Adding up art
By Hamish Coney,
[ART]
The art industry finally receives its own ‘confidence’ survey
‘Turbulence’ was the portentous title of the third Auckland Triennial. 2007’s version is all about the scary, complex times we live in. It’s a theme hard to argue with but it’s also a handy moment to consider the state of the art industry in Godzone.
This is a slightly touchy subject in the art world for the very simple reason that many of the participants love the art but are a bit iffy on the industry bit.
The dollars-and-cents part of the ‘industry’ tends to be harder to talk about than the vital contribution that all this painting, sculpting, installation-installing and essay-writing makes to the cultural well-being of the country.
Every other field of endeavour has rafts of statistics and august bodies busily recording, lobbying and cheerleading away on behalf of the constituent parts that add up to the sum of the industry. Newspapers and TV report daily on the gyrations of the housing industry and stockmarket, while breathlessly quoting from a seemingly endless supply of the latest statistics and the all-important business ‘confidence’ surveys.
The poor old art industry doesn’t come armed with all these noteworthy stats and graphs. (It would be great if it did. Imagine the headlines: ‘Artists depressed for three consecutive quarters’.) So, how to measure, record and then debate the size, girth and growth of the industry? It’s tricky to get anything approaching facts or even factoids relating to the art industry.
So prepare yourself: here come some stats. First up is the size of the art industry in a transactional sense. Let’s get the ickiest one out of the way first. This is the art GDP question—the value of art is sold each year. Based on a rigorous ‘best guess’ methodology as pioneered by myself and a few mates over a beer, I can confidently predict that the transactional size of the art industry in NZ is between $50 million and $70 million a year.
Here’s how I worked this one out. We can accurately say that $15 million worth of art, give or take a million, is sold at auction every year. Combine that with the sales of the top 40 commercial galleries, which average between $500,000 and $1 million of sales per annum, add major public commissions, prizes and awards, and the figure of about $60 million seems pretty close.
“With a fraction of the media time devoted to horse racing or Lindsay Lohan’s social life, Kiwis make a point of checking what’s going on in the local art world. It’s the kind of customer loyalty Kevin Roberts would like to bottle.”
Another measure is participation. It’s here that one starts to get a sense of the size of the art ‘world’. A 2005 Creative NZ survey titled New Zealanders and the arts: attitudes, attendance and participation tells us that 63 percent of New Zealanders over 15 years old attend a visual arts event or exhibition each year and 31 percent do so regularly.
Isn’t that incredible? With a fraction of the media time devoted to horse racing, netball or Lindsay Lohan’s social life, Kiwis make a point of finding out about and checking what’s going on in the local art world. It’s the kind of customer loyalty Kevin Roberts would like to bottle and offer as a free sample on the cover of Lovebites or whatever he’s named his latest epistle on consumer infatuation.
This all takes me back to the theme of ‘turbulence’ and a few more stats. This year’s Triennial featured works by 35 artists from 20 countries and attendance of 20,000, most of whom number among the 63 percent of New Zealanders who flock in growing numbers to see the fruits of our many and talented artists year on year.
What these numbers measure is the quantity. The hard bit to measure, and the bit that really counts, is the quality. One of the features of this year’s Triennial (and the upcoming Auckland Art Fair from May 18 to 20) is the palpable sense of an industry in growth mode. The visual arts in New Zealand is not just a domestic business or even an export business—we’ve been exporting our artists and their works for years—but also, and this is the exciting new bit, our visual arts sector is becoming an import business. By import I really mean cultural tourism. At the launch for Walters Prize-winner Yvonne Todd’s new catalogue at Parson’s bookstore on the evening of the Triennial opening I looked about and saw not just the usual diehard Kiwi art gang but also a sizeable group of Australian curators, collectors and artists who had flown over for the event.
Without naming names it was astounding to see just who had made the trek to attend this year’s Triennial. Here, if proof was required, was evidence of the pulling power of the local art industry, no longer just world famous in New Zealand!
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