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.”

Edited by Ralph Ginzburg, Avant Garde was renowned for its graphic content by design guru Herb Lubalin. In 1968 the magazine sponsored an antiwar poster competition, which received over two thousand entries from twenty-four countries. Winning entries included a typographic collaboration between Billy Apple and Robert Coburn.
Image: entry for Avant Gardes's anti war poster competition by Billy Apple and Robert Coburn. Note: MADE IN THE USA at the bottom of the original artwork has been cropped from this image

Tech detective work on some old computer discs show Warhol was one of the first artists to work with digital technologies. Thanks to the curiosity of Cory Arcangel, a forgotten hoard of Warhol artworks have been retrieved from old Amiga discs by students who hacked into the defunct software. Read more…
Image: Andy2, 1985, a self-portrait created by Andy Warhol and recently retrieved from an Amiga computer floppy disc

A version of Takashi Murakam's feature film Jellyfish Eyes has been circulating on the internet since 2012, but Vanity Fair has just premiered a new trailer ahead of the film's arrival in the United States for an eight-city tour from 1 May to 5 June. View Trailer
Image: film still from Takashi Murakami's Jellyfish Eyes

ARTINFO has posted a preview of works selected by Yuko Hasegawa for the Encounters section of Art Basel Hong, which includes Starkwhite's presentation of Automated Colour Field (Variation V) by Perth-based artist Rebecca Baumann. View preview

In our last post on the controversy surrounding the Biennale of Sydney and its links with Australia's policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers we summarised key developments and suggested that the actions of the artists who threatened to withdraw from the event had put the spotlight on the privatisation of Austrlalia's offshore detention policy and not on the policy itself.

On the eve of the second edition of Art BAsel Hong Kong, which runs from 14-18 May, Magnus Renfrew talks to ARTINFO about his vision for the fair and plans for the future.
Image: Magnus Renfrew, Art Basel's Director Asia

During the 31st Bienal de Sao Paulo (6 September – 7 December 2014) the Biennial Foundation will stage the World Biennial Forum No 2. Initiated to provide a discursive platform for the international biennale community, the forum's role is to investigate and research the various modes of operation and production in different regions, and offer insights into the current issues and needs surrounding art biennials worldwide. Read more…
Image:10th Bienial de Sao Paul, 1969

Artspace has launched a new series of critical texts by selected writers responding to recent exhibitions. The online texts can be accessed free of charge here.

In the week leading up to ANZAC day, WWI footage has been projected onto the Auckland Museum. The 13 minute film produced by filmmaker Gaylene Preston, with a soundtrack composed by Jan Preston, can be viewed here.
Image: Gaylene Preston's ANZAC day film projected onto the Auckland Museum

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island art and its relationship with colonial and post-colonial Australia has been under the spotlight over the past few weeks.

Songlines, an exhibition showcasing ancient Aboriginal stories, was postponed indefinitely by the South Australian Museum after a group of traditional owners threatened legal action because it publicises what they say are secret men's stories. The intervention divided the Aboriginal community into camps – those who believe the exhibition is a mortal threat to Aboriginal culture versus those who say it offers a way to preserve knowledge for future generations and advance the understanding of Aboriginal culture.

Daniel Boyd has won this year's $80,000 Bulgari Art Award for a painting that makes subtle reference to the little known history of slavery in Australia and the bleak realities of colonialism.

The painting is of an idyllic scene from drawn from an old photograph of Pentecost Island in Vanuatu. The island was home to Boyd's great great grandfather before he and many other Pacific islanders were brought as slaves to work in sugar cane fields of Queensland. Boyd says his ancestor was later forced to leave the country under the introduction of the White Australia policy.

Judged by Wayne Tunnicliffe, head curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the award includes a $50,000 cash prize and a $30,000 residency in Italy.

Boyd follows in the footsteps of Michael Zavros and Jon Cattalan, previous winners of the Bulgari Art Award which was launched in 2012.
Image: Daniel Boyd with his prize-winning painting Untitled 2014

Finland has issued three daring stamps of images by Tom of Finland, the legendary artist whose portraits of vast-shouldered men in leather, denim and knee-high boot is said to have influenced figures including Robert Mapplethorpe and Freddie Mercury.

The images aren't the most explicit of the artist's work, but even so they push philatelic boundaries. While it's not unusual for stamps to depict gay heros, Dean Shepherd, editor of Gibbons Stamp Monthly says he has never seen homoerotic art on stamps. “There was a bit of a storm in the early 1930's when the Spanish Postal Authority approved some stamps featuring Goya's The Nude Maja – a woman reclining naked. The US government apparently barred and returned any mail that bore it.”

Matt Hill, editor of Stamp and Coin Mart also says it's a bold move. “Stamps represent a country, and are the most public of media, so they rarely feature strongly sexual subjects.”
Image: Finnish stamps using imagery by Tom of Finland

As public awareness of climate change grows, Amy Balkin's Public Smog project highlights the need to slash greenhouse gas emissions. Public Smog is a series of attempts to create a clean air park in the atmosphere. Actions to create the park have included purchasing and withholding emissions from regulated greenhouse gas markets in Southern California and in the European Union, and an attempt to submit the Earth's atmosphere for inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Public Smog also offers an array of compelling images that expand the limited repertoire currently used to highlight the effects of climate change – for instance, striking images of skylines with silhouetted buildings and geometric white gaps suggesting clarity and possibility in an otherwise smoggy landscape. Other Public Smog images show serene skyscapes of blues overlaid with phrases such as 'public mog is no substitute for direct action' and 'public smog will save the earth'.

This link takes you to an article on Public Smog and interview with Amy Balkin.

Layla-Rudneva Mackay's Starkwhite exhibition Blue squares, purple pairs closes today at 3pm

Seung Yul Oh's exhibition MOAMOA closes at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery (DPAG) on 29 April and then travels to the City Gallery Wellington (CGW) where it runs from 31 May to 24 August. Curated by Aaron Kreisler and Aaron Lister, MOAMOA has been organised as a joint venture between the DPAG and CGW. You can read a review of the show here.
Image: Seung Yul Oh's Pokpo