Vivien Johnson; 19/7/08, The Australian, No Internet Text; Vivien Johnson is professor of new media narrative and theory at the University of NSW, and curator of the exhibition Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert at the Australian Museum in Sydney.
Dollar Dreaming: Inside the Aboriginal Art World; Benjamin Genocchio; Hardie Grant
Much has changed in the Aboriginal art world since Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines pioneered the genre to which Ben Genocchio’s Dollar Dreaming is the latest addition. Chatwin’s best-selling chronicle of his travels in the Aboriginal art world was written in the more slow-moving mid-1980s. The boom in Aboriginal art sales had barely begun and the first few Aboriginal artists were just starting to throw off the shackles of collective ethnographic identities and emerge as contemporary artists in their own right.
No Internet Text, The Australian
For Chatwin, the romance of insight into an ancient culture was the key to Aboriginal art’s fascination and Central Australia and its cast of eccentrics its world. As Genocchio’s title unsubtly suggests, Aboriginal art now, and its fascination for him, is at least as much about how much Aboriginal art has come to be worth.
Genocchio is a former art critic on The Australian and now writes for The New York Times. In Dollar Dreaming he sets out to discover what lies beneath the glittering surface of contemporary Aboriginal art: from the scams and scandals that tarnished its reputation in the late ’90s to the more subtle “inside” (that is, secret or sacred) meanings of tradition-based Aboriginal art.
Disappointingly, he fails to join the dots on the — money story and leaves us hanging on the revelations of inner significance that, when they finally come, turn out to be for his ears alone.
Notwithstanding the intrepid explorer pose of his author’s bio pic — complete with dust-caked LandCruiser on a bright red patch of dirt against a sky the blue of eternity — it is not an unmarked wilderness that Genocchio seeks to map, but a well-trodden path that many have gone down in the 20 years since Songlines. Almost everything of a substantive nature has been said before by others, although to the North American reader-ship for which this book is primarily intended, this may grate less than Genocchio’s coyness.
Unlike the 19th-century explorers who ignored the contribution of nameless “native guides” to their discoveries, Genocchio makes no secret of his sources. In fact, the book reads like a series of weekend magazine-style feature interviews placed back to back. A smart graphic of bird tracks separating each interview segment barely substitutes for a narrative structure that would link them into a compelling tale.
And there is a compelling narrative in the various events Genocchio and his interviewees describe. His two main preoccupations — the scandals and the auction house boom that delivered the stellar prices in Aboriginal art — are not unrelated phenomena but are inextricably entangled.
The power that Sotheby’s and the other auction houses came to exercise over the Aboriginal art market was able to develop so quickly, so unexpectedly and so dramatically precisely because of the disarray of the private dealers and the primary market brought about the so-called black art scandals.
The scandals significantly undermined collectors’ confidence in the private dealers’ boast of dealing directly with the artists and drove them into the arms of the auction houses. The more
uncertain the scandals made conditions appear in the primary market, the more buyers looked to the Sotheby’s name for reassurance and secure provenance. As wary buyers sought out trustworthy sources of paintings in the primary market, the art centres experienced a resurgence, but the focus on individual artists produced by media and auction house promotion of their record-breaking prices had permanently shifted the buyers’ focus from community based art collectives to individual art stars.
Where once there was only a handful of them, now there is a glittering firmament: buyers’ eagerness to add examples of these anointed to their collections provides the private dealers with a new foothold in the marketplace by specialising in these big-name artists.
They can simply pick off the top artists as they rise to prominence through the art centres’ nurturing and offer them individual deals that the communally resourced centres can’t provide, thereby depriving the centres of significant revenue. Short-sighted government funding bodies, observing only the ever-expanding Aboriginal art market, see no reason not to demand that poorly resourced art centres operate as profitably as their private competitors, unencumbered though they are by the community imperatives and development of new artists that keep the industry afloat.
Perhaps Genocchio was wise to stop his exploration short of these uncomfortable truths. For those new to the subject, this is an accessible and broadly accurate introduction to the world of Aboriginal art — no mean feat given the convoluted strands of the story simplified to achieve this end. Genocchio’s account ranges so widely over the immense and byzantine canvas of Aboriginal art in the early 21st century that you can hardly blame him for sometimes losing his way. Maybe it is better to separate the dots, at least in the beginning. It makes for a clearer, prettier picture.
Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Culture, Painting