March/April 2010
A good ARI isn’t hard to find > NSW
Artist Run Initiative (ARI) Read More
Art Month Sydney > Precinct 1: Paddington/Woollahra > NSW
The first week of Art Month Sydney kicks off across
Paddington and Woollahra, collectively crowned ‘Precinct 1’ Read More
Art Month Sydney > Precinct 2: Surry Hills/Darlinghurst > NSW
In reality Sydney’s gallery scene is a broad and vibrant kaleidoscope. Read More
Art Month Sydney > Precinct 3: Waterloo > NSW
Precinct 3 takes in the suburb of Waterloo, home to the Danks Street Complex which includes ten of Sydney’s commercial galleries. Read More
Art Month Sydney > Precinct 4: Redfern/Chippendale/CBD > NSW
Serendipitously there are two galleries in Precinct 4 that
showcase Asian art, Read More
Discipline ain’t what it used to be
Donald Judd, one of the more influential founding fathers
of minimalism couldn’t hack New York’s claustrophobia. Read More
The legacy of two great artists > NSW
Two significant Indigenous exhibitions, staged as part of
Art Month Sydney, are East Kimberley Painting Revisited at
Michael Reid at Elizabeth Bay and Museum III at Utopia Art. Read More
Off Track - Give it up for the rich guy
By Andrew Mackenzie
Question: What did all the successful Young British Artists of the early 90’s share, besides their three-letter acronym YBA? Answer: Almost every single one of them was collected by the wealthy ad-man Charles Saatchi who had, in true ad-man style, invented the acronym. Saatchi had collected European and US blue-chip art for much of the Eighties, but turned his attention around 1990 to the work of young bright-eyed iconoclastic art graduates (some indeed, like Damian Hirst, were not even out of college). His brash and bullish support for these upstarts helped build an empire of ‘Britart’ that was to dominate the world’s art scene for over a decade. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the art collector Charles Saatchi invented Britart.
Not that Saatchi was lavishing his wealth on contemporary art out of sheer altruism. The spectacular growth in value of the art he bought saw his collection turn into one of Britain’s richest. None of this is new. From Cosimo de Medici to Solomon R Guggenheim, art usually flourishes in the presence of rich collectors, who themselves become richer for it. Thus, Clement Greenberg observed the avant-garde was connected to the bourgeois “by an umbilical cord of gold”. Literally so in the case of Guggenheim, whose vast wealth came from Canadian alluvial gold.
Here in Australia the role-call of super-rich art collectors is rather short. So too our role-call of cultural philanthropists, who also serve a vital role in sustaining and supporting contemporary art and culture. Why, you might ask, are both so missing in Australia? In the world of charitable philanthropy for instance, the arts are very much the poor cousins. Compared to education, sport, science and (the largest of all) religion, the arts receive a risible 3% of total charitable giving. Meanwhile, as the income of Australia’s affluent has increased in the last boom decade by 36%, its giving to charity has grown from 0.36% to just 0.45% of total income. Compared to the rest of the first world’s affluent givers, Australia lags behind the likes of Argentina, Hungary and Spain.
Some say it’s because Australia doesn’t have the right tax instruments to provide incentives, compared to America, where the flip-side of voting for lower government expenditure, is a recognition of individual responsibility to ‘give back’ private wealth. All things considered, that’s not much of model for Australia to follow.
In any case, tax is not really a factor. While it is true that major givers have only recently been able to easily establish charitable foundations (thanks to the ‘prescribed private fund’ scheme introduced by the Howard government), it is also true that anyone giving $2 to the Salvos can get a receipt and claim it. Some arts funding experts like David Fishel of Positive Solutions believe it is more to do with cultural traditions and ‘the relatively weak appeal of the arts as a cause’1. Australians, especially rich Australians, just don’t care enough about the arts.
But surely there must be a ‘Charles Saatchi of Australia’ somewhere out there? While Marc Besen’s TarraWarra Museum of Art is indeed a beautiful building, containing some great modern and Aboriginal art, it remains a relatively minor influence on contemporary art. While Janet Holmes à Court has assembled an impressively eclectic and intelligent collection, it too has had a limited impact on the Australian contemporary art world. One could argue that John Kaldor might deserve such a title, as the donation of his family collection to the Art Gallery of New South Wales represents the largest gift for the visual arts to an Australian institution. Alongside this, Kaldor Public Art Projects remain a regular high point in Sydney’s artist calendar.
1 Philanthropy and the Arts In Australia, Conference presentation by David Fishel, 30 June 2001.
But my money would be on a reclusive Tasmanian multi-millionaire gambler called David Walsh, whose new private museum currently under construction overlooks the Derwent River (and the blue-collar suburb of Glenorchy where he grew up). Next year when the museum opens it will be the largest, richest private museum in Australia; a $75m architectural bunker containing a collection currently valued at well over $100m, and rising. The monumental proportions of the building, sculpted onto the end of a promontory by Melbourne architect Nonda Katsalidis, will have all the spatial drama, cutting-edge technology and clarity of purpose of a James Bond SPECTRE HQ. And no, Walsh does not greet visitors stroking a large fluffy white cat.
While recently visiting Tasmania I had the opportunity to take a sneaky peek at its concrete form taking shape. Though still over a year from completion, it is already possible to appreciate its colossal scale. It will house a collection that also contains one of the largest collections of Roman coins in the world along with an array of Egyptian artefacts, but is increasingly dominated by seriously good Australian contemporary art. Major works by Callum Morton and Patricia Piccinini will sit side by side with commissioned John Olsen paintings and the largest Sydney Nolan piece of art he ever made.
It is not just the dollar value of this art, or the scale of building that distinguishes Walsh’s collection. It is the sheer idiosyncratic attitude of it all. Underlying this collection is the profound personal passion its owner has for the art he collects. Although he head-hunted the Managing Director of Sotheby’s Australia, Walsh remains the driven, focused eye behind each purchase. His deeply held belief that sex and death drives us all, and all we do, including our art, lies behind a truly intriguing collection of contemporary art.
Unlike other famous collectors who have historically made their fortunes from industrial or corporate success, Walsh must surely be the first serious collector to have made his wealth from gambling, using
mathematics, algorithms and software to bet on a global scale, with hundreds of staff. Everything about him and his collection seems to leap from the pages of a novel. But this is all real, and it’s good news for Australian art and culture. Last year he virtually self-funded an
international music festival in Hobart for goodness sake. A friend commented that it was like a 21 year old’s fantasy party… done for the hell of it, not because it was tax deductable.
If the world has to have its super-rich, we need more of them like Walsh. People with an independent attitude, a gutsy self-confidence and a vigorous love of art; people who are less interested in buying another yacht, private jet or Caribbean island than in exploring the riches of art. Time will tell what effects MONA will have on Australian art. For lots of reasons we neither want nor should look for a YBA phenomena. But this example of someone really enjoying his collection, in something like a rock’n’roll style, buying the best of everything he can and putting it all on display in an extraordinary new museum, is what I’d call a good example for our affluent class. It might even create a new art collector or two. God knows, Australian art needs it.
TarraWarra Museum of Art.
Andrew Mackenzie is an art critic and Editor-in-Chief (Inside)
Australian Design Review and (AR) Architectural Review Australia.
