a work. Another is to just say a work comes from a private collection.

John Oster says the auction houses need to clean up their act, and guarantee the authenticity of the work they sell.

John Oster: There is no way of regulating this, unless we have an effective code of conduct or a code of practice in the industry.

Lorena Allam: So what trouble are you worried about?

John Oster: I’m concerned that anecdotal evidence that I receive and opinion from other people who talk to me is that the practices in the industry at the moment are becoming more and more questionable. There is so much questionable practice happening in our region at the moment, that there is cause for concern and that at some time soon, it may be that something will be unearthed, and it’s probably a good thing that it is unearthed, but attention would be drawn to this issue.

MUSIC

Lorena Allam: Auction houses provide buyers with comprehensive catalogues containing information about each painting and its history. They often include artists’ photographs and biographical information, maps and even commentary on the works by prominent art critics.

These catalogues can cost as much as $80,000 to print, and another $30,000 to mail around the world. This means the catalogue has to generate a lot of sales, just to pay for itself, let alone make profits for the auction house.

The job of the catalogue is to boost the value of the art works, and to sell them.

Adrian Newstead.

Adrian Newstead: If a painting has managed to be one of those 5% that gets into one of the elite auctions and has been given a full-page illustration in a Lawson-Menzies catalogue or a Sotheby’s or Christie’s catalogue, then this itself adds to the value, and generally means that when the person that buys that painting comes to sell it in five or ten years time, or whenever, they’ll be able to point to the fact that it was in that catalogue, and instead of having a 5% chance of getting into an auction, it will have an 80% of getting into an auction.

Lorena Allam: The stamp of authenticity given to a work by being in a catalogue caught Adrian Newstead up in a controversy this year.

The National Gallery of Australia discovered a mistake in a Lawson-Menzies auction catalogue. Last year the NGA curated an exhibition called No Ordinary Place – the Art of David Malangi’. Lawson-Menzies claimed to be selling the artwork which featured on the cover of that catalogue. But this was impossible. Curator, Brenda Croft.

Brenda Croft: A colleague had brought it to my attention and I just thought, Well that can’t be, because that work is on tour at the moment in that exhibition, and it will be touring for quite some time. And so I just looked at what was stated in the catalogue, and it did, it stated that that particular work going up for auction was the work. And so I took it up with the auctioneer, so I wrote to the Aboriginal art expert at the auction house which was Lawson-Menzies, and I just asked them to clarify it, because one, we have a duty of responsibility to the artist and the artist’s family, because it’s problematic. People think that this is a particular work, then therefore it has more value because it was in the actual exhibition. But it’s misinformation. And that was what my concern was, that the auction house let potential buyers know that it was a similar work, but it was not the work. And they have a responsibility if they are selling works, they have to provide the correct information. They have to check provenance etc., and particularly when there’s a commercial transaction about to take place, it’s even more important. And I didn’t receive any response.

Lorena Allam: None at all?

Brenda Croft: No.

Lorena Allam: Background Briefing asked Adrian Newstead about what occurred.

Adrian Newstead: Yes, it was a mistake but I mean it was a tiny little minor mistake. But it was a mistake nonetheless. I mean people that work in museums tend to think that these auction catalogues should be academic tomes or something. I mean it might surprise them if they learnt that basically it’s put together by two people in less than two weeks, and working incredibly long hours and having to proofread. And anyone could say, Well, why don’t they throw more resources at it? But that’s not the way it works in the commercial world. So we write the copy, it gets edited a number of times over. In this particular case I wasn’t there for the last proofread, and the graphic designer changed it slightly. So what in fact this painting was, was a painting by David Malangi of the same image that was on the front cover of the catalogue, but it wasn’t the same painting, right? It was the same image, exactly the same image.

Lorena Allam: Similar, they’re not exactly the same.

Adrian Newstead: Well they were both of Gumeringu’s foot or whatever, right? It was a footprint on a bark painting, almost identical, but not the same. David probably painted 10 or 15 paintings like that. Nevertheless the original copy would have said ‘For a similar image see the cover of …’ And somehow, during the editing process, with the graphic designer trying to fit everything in to the pages, and everything on an incredibly difficult schedule, a couple of words got cut out. So the complaint came in and immediately it was acknowledged, and a saleroom notice went up in the saleroom, and the auctioneer on the night announced before the sale of the work that the contents of the saleroom notice was that this work was similar to, but the same as the work that was on the front cover. So big deal.

Lorena Allam: Adrian Newstead.

Vivien Johnson says verifying provenance is a complex process. It takes expert knowledge, and time.

Vivien Johnson: One of the enormously complicating factors in Tjapaltjarri’s case, and in that of so many other indigenous artists, is that you can say if you’ve made a study of Tjapaltjarri’s work, with a certain amount of certainty, that this is probably not, or in his own hand not at all in his hand. But having said that, you can’t then rush to judgment and say, Oh, it’s a forgery because there’s another huge category of works, namely, some people call them family paintings, collaborative paintings, it is part of what indigenous art is as cultural transmission that it’s very important to engage younger people in the process of creating these works.

Lorena Allam: Vivien and others think the industry needs to acknowledge these cultural complexities if it’s to survive.

Vivien Johnson: I don’t think a retreat to the idea of only what they call ‘autograph paintings’, that is, every dot or line is in the hand of the master-artist, that’s not a solution that is consistent with the cultural underpinnings of indigenous art. But then you’re faced with the very difficult discrimination between, well, the more you study it, the less difficult it is, but between genuine indigenous artworks that are just as authentic as works by the hand of the master artist, in fact they exemplify the principles which have enabled indigenous culture to survive for so long, and outright forgeries, and there’s various shades of grey in between, of course.

