A swedish glass gallery, Kosta Boda, has come up with a novel way to auction an artwork. Instead of the usual monetary bids, bidders could only win an artwork with the intensity of their emotional and physical reactions to the piece. Coined the “auction based on emotions”, no money changed hands for three pieces valued at over €25,000 in total.

On the night of the auction, each bidder was brought into a closed off room and sensors were hooked onto their hand and ear. At this point, the artwork was unveiled and the sensors began monitoring the bidders heart rate and galvanic skin response. Each bidder had 60 seconds to experience the work and after going through the process for the 303 participants, the three with the highest physical response were awarded the artworks.
Image: a bidder at the Kosta Boda auction

Hong Kong's ParaSite Art Space curator Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya sees Asia as being like “a curatorial Wild West” where the continent's multi-role curatorial practices deconstruct all his European preconceptions. Influenced by the lack of publications that focus on curatorial practices in Asia, Fominaya and artist Michael Lee compiled a selelction of 16 essays that address this issue, inviting contribitions from curators and critics, including Hans Ulricht Obrist, Russsell Storer, Cao Weijun, Hector Rodriguez and others. Read more…

Grant Stevens' exhibition Hold Together, Fall Apart enters its final week at Starkwhite, closing on Saturday 2 August. You can read a review of the exhibition here.  You can also catch Stevens' work at the City Gallery Wellington. What We Had Was Real runs to 7 September.
Image: Grant Stevens, Haven (2104), video still

In his first feature-length film, photographer Gavin Hipkins presents a richly pictorial essay of images of the natural world – and the often forlorn evidence of humanity's passage through it. Hipkins draws his themes for Erewhon from Samuel Butler's Erewhon: Or, Over the Range, published in 1872. Butler had worked on a South Island high country sheep station and it's easy to suppose that his objectification of a wholly invented 'native people' is an ironic posture owing something to his experience in colonial New Zealand. Likewise his concerns with the coming dominance of industry chime eerily with contemporary concerns: vegetarianism is the law of the land in Erewhon and machines have been banished to museums for fear of their becoming conscious.

Erewhon  was premiered on Sunday at the New Zealand International Film Festival and screens again today at 1.30pm at Auckland's Academy Theatre. You can view the film trailer here.
Image: Gavin Hipkins Erewhon (Production Still)

Barry Keldoulis, the CEO and Group Fairs Director of Art Fairs Australia, the presenters of Sydney Contemporary and the Melbourne Art Fair (on behalf of the Melbourne Art Foundation), will talk about the upcoming Melbourne Art Fair at Starkwhite at 5pm today. He will cover public and collector programmes, and the three new exhibition sections that have been introduced to this year’s edition of the Melbourne Art Fair – MAF Platform, MAF  Video, and MAF Edge. Curated by Simone Hine and Kyle Weise, the co-founding directors of Screen Space, MAF Video includes Grant Stevens’ Auric Variations.
Image: Barry Keldoulis

Changes to the rules governing collectibles held in self-managed super funds (SMSFs) in Australia may trigger a flood of artworks onto the market with investors facing the possibility of their portfolios being sold at fire sale prices. According to art accountant and valuer Michael Fox there has already been a significant level of divestment of collections that he says could be explained by “a desire to seek a higher price for the artworks and collectibles before the market becomes depressed by an oversupply of artworks”. Read more…
Image: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Untitled (Awelye) 1995

The role of art in growing your wealth and viability of art as an investment were two of the session topics at the London Business School's recent art investment conference.

Keynote speaker Anna Dempster, an economist and senior lecturer at Soetheby's Institute of Art, said art as an asset class presented significant opportunities at a time when an estimated $2 trillion of artworks are currently held in private hands. But other panelists disagreed with the positioning of art as an asset class. “Art is an asset, not an asset class,” said Luke Dugdale, director of the Royal Bank of Canada's British-based wealth management division. “If it were an asset class, the Financial Conduct Authority would regulate it and that would kill the art world. It's a market in which everyone can be an advisor.”

The conference was wrapped up by self-confessed flipper Kenny Schachter. “An asset class generates a return on investment, whereas with art the dividend is visual,” he said. “But if you buy art low and sell high you can make extraordinary money.” Read more…

Michael Zavros' exhibition Bad Dad continues at Starkwhite this week through to 28 June.
Image: Bad Dad installation view 

New Zealand is one of 11 countries presenting inaugural exhibitions at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, which opened on 7 June.

