The Aboriginal art trade has been corrupted by forgers and con men while indigenous artists are treated with contempt. Nicolas Rothwell reports on a cultural travesty
04mar06
IT is at once the finest artistic movement in today's Australian culture and the nation's most unstable, most speculative investment market. It was born in a triumphant renaissance that brought Aboriginal traditions alive in the wider world, but a fast-growing cancer of exploitation is gnawing at its heart.
The rotten, morally decayed state of the indigenous art trade is the best known of secret scandals among market insiders, but its scale and depth are completely hidden from the outside world.
It has become a gold-rush scene where money chases the dream of profit, where forgers, con men and thieves with plausible eyes greet you at the entrances to smart shopfronts, while Aboriginal artists sit cross-legged in backyard sheds, daubing hack works for paltry sums.
Government regulators and ministers stand by, art groups wring their hands and the dance goes on, with greed and denial locked in tango-step.
Today, after lengthy investigations, Inquirer can lay bare some of the unconscionable practices that are commonplace in the lower depths of the Central Desert art business. So grave is the crisis of authenticity and legitimacy spreading through the field as a result of these practices that the demand-fed rise of values in the Aboriginal art market seems unsustainable.
Portfolios worth millions of dollars have been invested in the outpouring of desert artworks, but many of the new paintings, ostensibly by known artists, are of uncertain provenance and would struggle to hold their value at resale.
Some distinguished collectors, sickened by the corruption at the heart of the trade, have abandoned their great obsession. The crescendo in this sad drama looms: the Central Land Council has invited the Australian Taxation Office to investigate the Alice Springs art trade and Centrelink teams are carrying out their own probes into the finances of artists on their books. Fraud squads across the country have begun monitoring suspect sales and in late 2004 they even broke up an exhibition of forged works at a prominent Melbourne gallery. But the key players in the market are still in place: the impoverished traditional artists in their ghetto-like communities, the rough drifters making quick cash deals, the mainstream as well as Aboriginal middlemen, the Alice Springs entrepreneurs with smooth sales pitches, the elegant assistants in bijou capital city galleries; all of them are links in the chain, playing their vital part in the systematic debauch of a high art. The problems run deep. First, there is the simple question of authenticity; second, the disturbing conditions in which much of the art, whether genuine or not, is produced. The market is dangerously tainted and this taint is at least threefold.
Besides the outright fakes, painted at their leisure by common crooks from outside the desert Aboriginal world, there are problematic paintings circulating. These are often painted by family members of famous artists. Then there are the part-forged paintings, made for quick cash by name artists who scrawl a few marks before associates complete the work. And there are autograph canvases of varying quality, created by distinguished artists, but painted without care and often under a degree of duress.
Distinguishing these respective categories from true works by engaged artists requires the eye of a detective. This ambiguous realm is the home of the carpetbagger: the margin trader of the Aboriginal art world, who parasitises established artists and profits from their reputations even as they fall. It is a realm that has grown at explosive speed in recent months: to many insiders the situation appears out of control.
But scarcely anyone involved in the Aboriginal art market will speak on the record; and with authorship of a canvas so hard to prove or disprove, libel laws protect the fraudsters and the truth-benders. This means there are sharp limits to what we can tell you in this article.
Some collectors, of course, are reluctant to confront any problematic items in their holdings. Prominent commercial dealers are under pressure to keep quiet; there are determined Aboriginal art forging syndicates active in the market and they use threats of violence to procure silence. Most of the celebrated artists who paint for the carpetbaggers are too ashamed of their own behaviour to admit their part openly. Many have spoken privately to Inquirer and provided anecdotal information that reveals an entire subculture of exploitation, blandishment and coercion.
Meanwhile, critics and art lovers remain silent about this state of affairs for fear of seeming anti-Aboriginal or talking down the market they love and seek to support. That market is increasingly a complex zone, a spectrum of transactions and interracial contacts, a frontier full of subtle shades of grey.
The best way of picturing the Aboriginal art trade is as a set of superimposed circles. Only when the structure of the industry is unpicked can we start to think about how to police it or the actions that may be necessary to salvage its reputation.
Indigenous art sales are worth about $300 million a year, though much of this comes from knick-knacks sold to the tourist trade and from churning resale of old, high-value pieces. Perhaps two-thirds of that total is generated in Central Australia and its capital, the metropolis of the local art trade, Alice Springs.
The desert tradition first bloomed there three decades ago in an Aboriginal-owned painting company, Papunya Tula, which still sets the blue-chip standard for the market. This establishment stands at the centre of the interlocking circles. Not only is a PT catalogue number on a painting a guarantee of authenticity (and so desirable it is now often imitated); it also suggests a work of some quality, as the company has a high reputation to protect.
PT represents about 90 artists and has 49 shareholders. Its new galleries in Todd Mall, Alice Springs, are the Vatican of the desert: the stars of the movement are formed in its ranks. Walk into PT and you are in the world of the connoisseur; austere canvases hang on white walls.
