The South African National Arts Council’s budget has plunged from $3.7 million to $1.8M for the fiscal year of 2010 – 2011 in the months leading up to the most widely viewed sporting event in the world. This call was made by the culture ministry, of which the National Arts Council is a department.
Among the speed bumps that have lead to this rough road is the failed promise of 19.7 million dollars of funds that were supposed to be dedicated to World Cup arts initiatives. The money went missing and an investigation was launched last March by culture minister, Lulu Xingwana. However, the results of this investigation have yet to be made public.

The event is not detrimental to all other government departments, of course. Preparations for the games has triggered the improvement of football stadiums, as well as public transportation, and the tourist industry is sure to boom as hotels, restaurants and establishments are sure to have the busiest month they’ve had collectively, yet. The approximate GDP to be generated by the 2010 FIFA World Cup is $21.3 billion. But until that money can get filtered back into the system, arts and artists around the country will have to wait.

“Artists have had to shelve their plans and feel let down at a crucial time when we should be highlighting the uniqueness of our culture,” says Riason Naidoo, director of Cape Town’s Iziko South African National Gallery.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about Arts and Culture.

Festival founder Robert Redford took the stage at the festival’s opening news conference and offered his mea culpa. “I felt we were sliding. We were beginning to flat line and we needed a fresh approach.” Redford didn’t elaborate on the specifics of what he felt was needed, but the news conference went on to cover everything from John Cooper taking over as festival director to Sundance’s increased emphasis on micro-budgeted films.

The annual press conference is usually more a place of generalities than controversies. But it can offer hints about the direction of the festival, and organizers this year suggested they wanted to plunge into the future by returning to what they’ve done in the past.

In addition to the low budget films, a Bansky documentary will be making its debut, while Leon Gast’s documentary about early days paparazzo Ron Galella, “Smash His Camera” also plays the festival.

In talking about the new direction, Redford acknowledged Cooper predecessor Geoff Gilmore with a series of compliments that nonetheless also validated their decision to part ways. “Geoff did an amazing job,” he said. “He’s passionate and extremely articulate and a great lover of film. But it was simply a time for fresh blood. You have to rejuvenate,” he said, adding that such a decision “just happened to coincide with Geoff’s need to move on.”

With Cooper making his debut as festival director, the news conference wandered into themes that have recurred over the last few months, particularly the creation of the low budget Next section. “We’ve been showing these kinds of films for years, but we thought it was time to carve out a section for it,” he said.

As he laid out the new plans, however, Cooper also offered his own admission. “There’s a schizophrenia to talk about the old and new when I was here all these years,” he said. “If there were problems with the festival I was probably part of them.”

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about arts and culture

Matthew Weinstein; Sonnabend Gallery – Mr. Weinstein’s painterly precision illustrates how important it is for artists to toss out everyone else’s ideas of what art is to get as close as possible to one’s own ideas. Weinstein isn’t well known enough yet, and needs to find a way to attract a larger audience.

Duke Riley, Those About to Die Salute you: Queens Museum of Art – This mock sea battle between New York’s museums, staged in a flooded pool near the Queens Museum, coaxed the spirits of reverie, chaos, and abandon out into the open, while advancing ideas of what art could be if it is willing to go in its own direction.

Picasso: Mosqueteros: Gagosian Gallery – This magnificent show of 52 powerful paintings and 41 intricate prints – all made between 1962 and 1972, the year of Picasso’s death – show Picasso frolicking with women, helplessly aging, and still hungering for life.

The New York debuts of Leidy Churchman, Cyprien Gaillard, and Josephine Halvorson – Gaillard’s Desniansky Raion allowed glimpses into the love, confusion, and information younger artists are turning to these days. Halvorson’s quiet paintings echoed the spirit of William Nicholson, and Churchman’s beautifully rendered wood paintings combined folk art and Indian manuscript painting.

Diego Velazquez, “Portrait of a Man”: The Metropolitan Museum of Art – Part of Met’s collection since 1949, this portrait was attributed first to Van Dyke, then the “workshop” of Velazquez, and then “School Piece in the Velazquez Manner.” The picture went in for cleaning earlier this year, and the painting emerged as a real work by Velazquez, one of the greatest painters of all time.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about art

Prior to the sale at Sotheby’s, the world art market had already been slowing down after rising continuously since 2003. The market peaked in 2007 when it was worth more than $65 billion, double the figure from five years earlier. Since then the figure may have dropped to around $50 billion, but the market continues to generate interest beyond simple size calculation. The world art market brings together a variety of factors including wealth, egos, greed, passion, and controversy in a way that is matched by few other industries.