Artistic director Rem Koolhaas's theme invites participating nations to reflect on the development of modern architecture since 1914 and the resulting loss of distinctive national characteristics in architecture. But New Zealand commissioner David Mitchell argues that national differentiation in architecture is possible and has curated an exhibition about traditional Maori architecture, identified by Artinfo as one of the 5 rookie pavilions to watch out for. Read more…
Image: detail from the whatarangi (Maori storehouse) in the New Zealand pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale

Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art has revealed the names of the 13 artists selected for this year's edition of Primavera, the exhibition for young Australian artists under the age of 35 launched by Cynthia and Edward (Ted) Jackson to honour the memory of their daughter Belinda. The selection was made by artist Mikala Dwyer, one of the four artists exhibited in the inaugural edition of the exhibition at the MCA in 1992.

Dwyer's lineup includes the controversial Melbourne-based artist Paul Yore who is currently fighting charges of producing and possessing child pornography after being accused of creating images that sexualised children during an exhibition of his work at the Linden Centre for Contemporary Art.
Image: Hossein Ghaemi's Frank: Hole up – Hold up (2013). Ghaemi is one of the 13 artists in Primavera 2014

Okwui Enwezor, the artistic director of the 56th Venice Biennale, has been on a whirlwind trip to Sydney and Melbourne where he has been meeting artists and visiting galleries and exhibitions, which he described as a “fascinating investigation into Australian contemporary art”. Read more…
Image: Okwui Enwezor

Over the past decade we've seen a growing interest in art co-ops in New Zealand – groups of art lovers forming collections purchased collectively and rotated around their homes. When the collections are wound up they generally go to an auction house to be sold into the secondary art market. However, this week the Auckland-based group Bijou took a novel approach to the dispersal of their collection. The works were appraised by an independent valuer giving an estimated value for the entire collection. The sum was divided by the number of members in the art co-op giving each member credit they could use to bid for works at a silent auction held at Starkwhite. Through a process of paper bids and rounds that allowed each member to get a work before moving to the next round, the entire collection was picked up by members who were all delighted to have works they couldn't bear to part with.

Independent curator/writer Alison Kubler discusses her new book  Art/Fashion in the 21st Century (Thames & Hudson) at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki on Thursday. The book, which she co-authored with Michael Oakley Smith, explores the creative collision between fashion houses and art such as Balenciaga, Walter van Beirendonck, Prada, Jeff Koons and Hussein Chayalan, as well as Australian labels Romance Was Born and Birthday Suit, since the turn of the new millennium. (Auckland Art Gallery auditorium, 29 May, 6pm, free entry)
Image: Alison Kubler

Never has brand power been more in evidence at an art event than at Art Basel Hong Kong 2014, says John McDonald in the Sydney Morning Herald. He also discusses why the fair puts such emphasis on curatorial projects (like Yuko Hasegawa's Encounters section), lectures and forums. Read more…
Gordon Walters, Chrysanthemum (1944), oil on card, courtesy of the Walters Estate. Chrsysanthemum was exhibited in the Starkwhite survey of GordonWalters' work at Art Basel Hong Kong, 2014, with the support of Creative New Zealand  

This coming weekend (Saturday 31 May) we open Michael Zavros: Bad Dad and launch a new publication on his work with writing by Robert Leonard, Chief Curator at the City Gallery Wellington, and an interview with the artist conducted by Rhana Devenport, Director of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, who will also open the exhibition.

While Zavros has exhibited previously in New Zealand at Auckland Artspace in 2005 (Uncanny (the unnaturally strange)), and at Govett Brewster Gallery, New Plymouth in 2007 (New Nature), this is his first solo exhibition in New Zealand. Bad Dad brings together new paintings and drawings with a selection of important past works borrowed from private, public and the artist’s own collections in an exhibition that offers an introduction to the artist’s rich and complex oeuvre.

“In the consistency, coherence and cunning of his post-criticality, Michael Zavros cuts an unusual figure. Other artists are postcritical. Other artists make likeable art. Other artists are rated, curated and collected. Other artists are profiled in the glossies, are well connected and live the good life. Other artists nag the boundaries between life and art. But Zavros has tied these thoughts together and granted them the force, clarity and self-consciousness of a project – a paradigm. In doing so he has become a reference point in Australian art that other positions must be read against. Because of this, his art is as much about what it is not as about what it is. It can be read both in itself, as a self-contained system (a hall of mirrors), and in terms of its relation to other work. The art world looks different with Zavros in it.” Robert Leonard
Image: cover of Bad Dad published on the occasion of Michael Zavros' first solo show at Starkwhite, design by Inhouse, Auckland

