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Aboriginal art auction record

By Joel Gibson

July 30 2003 - Foreign buyers have ensured that Sotheby's annual auction of Aboriginal art will be a record one.

Before the second session began at the Museum of Contemporary Art last night, the sale had already attracted bids worth $6.08 million, against last year's total sales of $5.2 million.

Emily Kngwarreye's Untitled (Spring Collaboration) 1991 was sold for $509,300 on Monday - a new mark for a work by the first "superstar" of contemporary Aboriginal painting.

A Sotheby's manager, Benedict Pownall, said: "We are delighted at this sale because it augurs well for the future of Australian indigenous art."

An estimated 50 per cent of the works had been sold to international bidders based mostly in Europe and America, he said.

But not all expectations for the 560 works on sale - 384 were offered last year - were met.

The signature item, Ngurrara Canvas I, spanning 4.7 metres by 7.7 metres and depicting the landscape around Fitzroy Crossing, was sold to a Perth businessman, Paul Naughton, for $213,000, well short of the pre-sale estimate of $500,000.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

Further reading and links:

• Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture
• Diversity and relevance - Dream Traces: A Celebration of Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art
  August 12, 2003 - ENIAR - If Dream Traces and it's accompanying symposium had any main point it was to say that Aboriginal art is not what you think it is; it's extremely diffuse, not divided into urban vs. traditional – and it's evolving.
  
• Aboriginal art — Selling out Aboriginal culture: yesterday, and today?
  15 July 2003 - ENIAR - Unfortunately, alongside the rapid development of an export market for Aboriginal Art and music in Europe, Europeans have not been able to develop a sensitivity to the cultural property rights and values of this culture. On the contrary, we find lately excrescences in Europe — in our whole observational field, but particularly in Germany — which would not have been able to survive in Australia for such a long period of time.
• Emily Kngwarreye and Barbara Weir
  June 20 2003 - The desert community of Utopia has become closely associated with some spectacular indigenous women artists. This former cattle station north-east of Alice Springs was placed squarely on the art map by the phenomenal success of the late Emily Kngwarreye, the traditional elder who in the 1980s became the first "superstar" of contemporary Aboriginal painting.
• The Aboriginal Arts 'fake' controversy: Traditional art holds the key to world understanding of Aboriginal culture
  July 29, 2000 - But a rising market brings pressures as well as blessings. When demand for a successful artist to produce more and more work meets a tradition in which art is a communal activity -- with elders like the late Emily Kngwarreye authorising others to assist with her paintings -- the outcome at times has been scandals over bogus works.
• Stolen Identities
  29 January 2000 - As Aboriginal people transferred their visions onto canvas, buyers swiftly began to recognise their value. Aboriginal painting is now recognised as one of the most important movements in modern art. It generates around 200 million Australian dollars a year: some canvases are worth as much as A$40,000 each. For a while it looked as if the sale of art would be a means by which the Aborigines could start to recover some of the self-respect of which they have been deprived, as well, of course, as some of the resources. As soon as their painting became valuable, however, white marauders began to steal even that.
  

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