Lorena Allam: Vivien Johnson.

There’s also hope that Australia will adopt the re-sale royalty system that already exists in Europe. A re-sale royalty sees a percentage of the sale of each artwork returned to the artist at each point of sale through the market.

The Attorney-General, Phillip Ruddock, is due to make a decision at the end of the year, and the forces for and against the scheme are digging in.

Supporters of a re-sale royalty argue it’s an artist’s moral right. The opponents of the scheme include the big auction houses, Sotheby’s Christies and Lawson-Menzies.

They’ve engaged the help of Michael Kroger, who’s also on the board of auction house Deutcher-Menzies, to write a submission to the Attorney-General, outlining their case. Mr Kroger declined an interview with Background Briefing.

Adrian Newstead said a lot of his views are represented in the submission.

Adrian Newstead: The primary argument for a re-sale royalty is that it will address indigenous disadvantage. So any re-sale royalty has to be judged against that. Will it address indigenous disadvantage?

Lorena Allam: Well, will it?

Adrian Newstead: No.

Lorena Allam: Why not?

Adrian Newstead: It can’t. Because the vast majority of artists by something like 96%, will earn less than $1,000 a year from it, No.1.

Lorena Allam: But isn’t less than $1,000 a year to people who might be living in very poor communities, isn’t that better than nothing?

Adrian Newstead: Maybe it is better than nothing, but is it worth the pain that the market has to go through, are the results of that justifiable? I mean if Aboriginal people like in Balgo Hills for instance, are simply bullied by their kids to take the money to town and spend it on alcohol and cigarettes or whatever, or it’s gambled away under the trees playing cards, is that going to change Aboriginal situation one iota? One iota? Is it addressing indigenous disadvantage? The answer is No, it’s not.

Lorena Allam: But the tricky thing is, that we can’t really tell those people how they spend their money.

Adrian Newstead: No, we can’t. This is a democracy, and they can spend their money however they like, and that’s the fact. And so one has to measure the benefit against the likely impact, right? I mean the arts industry is supporting a lot of people, so I feel that unless you can demonstrably prove that something is going to be of benefit, and is going to actually address the major social issues that Aboriginal people are facing, it’s not worth taking the risk.

Lorena Allam: The scheme already operates in Europe and is being rolled out in Britain too. Adrian Newstead has set up his own scheme which he says will work better for Aboriginal communities.

Last year, the Art Trade Association, led by Adrian Newstead established the Aboriginal Benefits Trust Foundation, into which the auction house Lawson-Menzies pays 2% of the hammer price of all Aboriginal art sales. Other galleries, which are members of the Association, are also encouraged to contribute.

Lydia Miller, from the Australia Council, doesn’t think a communal fund is a replacement for a re-sale royalty.

Lydia Miller: That is not the artists determining what they will do with the monies that they receive from the act of creation in relation to their work. That is profoundly naïve to think that if I administer your money for you because I don’t think you’re capable of it, that I am doing you a profound service. I think that’s slightly delusory. And in some respects I think that’s a distortion of the debate. We certainly don’t ask other non-indigenous artists to have their money taken care of, because we think we do it better than them.

Lorena Allam: Lydia Miller, Executive Director of the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council.

MUSIC

Lorena Allam: Across Central Australia, there are 35 Aboriginal-owned and operated Arts Centres; they were supported by ATSIC, which ceased to exist in June. Many of these centres are dilapidated, and they need funding of about $12-million for concrete flooring, roof repairs and infrastructure.

These centres do three things: they are Aboriginal-owned, the product is genuine, and the monetary returns go directly to Aboriginal people. But the art centres are struggling to stay afloat.

John Oster says they’re the foundation of the industry, and if they aren’t cared for, the whole market could unravel.

John Oster: The whole industry is supported by people who are willing to invest in Aboriginal art, and they are paying significant amounts of money to do so. The value of the high end fine art in this industry is growing extraordinarily, and we’re talking about works of substantial value in the order of half-a-million dollars each. And buyers need to be certain that they are getting value for the money, and that this work has sound provenance. And when art is produced away from art centres, provenance becomes an issue.

Lorena Allam: Art centres also support the younger artists, making the industry sustainable over generations. But Adrian Newstead says the market is fine the way it is.

Adrian Newstead: The way the industry has developed on a macro level mirrors the way that Aboriginal artists individually have acted on a micro level. Anarchically, responding to opportunity, hunter-gathering, fight and flight, you know, seizing the day and making the best of it, and getting on better and better. And most Aboriginal people will say ‘I want to be on the winning side’, and from my point of view, I want every Aboriginal person to be on the winning side.

Lorena Allam: The winning side is becoming harder and harder to make out. Vivien Johnson.

Vivien Johnson: There was Aboriginal art long before there was an Aboriginal art market of course, but on the scale that things are being practiced at the moment, that’s dependent on the art market, which is an extremely fickle beast I think. I think that there are certain artists who rise from the vast throngs of indigenous artists who are working away in the country at the moment, who will always be part of the cultural history of Australia and of their own nations. And that won’t go away. But one can never count on the market. This is the scary thing about it, that it does depend so much on the tastes of non-indigenous investors.

MUSIC

Lorena Allam: On Background Briefing, the Co-ordinating Producer is Linda McGinness; Webmaster, Jason Di Rosso; Technical Operator is John Jacobs; Executive Producer is Kirsten Garrett, and I’m Lorena Allam.

You’re listening to ABC Radio National.

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