A 10,000 year old woolly mammoth skeleton, gilded in 24-carat gold leaf and encased in a giant gold framed tank has sold for 11 million euro. Damien Hirst's Gone but Not Forgotten was auctioned at a star-studded fundrasier for AIDS and purchased by Leonard Blavatnik, the Ukranian owner of Warner Music and Britain's fourth richest person. The mammoth skeleton is from Hirst's natural history collection which he began in 1991.
Image: Damien Hirst with Gone But Not forgotten

Yesterday e-flux sent an open letter to the the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) to protect the dot art domain from commercial exploitation, saying “we are on the cusp of an extraordinary opportunity with the simple use of a single word: a virtual palace to the arts, built site-by-site by millions of artists and arts institutions, each with an individualized contribution gathered around the simple namespace .ART”

In 2103, ICANN launched its new gTLD Program, allowing any company or orgnisation to apply for one or more top generic top-level domains. Within the regulatory frameworrk established by ICANN and the ICANN community, priorities have been given to to self-designated communities who want to promote and protect the common language, culture, interests, identity or any other common denominator they can demonstrate to represent.

Two entities have applied of the .ART gTLD having elected community representation: DeviantArt and e-flux. Both organisations support each others applications saying they are “committed to develop .ART as an authentic internet address for the arts and represent its community,” and “that it could become a touchstone of world culture and contribute transformative vision across all boundaries.”

However, eight other purely commercial entities and individuals have also chosen to apply for .ART proposing a purely commercial exploitation of the domain. e-flux says: “Left to pure commercial exploitation .ART will stand as a complete failure” and that it “would be an irretrievable tragedy”

In an open letter e-flux has called on the ICANN Board and GAC “to safeguard the arts as a universal human right in its shared culture” and to “set aside its unlimited and seemingly unrestrained commercialization of the internet name space an embrace the opportunity that it hardcoded into its guidebook for applicants  to self-identify as a community.”

Bill Viola has created a modern alter piece for St Paul's cathedral. It has taken more than a decade to agree, plan and install his multiscreen work Martyrs (Earth, Air , Fire, Water), a process that started when the cathdral's overseers saw his exhibition The Passions at the National Gallery in 2003 revealing the depth of his interest in traditional religious art. The artist, who is making another piece for St Paul's to be unveiled next year, says he hopes the pieces are not just art but “practical objects of traditional contemplation and devotion.” Read more…
Image: Bill Viola's Martyrs at St Paul's London 

Michael Zavros' Bad dad features soon in our ground floor gallery – an exhibition that combines major works such as Phoebe is Dead/McQueen (on loan from the Moran Art Foundation, Sydney), with others from his personal collection, such as Bad dad, and new works made for the show. And upstairs we will present new works, including The Poodle pictured above.

Bad dad runs at Starkwhite from 2-28 June with a preview on Saturday 31 May where we will launch a new publication on Zavros with writing by Robert Leonard, chief curator at the City Gallery Wellington, and an interview by Rhana Devenport, director of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki.
Image: Michael Zavros, The Poodle, 2014, oil on canvas, 155 x 135cm

Art Basel Hong Kong is over and the reviews are starting to appear. Here is one of the first from Nic Forest, which mentions our Walters exhibition. Read more…

Rebecca Baumann is one of 17 artists selected by Yuko Hasegawa  to present works in the Encounters section of Art Basel Hong Kong. Hasegawa first saw one of Baumann's automated colour field works at Sydneys's Musuem of Contemporary Art. “I was imperssed by the contrast between colour and the qiuiet movement of the panel. Her work draws our attention to singualr moments in everyday life, shifting our memory from the formalistic to the aesthetic.”

Hasegawa thought the work was well suited to the curatorial concept for this year's Encounters presentation, which focuses on the relationship between artwork and viewer. “As we have seen in her previous works, which have utilised coloured smoke or golden tape, Baumman invites her audience to participate in her work emotionally and physically.”
Image: Rebecca Baumann, Automated Colour Field (Variation V), 2014 (detail), 132 flip-clocks, laser-cut paper, batteries, 1550 x 3950 x 90mm (bottom). Presented by Starkwhite at E14 (level 3 of the fair). The artist is participating in Art Basel Hong Kong is with the assistance of the Artflight programme administered by Perth's Department of Culture and Arts.

