James Wallace
Art Patron and Collector

Contemporary Visual Arts:

I firmly believe that the amount of good to excellent art being produced in New Zealand is out of proportion to our population. My view is based on regular visits to overseas galleries and on overseas periodicals.

However the one area where we are out of line with overseas experience is prices. Many artists, including those just emerging, encouraged and abetted by dealers, ask ridiculous prices for their works compared to their contemporaries or equivalents anywhere else in the world. Further, a number of 'fashionable' artists are now fetching astronomic prices at auctions, reflecting the hysteria of investment speculation rather than their true worth.

The Establishment:

Some of our Institutions have caught the Te Papa disease believing that spending an immense amount on buildings and bureaucracy is more important than enhancing collections and giving public access to them.

New Zealand is particularly strong in painting and sculpture and yet many public gallery contemporary exhibitions show a perverse reaction to that and embrace installation and performance art, most of which is as boring as it is fatuous. We have empty shows curated by a strange breed who embrace the Emperor's Clothes concept as a proper objective, i.e. Art can be nothingness. This may be the myopic flavour of the moment but history will put it all into perspective. Major established painters in particular are sorely neglected in every way.