Lindy Lee is a respectable Australian artist whose development I discussed sympathetically in my review of her survey at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art last year.
But $14m is too much to pay for her work, or anyone else’s, especially when considered against other priorities and the limited funds available.
This is huge sum of money that could have made a significant difference to the collection at the National Gallery of Australia.
To take an example at random, a fine landscape by Camille Corot sold at auction a few weeks ago for €120,000, about $194,000. This picture would have been a valuable addition to the gallery’s holdings of 19th-century painting; and the director Nick Mitzevich could have bought 72 works like this for the $14m he is now spending in such a cavalier manner.
The NGA could also have sought to repair gaps in the now sadly depleted Indian collection, or added to its Asian holdings in general.
Parts of the art market are grotesquely overpriced, but there are bargains in other areas, particularly in works on paper. Instead of allocating funds in a prudent and responsible manner, however, the gallery boasts of paying more than it has ever paid, like those billionaires who are delighted to pay record prices at auction because they think it buys them prestige. And just for good measure, this purchase somehow also proves the NGA is an “equitable, inclusive and sustainable institution”.
The pieces that were most impressive in Lee’s exhibition last year would have cost a fraction of the sum now being proposed.
So why exactly does this one have to be so big and so expensive? Because it is conceived as a so-called immersive work, which in this case means visitors can walk inside it.
Immersive works have become popular in recent years because they offer a passive experience to audiences who are unwilling or unable to engage more actively with works of art.
This purchase is another example of the poor quality of leadership in our most important art galleries, where fashion, money, virtue-signalling and populism all seem to take precedence over the core priorities of developing, caring for and displaying a great art collection.
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