The VIP Preview is underway at Art Basel Hong Kong and will be followed by the vernisage at 5pm. We'll post vernissage shots tomorrow.
Image: installation views of Starkwhite's presentation of Gordon Walters at Art Basel Hong Kong (Booth1D20), presented in partnership with the Walters Estate and with support from Creative New Zealand

Today we are also installing Rebecca Baumann's Automated Colour Field (Variation V) in the Encounters section of Art Basel Hong Kong, which has been curated by Yuko Hasegawa. Baumann's new piece consists of 132 split-panel flip clocks, each with the number cards replaced with cards of solid colour, creating a vast and constantly changing field of colour. We'll post an installation view of her piece tomorrow.

Today we are installing our Gordon Walters exhibition in the Galleries section of Art Basel Hong Kong.

Walters is best known for his paintings employing the koru, the curving bulb form from Maori moko and kowhaiwhai rafter patterns. He Mondrian-ised the koru, straightening and regimenting its scroll-like forms, taking it from organic to strictly geometric. Our presentation at the fair includes koru paintings produced between 1956 and 1983, along with Chrysanthemum (1944) which is considered to be one of his most important early works.

Walters is a revered figure in New Zealand, recognised for a long and productive career spanning four decades. However, aside from Australia where his work has been seen in Headlands: thinking through New Zealand Art at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (1992) and the 5th Asia Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (2006-2007), Walters’ work has not found its way onto the international stage. This provides an opportunity for Starkwhite, in partnership with the Walters Estate, to stage a solo exhibition of his paintings at one of the world’s great art fairs where it will be seen by international curators, exhibition makers and influential collectors –  a step towards granting Walters the international recognition he so richly deserves. 

Our Gordon Walters exhibition at Art Basel Hong Kong is presented with the support of Creative New Zealand.
Image: Gordon Walters, Untitled, oil and acrylic on canvas, 1520 x1220mm, courtesy of the Walters Estate

The Museum of Old And New Art;'s winter festival DARK MOFO returns to Hobard next month (12-22 June) with a mix art, food, music and light. The visual art programme promises to be one of the high points of this year's festival with an array of installations, including Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's personalised light sculptures, Yin Xiuzhen's wall of ice and Ross Manning's subterranean light installations.

The organising committee of  the Shanghai Biennale has announced the selection of Anselm Franke as the chief curator of the 10th edition of the biennale, which takes place from 22 November 2014 to 31 March 2015 at Shanghai's Powerstation of Art. Franke is currently head of visual art and film art at Berlin's House of World Culture and curated the 2012 Taipei Biennial Modern Monsters / Death and Life of Fiction.
Image: Anslem Franke

The online art market generated $1.6bn of transactions in 2103 and is forecast to grow to $3.8bn by 2018, according to report on the online art trade published by Hiscox. Their head of fine art, Robert Read, says there is as yet “no winning formula” in terms of the ideal platform for selling art on line, but he expects bricks and mortar and online companies to consolidate as “the race to find that elusive winning business model continues.”

The current issue of the Australian publication Art Collector contains an interview by Robert Leonard with Brisbane-based artist Michael Zavros who is about to present his first solo show in New Zealand. Bad dad runs at Starkwhite on Auckland's K Road from 2 – 28 June, 2014.
Image: Michael Zavros, Bad dad, 2013, oil on canvas, 110 x 150cm

Income inequality moved with astonishing speed from the boring backwaters of economic studies to “the defining challenge of our time,” says the New York Times. And it found Thomas Piketty waiting for it.

Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics who has devoted his career to understanding the dynamics driving the the concentration of income and wealth into the hands of a few. In his new book Capital in the Twenty-first Century, he offers a theory of capitalism that explains its lopsided distribution of rewards.

The NYT's Eduardo Porter talked to Piketty about the wealth divide, the risks associated with income inequality and whether our political systems will be able to address the trend. Read more…

Commentary like Piketty's also raises questions about the relationship between the art world and big  money. For instance, Yale economist William Goetzmann argues that prices for art rise not in line with a nation's gross product, rather in parallel with rising income inequality – ie that art performs best, financially, when most people are doing badly. And philanthropic money, whether from corporations or the super-rich, is more likely to be scrutinised these days (for example, artists protesting Transfield's link with the current Biennale of Sydney) presenting socially-engaged artists with the challenge of finding ways to operate inside an art world fueled by the privileged 1 percent.
Image: Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-first Century

For the first time in its 133-year history, the Architectural League of New York is presenting its presidential medal to an artist: Richard Serra.

The league's president, Annabel Selldorf, said the artist “engages the sense in terms of scale, space, volume and materiality in a way that is inevitably fascinating for every architect.”