Money, money, money: Georgett’s Big Durian and all that cash

 Lit Review: https://observer.com/2023/06/singaporean-artist-georgette-chen-sets-three-auction-records-in-less-than-one-year/  Singaporean Artist Georgette Chen Sets Three Auction Records in Less Than One Year By Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly • 06/01/23 2:04pm

 

 

Auction headlines that get into the news are sooooo about money. If you read them, they highlight the movement of money. Most of the time, this kind of news is about how much money the art was sold and how much it has risen in its financial value. There will be little about art's other values. You know, pictorial value, beauty, social value, whatever. Hence the only thing we are sure of in this kind of news is its exponential 'surprising' - rise in financial value.

 

Thanks to Jeffrey Say for highlighting this piece of news about Georgette Chen’s auction success (Tremayne-Pengelly). This lit review is not a critique of money and art speculation. Instead, I want to unpack thoughts around it by following the money.

 

Before this auction, somebody sold and bought 2 of Chen's paintings each for $1.6 million and nearly $1.5 million in November (2022) and August (2022), respectively. This sale of $1.8 million is the 3rd time Chen's auction record has been broken — the sales total to about USD 4.9 million. There is no mention of who sold and bought the work on these 3 auctions; we don't usually know when big sums of money are changing hands.

 

Chen's painting was auctioned at Christie's Hong Kong. Evelyn Lin, deputy chairman and co-head of the 20th and 21st-century art department at Christie's Asia Pacific, claimed that the May auction saw sales worth USD 160 million. Based on a quick search on Christie's auction records, I found USD 137 million from 3 auctions on 28 & 29 May 2023. Chen's painting was auctioned in one of these auctions on 28 May at the 20th/21st Century Art Evening Sale. That auction saw consolidated sales of art worth USD 92.5 million worth of art.

 

Noting the rise in financial value, the author points out the influx of 'wealthy' immigrants during the Covid-19 pandemic as a reason for the surging growth in its art scene. Surging growth seems ambiguous, but I read it as rising financial resources from new immigrants during the Covid-19 pandemic (2020 - 2023). The author also points to increasing demand for Southeast Asia art based on Sotheby's first auction in more than 15 years, as Southeast Asia accounted for nearly a 75 per cent increase in its global sales over the past five years.

 

Some preliminary search shows that the increase in demand is based on this 28 August 2022 auction in Singapore which was a 'resounding' success achieving USD 18 million (Singapore). It is the highest total for any sale held by Sotheby's in Singapore --- ever. Comparing to the Christie’s auction of 2 days, Sotheby’s ‘demand’ in financial value (18 million vs 132 million) is much less.

 

According to the article, there is an increase in 'appetite' for million-dollar works where Singaporean collectors spend more than $1 million on artwork rose to 25 per cent in 2022, compared to just 4 per cent in 2019 as quoted from the report from Art Basel and UBS. In addition, the median expenditure on artwork also increased, with $322,000 spent last year compared to $129,000 in 2021 and $93,000 in 2020. At the time of writing, I was unable to find and rectify the data claimed here.

 

However, Singapore is noted a few times in the report. As the review is an exercise to follow the money. I have extracted other ‘money info’ related to Singapore. One of this is Singapore’s double-digit growth in auction sales driven by Sotheby’s sale of Modern and Contemporary art (McAndrew, p188). Asia (including Singapore) accounted for almost 20% of global auction sales at USD 1.1 billion (Ibid., p150). Lastly, the report surveyed 2700, High Net Worth  (HNW) collectors from US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Brazil (Ibid., p257).

 

Within a year, the sales total of Chen’s 3 paintings was sold for about USD 4.9 million. What does USD 4.9 million mean for the Singapore art scene?

 

USD 4.9 million is about SGD 6,564,520.67

 

• 5.9 years of annual expenses of The Substation on Armenian Street (based on FY 2020)
• 315 years of annual expenses for The Soup Kitchen Project

 

• 4% of the annual operating expenditure of National Art Council (based on Annual Report 2021/2022)
• 82% of the budget for the inaugural Singapore Biennale (2008)
• 109% of the budget for the Singapore Biennale (2011)
• 46% of annual expenses of Singapore Art Museum (Annual Report 2021/2022
• 8.8% of annual expenses of National Gallery (Annual Report 2021)

•  2,188 paintings by young Singapore artists based on an estimates in 2013 (Huang)
• 2900 Kg of Rice

 

• 15 3-room HDB flats
• 8.9 5-room HDB Flats (prices are based on listing in June 23, 2020)
• 2 4-Bed Condo
• 1.3 Semi-detached landed property
• 68% Bungalow landed property  

Bibliography:

20th Century Art Day Sale: 29 MAY 2023 | LIVE AUCTION 21394. Christie’s, 2023, https://www.christies.com/en/auction/20th-century-art-day-sale-29789/.

20th/21st Century Art Evening Sale: 28 MAY 2023 | LIVE AUCTION 21389. Christie’s, 2023, https://www.christies.com/en/auction/20th-21st-century-art-evening-sale-29784/.

21st Century Art Day Sale: 29 MAY 2023 | LIVE AUCTION 21390. Christie’s, 2023, https://www.christies.com/en/auction/21st-century-art-day-sale-29785/?page=2&sortby=lotnumber.

ANNUAL REPORT FOR THE FINANCIAL YEAR 1 APRIL 2019 TO 31 MARCH 2020. Annual Report, THE SUBSTATION LTD, 2020.

Evlanova, Anastassia. Average Cost of Housing in Singapore 2023. 5 Jan. 2023, https://www.valuechampion.sg/average-cost-housing-singapore#:~:text=Average%20Cost%20of%20HDB%20Flats&text=The%20average%20cost%20of%20an,2%20and%203%2Droom%20flats.

