
The provenance of an art object has a significant impact on its value, and even its saleability. It necessarily encompasses two aspects: the authenticity of authorship; and the proof of ownership through an object’s history. Provenance may also include a history of exhibitions and auctions (including those where the object was ‘bought in’, i.e., didn’t sell).
Within Australian Indigenous[i] art, determining authorship and ownership comes with cultural and market implications that may not be evident to the non-expert or international collector. As Indigenous art gains in international importance, collectors need to understand the particularities of this market if they are to make acquisitions that will meet museum and investment standards. There are many rewards to be gained from collecting Indigenous art, but it is also an area where ethics and the path to market play significant roles in the validity and value of the provenance.
In Australia “the Indigenous art market” is as a convenient shorthand for a complex market where not all roads to market are equal. It is also a term that broadly encompasses First Nations artists working in city, regional and remote areas. This paper concerns itself primarily with those artists normally from remote or regional areas who may or may not temporarily or permanently live in larger regional or city areas like Alice Springs, Fitzroy Crossing, Darwin or Adelaide where they are better able to access health and education services, as well as employment.
This section of the market has a hierarchy of three distinct market segments that provide sales and marketing services to artists. Each segment influences how likely a work is to be of reliable provenance and provable authenticity. These are: Indigenous community-owned and operated art centres; established privately owned dealer-community partnerships; and private dealers. The following descriptions do not relate to First Nations artists who work exclusively as independent artists and manage their own careers.
Segment 1: Indigenous owned and operated art centres
For contemporary art from remote areas, the museum sector and serious collectors value the community owned and operated art centres most highly. For the past 20-odd years acquisitions of art from remote areas have been sourced almost exclusively from this segment. Art centres operate like artists’ collectives and are governed by a board of local Indigenous elders, whose role it is to ensure that each member artist observes cultural protocol. Each artwork is documented, catalogued with a unique number and issued with its own Certificate of Authenticity on art centre stationery. Any artworks that are collaborative pieces credit the artists involved; they do not try to pass them off as the sole work of the most well-known artist. Typically, no work can be sold without the approval of the board. The cultural integrity and authorship of works is therefore guaranteed by the art centre. Further, these centres receive federal and state government funding, and their accounts are externally audited. Pricing is set by the individual art centre, with the exhibition quality works being consigned to city-based galleries; the majority of the sale price is returned to the artist and art centre, which in turn helps to financially support these remote communities.
Segment 2: Legitimate private dealer–community arrangements
In the middle are direct private dealer arrangements with communities, although they are far fewer in number than the community-owned model. Some such arrangements have been built over decades while others are newer. These art studios are run and maintained as private businesses owned by a non-Indigenous person or persons but with creative and cultural input determined by the Indigenous community. The best examples of these businesses remunerate and treat the artists fairly and transparently, and they observe cultural protocols even when these can have a material impact on business operations, for example during extended periods of mourning when the studio closes. The best businesses are respected and accepted by the industry, including museums. Others operate on the fringes of transparency, making it difficult to ascertain the credibility of their claims. Preliminary research prior to making a purchase is prudent.
Segment 3: Private dealers
At the opposite end of the spectrum are the private “dealers” who have loose arrangements with individual artists, either through their business’s studio or shed, or by giving artists materials to work at home. It is important to note here that many artists painting for private dealers are independent of any art centre. At face value, these dealers provide a much-needed income for these artists and their families, however some dealers are unscrupulous. More on that below.
While some of these private dealers may be well-intentioned and genuinely interested in Indigenous people and their culture, others can be naïve or wilfully ignorant about the market and cultural protocols they operate in. Very often artists paint for “quick money”, which leads to inconsistent or poor quality.
Although some art may be considered attractive by entry level buyers, they are rarely accepted as valuable by collectors. Such paintings are often pitched into the tourist or home decorator markets. The paintings may be sold through the dealers’ own galleries or wholesaled to galleries elsewhere – usually at significantly higher prices than the artist was paid – or cleared through small private auctioneers or minor public auction houses.
At the bottom of the barrel are dealers who are exploitative, abusive, and/or fraudulent. They are usually referred to as “carpetbaggers”. The worst elements of this segment prey on the financial vulnerability of Indigenous people, and the dealers’ success relies on the naivety of the uninformed buyer to make money. While they will profess a love of the art and culture, their motivation is solely profit; artist wellbeing, cultural preservation, curatorship, scholarship, or community support are rarely considerations.