There is an inner sanctum, seen by few; there the gallery's manager Paul Sweeney presides over the museum-grade masterpieces collected by his fieldworkers in Kintore or Kiwirrkura, homelands of the Pintupi people. As he ponders the growing flood of fakes and the carpetbagged works being made by PT's best-known artists, he hangs his head in near-despair. These days, PT is far from the only "pure" source of indigenous art.
The next circle is made up of the community-based art centres. Scattered through the desert in Aboriginal settlements are more than 30 indigenous-controlled art workshops, which receive government funding and return all their earnings to their home communities. Some, such as Warlukurlangu Artists at Yuendumu, are high profit; others, such as those in the far western desert, are new and just finding their feet.
They tend to be chaotic places, full of ideals and inefficiencies; you will find a harassed-looking art co-ordinator trying to pack up new canvases, distribute payments, field phone calls, cope with grumbling old artists and fend off ravenous camp dogs. A few years ago, 80per cent of the desert's indigenous paintings came from these art studios. Things were straightforward then; the community art centres were the wholesale outlets and the few capital city galleries that handled Aboriginal art were the retail establishments.
John Oster, head of Desart, the art centres' umbrella group, outlines the stark shift that has taken place in the market: "Art generated and put into the market by private dealers of whatever flavour now equals the amount of art coming from community-based art centres. It's a many-layered beast we're dealing with. Some art goes out through very respectable dealers; there are some commercial dealers that have supported the industry and who even created it, in some sense.
"And then there are very dubious works being made in back yards, being sold on and finding their way to sophisticated galleries, and then being bought by people keen to acquire good art."
And in just this way the grey market has formed and grown. It began simply, in the interstices of the original art centre system. It's easy to see how it works: if you're a known desert artist, you have to provide for your extended family; it is your cultural obligation to spread your money around.
However, your art centre sometimes takes months to pay you while it waits to sell a painting or get the sale price back from some city show; and even then the art centre takes a healthy cut. Artists don't sign exclusive deals with their local community art centres; they are quite free to paint elsewhere. So there's a logical solution: the artist goes to town, paints a few works quickly for a "private dealer" and gets paid in cash or grog or - the preferred currency - a second-hand four-wheel-drive.
Desert artists aren't naive; even if they speak little English and find it hard to make their way in the white world, they know they are being ripped off in such deals. So, as a general rule, they don't bother to paint their best works for the back-yarders. Consequently, they undermine their own brand in the marketplace for short-term gain.
Things have snowballed in the past two years. The private market has spread out and developed its strange grace notes. Some backyard dealers offer their artists prostitutes, Viagra, pornographic DVDs, even Valium. Good, quick business, of course, for the artists and their conduits.
Thousands of new paintings have appeared, keenly priced, of vastly varying quality and degrees of authenticity, sold through multiple channels without serious provenance. A parallel desert art universe has come into being, shining mockingly in the reflected light of the established trade. And who pauses to consider that the artists in the grip of carpetbaggers may be kept stabled in unprepossessing environments when in town, and may be dominated or exploited until a sweat of sadness exudes from their work?
Step back to the next circle of the trade: the galleries. These come in distinct categories.
A handful of high-grade city galleries specialise in Aboriginal art sourced exclusively from community-based art centres. They tend to show limited amounts of work and run extensive exhibition programs. Others, less purist, will source art from communities and from private dealers. Others still have some paintings that are, to the trained eye, rank forgeries carrying the signatures of prominent artists. But none of these galleries can be pinned down as doing anything definitely illegal. Hence the market is full of traps for the trusting and the unwary.
Let's walk into a typical carpetbagging gallery. It will be well-lit, all front, full of stock, and staffed by an oleaginous, over-friendly salesperson. You will at once be spun a line about the authenticity of the art. There will be much talk about the story accompanying the painting and, just in case you're worried, a set of photos will record the artist in question making the work. A certain gimcrack quality will be immediately evident, as will a propensity to bargain in order to achieve a sale, and to offer a certificate.
How to tell the difference between the good galleries, which sell high-value work that has been produced in decent fashion, and the less savoury outlets? It can be hard, especially because the primary efforts of the carpetbagging gallery are devoted to proving its own legitimacy.
In fact, the definition of carpetbagging is contentious: some private dealers have strong relationships with their artists, treat them well and receive good art in return.
The ambiguity is fuelled by the plethora of trade groups. The Commercial Galleries Association is for the high-end operators. Art Trade, set up by noted industry figure Adrian Newstead, groups together a rather broad church of member galleries. Its head, Ian Plunkett, who runs Japingka Gallery in Perth, believes as much as a quarter of all indigenous art being sold is dodgy: "Greed drives the market now," he says. "Any other business this size would be regulated."
Art Trade has an elaborate code of ethics that its members are required to uphold. But the only sanction that can be applied to a member gallery is expulsion and complaints can be made only by fellow members. Art Trade has an investigations panel composed of indigenous board members, but it has never gone as far as expelling anyone. Once a former member dropped out of the group before action could be taken.