Exploring the Next. Annual Report, National Gallery Singapore, 2022.

Fairprice Group. Rice. 2023, https://www.fairprice.com.sg/category/rice?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=%5BIH.000.01%2FFPon_GS_Sal_20191101%5D%20Category%20rice&utm_content=ricegeneric_RSA_+rice.

Forging Creative Connections with the Arts. Annual Report, National Arts Council, 2022.

Huang, Lijie. ‘Gallerist Caution Budding Artists to Price Works Realistically’. The Straits Times, 13 Nov. 2013.

Lim, Siew Kim. ‘Singapore Biennale’. Singapore Infopedia, https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_1363_2008-07-31.html#:~:text=The%20result%20of%2018%20months,in%2019%20venues%20around%20Singapore. Accessed 22 June 2023.

McAndrew, Clare. Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2023. Art Basel and UBS, 2023.

Singapore. Sotheby’s, 2023, https://www.sothebys.com/en/singapore#:~:text=In%20August%202022%2C%20Sotheby's%20held,in%20the%20city%20to%20date.

The Most Expensive Houses In Singapore - Homes Of The Mega Rich Billionaires. Youtube, Red Potato Singapore, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNgeV3Clzh4.

Tremayne-Pengelly, Alexandra. Singaporean Artist Georgette Chen Sets Three Auction Records in Less Than One Year. 1 June 2023, https://observer.com/2023/06/singaporean-artist-georgette-chen-sets-three-auction-records-in-less-than-one-year/.

Year In Review 21/22. Singapore Art Museum, 2022.

 

Without independent artists the major arts bodies will die

Um, here is an interesting read. This article looks at decreasing funds for the independent artist.  Any thoughts on this?

I archive here.

http://theconversation.com/without-independent-artists-the-major-arts-bodies-will-die-26924

Without independent artists the major arts bodies will die
May 28, 2014 3.01pm AEST

The morning after budget night on May 13, independent artists woke to a familiar alarm. It was Groundhog Day for “the heavy-lifters”, the independent artists of Australia’s arts sector. Their miserable livelihood was once again targeted by high office in Canberra when they bore the brunt of the cuts to the arts budget.

On the other side of the ledger, the 28 organisations that comprise Australia’s Major Performing Arts Group (AMPAG) remain hermetically sealed by the largess of Arts Minister and Attorney-General George Brandis.

Brandis' classification of the major organisations as a protected species – in pre-election and latterly budget mode – has implicit within it the inverse proposition that independent artists are fair game. Budget 2014 was only the beginning.

The challenge for the arts sector is a compelling one. Independent Australian artists are the lowest paid members of the Australian workforce. Direct funding for individual artists in Australia has fallen by about a third since the 1990s. In real terms, they earn far less from their artistic practice than they did 20 years ago.


Attorney General George Brandis speaks to the media during a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra. AAP Image/Stefan Postles
Independent artists are barely visible at the elite levels of governance, their numbers are decreasing and their autonomy has been compromised and curtailed by policy that has institutionalised them within organisations, venues and programmes.

To satisfy majority funding criteria, artists must have one of the above as a partner, presenter or producer just to get a show up. Operating with any genuine independence is a thing of the past.

The issue, of course, is not one of the current government but one of governments, in general, and the arts sector’s capacity to respond and take care of itself and artists in the face of regressive government action.

The arts sector needs to accept responsibility for the inequity on which its success is achieved and not blame it on government action. Depending on how the figures are interpreted, AMPAG members take between 65% and 80% of the Australia Council’s budget. As of last week, their slice of the pie got a whole lot bigger.

Led by AMPAG, the arts sector has fashioned for itself the identity of “an industry”. But what industry operates on the corollary of the majority of its primary workers living on or below the poverty line?

For artists, the arts industry is a mirage. Its values are steeped in the market: competition over cooperation, profit over equity. While they may serve the ambitions of the major players in the Australian performing arts, they do nothing but disenfranchise artists. Through this prism, Brandis’ patronage of AMPAG is the act of a minister taking care of those he views as fellow travellers and disregarding those he doesn’t.

In the wake of this budget, AMPAG needs to do the heavy lifting that artists have always done. And I don’t mean just cut a bit of fat internally. I mean show responsible sector leadership.

For artists to have any faith that those better off than them have their best interests at heart, the major organisations need to push back against the Ministers' assumptions by initiating a cut on their own subsidies to ameliorate those applied directly to the independent arts sector.

Many will argue that this is an over-simplification of a complex problem. None of those will be artists whose median earnings from their artistic practice are just A$7,000 a year. Most will come from arts managers who earn almost ten times that on average.

The collateral damage in the arts sector will be significant if the major arts organisations don’t push back. The professional field knows that the independent and small-to-medium sector is a separate ecology fulfilling a separate mission to those of the major organisations.

The depth of conservatism in the majors is historically counterpointed by the independent sector which consistently delivers on its mission of innovation, experiment, cultural diversity and risk-taking.

Few of the dynamics of the small-to-medium arts organisations and independents have correlatives in the mainstream; few companies in the majors and the small-to-medium/independent sector share the same artistic values, organisational design or professional aspirations.

The solution is not for the mainstream to bring independent artists into their fold as has been suggested but to support and nurture their independence outside of it.

By advocating for and facilitating a larger pool of discrete money for independent artists and their activities, AMPAG will ensure continuity of the arts sector’s greatest strengths: diversity and innovation. If it fails to act collectively, these will be compromised.

Put simply, the independent sector is the oxygen of the mainstream. Cut off the supply and the major performing arts organisations will suffocate. If they don’t step up, they’ll die. It’s up to them.