The current downturn in the art market is the worst since the Japanese stopped buying Impressionists in the nineties, a move that initiated the most serious contraction in the market since World War II. This time experts believe that prices are down roughly 40% on their peak, though some have been far more volatile. The difference between this slump and the last is that there are still buyers in the market this time. In the early 1990s, when interest rates were high, there was no demand even though many collectors wanted to sell. The biggest problem now is not lack of demand but a lack of good work to sell – anyone who does not have to sell is keeping away, waiting for confidence to return.

According to the World Wealth Report, in 2007 there were over 10 million people with investible assets of $1 million or more. Last year that number dropped to 8.6 million, and many rich people scaled back their “investments of passion” – yachts, jets, cars, jewelry, and so on. But the proportion of all luxury spending that went on art increased as investors looked for assets that would hold their value in the longer term.

The best that can be said about the art market right now is that it is holding its breath, and that the key to its resurgence lies in globalization. The supply of the world’s best art will always be limited, but in the long run demand is bound to rise as wealth spreads across the globe.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about business

In speaking on “The Importance of Art,” I offer my thoughts from the standpoint of an appreciator, an investor and a philanthropist. The art world represents a rare opportunity to combine many of my passions into a singular endeavor and it’s vital that we continue to support the institutions that make it possible.

With that in mind, Richard Polsky’s recent advice on ArtNet tells us what not to do – buying mediocre paintings rather instead of great prints or drawings, accepting minor discounts (10 percent or less) from galleries, choosing works of unusually large scale, and purchasing a recently deceased artist’s work –  all rules of thumb that make sense from an investment standpoint.

However, Polsky’s recommendation that buying atypical work is “another sucker bet,” is a bit harder to digest. While it may be true that “when the time comes to sell, you will come to despise your ‘inspired’ purchase” because it’s more difficult to unload, it doesn’t mean the decision was any less inspired. After all, it only takes one person who shares your vision. And on a much larger scale, the Whitney Museum of American Art was founded on a private collection of blue chip artists’ lesser known pieces, though we can’t all expect to carry that kind of cache.

Making money on the art market is perfectly reasonable if one thinks about the investment as long term – ten to twenty years being the gold standard. Polsky advises buying the program (a good gallerist like Paula Cooper, Barbara Gladstone, or David Zwirner choose high-quality art across the board). Other areas to consider are artists’ estate, new release prints and works from an artist who is switching galleries. On a more obvious note, try to collect pieces before an artist is involved in a retrospective – comprehensive exhibitions not only present the full spectrum of artistic development but instill a kind of nostalgia, even for the weaker works.

And again, it’s worth remembering that the art world represents a rare opportunity to combine your passions for collecting with an eye on investment and business acumen, something truly worth appreciating.

Not only does this recognize a healthy sense of competition (never a bad thing in responsible doses), the awards assess risk-taking and corporate skills in an industry where the term “business” makes people rather squeamish. Lyn Gardner, a theatre critic and judge for the performing arts awards, addresses this hesitance to embrace a commercial philosophy when operating a creative enterprise. She writes, “In the current climate, our need for cultural entrepreneurs is greater than ever; we have as much need of organisational energy, corporate skills, original ideas and a willingness to take risks as we do of creative energy. When funding dries up, so too does the quality and riskiness of work on our stages.”

There is only so much grant and public funding to go around, so it’s important to analyze the bottom line when it comes to cost and operating budgets so as to make the most out of an organization’s creative capital. Such leadership can only lead to necessary change in a field notorious for its financial woes.

Find out more about the YCE Awards here; winners will be announced at the end of August.

Part of this, as suggested in the review is that “fashions changed” during the period in which they were created. And although the sculptors who made the works were as highly regarded as many of their household-name contemporaries, many of them faded into obscurity as time passed.

Certainly in today’s art world, fashions change by the week, month, year in which they were both created and received. Pieces conceived in a time when sensational, loud, boisterous expression ruled the day can easily be forgotten a year later, when a more subtle and understated approach becomes popular.

Some of the sculptors featured in this exhibit created their most prized works in the form of monuments, tombs, and altars, all of which – for obvious reasons – cannot be transported in the auspices of any modern day museum. Tullio Lombardo, whose name holds the title of the exhibition, was near obsessed with classical form and Greek approaches to sculpture. Because of this, his style, which he mostly  learned studying under his father, Pietro, was in a sense left behind.

It’s always interesting to see work that was overshadowed during the period in which it was created become appreciated in a modern setting. As Artdaily.com describes his artistic direction, “Tullio crafted close-up treatments of secular subjects designed for an audience that could respond to their elusive, haunting character in an intimate setting. A type of sculpture never seen before, these portrait-like busts in exceptionally high relief represented figural types descended from ancient Greek and Roman art, given immediacy by their Renaissance hairstyles and costume details.”

So in essence, Tullio’s work predated the multi-faceted conceits of the famed 20th century masters, such as Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, or even Diane Arbus. For lovers of sculpture, this sounds like an exhibit not to be missed.