Plunkett's gallery offers customers a money-back guarantee and he thinks this would be a good thing to make standard across the industry. He also believes there should be a set price range for particular artists to prevent rip-offs. But that would be hard to enforce.
"There's no doubt the reputation of the industry is at stake," Plunkett says. "Over the last two years, people have started coming in and asking to your face how much money the artist is being paid for their work. It's quite confronting. People have heard the stories; there's an awareness and scepticism beginning that I've never come across in any other field."
There are three more, outlying circles of the indigenous art galaxy. A secondary market of great power is formed by the big auction houses, which run distinct ethics codes of their own in their respective campaigns to avoid handling carpetbagged art.
Alongside the gallery system, as a vital support network, are some of the art magazines, glossy on the outside, anodyne within, stuffed full of large gallery advertisements for art of varying quality. Increasingly, complaints are being made to these magazines about their role as legitimisers of unsafe attributions.
Inquirer has seen samples of this correspondence; suffice to say that the editors of these magazines display, in their replies, a brave confidence in the honesty of the advertisers who keep them afloat.
And beyond this circle, the last: the outer depths of the internet, where paintings by desert masters are on sale for prices above $50,000, and the rhetoric and sales pitching take on a surreal intensity.
How does this elaborate market work for an individual artist? Let's take a prominent example, Makinti Napanangka, one of the most beautiful of the old women painters from Kintore. Makinti is about 75, frail, stick-thin, a princess of great reserve. She speaks barely any English and has a speech impediment.
Her best work is ardently collected and hangs in all prominent state galleries. It catches the deep desert's inner light and endless variation. It is easy to imitate but impossible to match. On good days, Makinti can be found cross-legged, painting away at the Kintore painting house of Papunya Tula arts. There are, however, other times when some in her eager extended family, in concert with private dealers, set her up with canvases and paint with her, or for her, or drive her the 500km into town to work there.
The canvases done under these circumstances may or may not be autograph. They look very different from her classic style. Makinti tells the fieldworkers at Papunya Tula that when she's at work for other outlets, she will sometimes paint the lines while her family members paint the circles.
The carpetbaggers pay cash to her family and after Makinti has raised a large enough sum for their purposes she may be allowed to go back home. The paintings then go on sale in Alice Springs or in city galleries.
They are offered widely. The images of Makinti holding up the art made in her name have an odd resemblance to images of Western hostages in Iraq pleading for their lives. It is not, one feels, the ideal existence for one of the nation's most treasured artists.
The key point, though, is that no one has done anything illegal, although an obvious deceit has been committed somewhere along the line. Makinti is fulfilling her cultural duties. Her family is trading an artefact that they have helped bring into being. A private dealer may be slipping them cash for the work, but that hardly makes him unique in the Central Australian environment. He can say he believes he has a Makinti to offer. And the gallery that takes the work and sells it on can claim to be proud it has developed a link with this great painter who also works for the august Papunya Tula. From back yard to drawing-room wall in a few easy steps.
Reform proposals fill the air. Art Trade, Desart and the Central Land Council all describe the status quo as unacceptable. There are suggestions for a strengthened certificate of authenticity and for an Aboriginal art dealing licence. The National Association of Visual Artists has arranged - guess what! - a lucrative consultancy to help draw up a code of conduct for the trade.
But the problem, of course, is not just technical or legal: it is moral. The dark side of the desert painting trade is a national disgrace and it is also destroying the broader Aboriginal art industry, the one viable source of income and the one productive economic activity for indigenous people across remote Australia.
This gold rush is already over and the integrity of the market has long since been compromised. The case for profound inquiry and a degree of official regulation is unassailable. Perhaps a correction can be achieved in time, but it will require prolonged reflection by gallery owners and, above all, by purchasers on their conduct and their motives.
There are two distant parallels to keep in mind as one looks at desert art of unclear provenance. One is the slave trade, for there is something unlovely about indigenous Australians being driven, for whatever motives, to subject themselves to labour exploitation.
And the other is the trade, during and after World War II, in masterworks of Western art expropriated from Jewish households. This art came to be seen, in time, as tainted to an unbearable degree. The work retained its beauty, but the way its new owners had acquired it was wrong.
And a bleaker prospect awaits as the shake-out in the indigenous art trade begins. For the past three decades, Aboriginal art has been the key channel bridging traditional and modern Australia, bringing together the cities and the remote world.
As prominent collector Colin Laverty says, with much sadness: "So far, art has been the key way that Australia at large has come to understand and learn about and have respect for Aboriginal people, and there's been tremendous respect for the achievements of the artists. So it's not just monetary value that's at risk here. If the art is seen as being without cultural authenticity, and it can't be sold, there could be a lessening of respect for Aboriginal people through that effect."
So this piece closes and comes down, inevitably, to the issue of personal responsibility. The cultural climate of a nation is built brick by single brick.
Art buyer, as you read this weekend newspaper, is your conscience clear?