Carpetbaggers have been known to strategically target high profile art centre artists so they can cash in on a valuable name, although it is very common for artworks to be completed by younger family members who are paying off a debt to the dealer. It is important to note here that a work created for a private dealer by a high-profile artist from an Indigenous art centre, does not have anywhere near the same value as a work created at his/her art centre. The resale value of these “private dealer” works are typically very low.
International backpackers and other non-Indigenous people have also been known to be employed to paint works copied from books. A high-profile case involving accusations of fraud and misattribution was exposed at the beginning of 2015 in a series of articles in The Australian newspaper[ii].
I’ll end this section with a word about dealer-issued certificates of authenticity accompanied by photos and/or videos of the supposed artist completing the work. Leaving aside the question of how ethically an artist was treated during production of the work, these types of certificates are generally treated with caution by valuers and collectors because it can be very difficult to prove true authorship in this kind of environment. A photograph or video only shows that the attributed artist was with the work at the time the photo/video was taken. What happens outside the frame is anyone’s guess and relies heavily on the word and reputation of the seller. I have personally inspected several private dealer works attributed to single high profile art centre artists, and while a small part of a canvas was most likely by the attributed senior artist, I could see the hand of their children and/or grandchildren in the majority of the work. Certificates were structured and worded to sound like the art centre certificates, and in some cases, there was outright plagiarism of stories and biographical information.
Buyers are therefore advised to conduct thorough due diligence if purchasing works by artists normally affiliated with community-owned art centres. Do not assume that the gallery, auction house or seller has done this for you: caveat emptor. Buyer beware.
Other factors affecting provenance
There are also temporal considerations when establishing provenance, as the date of creation may affect the trustworthiness of the stated authorship. The founding and gradual rise of the Aboriginal community-owned art centre Papunya Tula Artists in the early 1970s set the scene for the Indigenous art market that was to explode about 20 years later. The late 1980s to early 2000s saw a mushrooming of community-based art centres opening throughout the deserts and remote coastal regions, many of which are still in operation. Governments saw these centres as viable places for Indigenous employment and economic production. These centres quickly established themselves as reliable and trustworthy sources of high-quality art that was being produced to high ethical standards. The assurance of a community-based certificate of authenticity removed the risk of buying misattributed or fraudulent work. The museums and collectors began amassing collections like never before, the market attracted a considerable number of speculative investors, and prices began to rise rapidly. With the boom came the carpetbaggers and fraudsters.
For works created prior to the art centre movement, a complete provenance can be more difficult to establish, particularly as remote artists rarely sign work. For example, in the 1950s-1980s, several Christian missions in remote and coastal regions started selling art and artefacts as a means for making money for the mission and the local people. As it was seen as a commercial venture to fund the missions, today’s curatorial cataloguing standards did not apply; sales and object records were often not kept or have since been lost. Artists regularly moved between missions on their traditional lands and the application and spelling of their tribal or adopted European names can vary from mission to mission. Many of the missionaries, non-Indigenous workers and local Elders have since died, taking much of their operational knowledge and memories with them. This period pre-dates computer databases and digital photography, making archival research more difficult.
Generally, though, I believe the level of fraudulent activity prior to the early 1980s was very low, due to there being a limited and not very lucrative market for Indigenous art and therefore low incentives for unscrupulous actors. Some of these early works can be very valuable if good provenance can be established.
There is a final reason – as yet unidentified by the market – why I believe impeccable provenance should be at the top of any collector’s due diligence list: cultural restitution. I base this prediction on important historic precedents.
Already we are seeing artists distance themselves from works that are being produced for and marketed by private dealers[iii]. I suspect that much of the art created under duress, by non-family members, or purely for quick cash, will become contested objects. There may even be demands for financial compensation for artists who were exploited or kept in bonded labour. Some claims could be framed as theft if there is no evidence of the artist being paid.
Industry codes of ethics
There are several codes of ethics operating in Australia, all of which are voluntary. The most significant code is the Indigenous Art Code (IAC), which was introduced by the Australian Government in 2009 after a Senate Inquiry into the commercial Indigenous art industry. Its membership is very broad and includes galleries and dealers from around the world.
While the spirit of the IAC is honourable and its guidelines are very comprehensive, the weak point of the Code is that the Board has no real power to discipline members in breach of the Code, apart from expelling them from the Code. The Code does refer suspected criminal conduct to the appropriate authorities, however it has proven difficult to successfully prosecute offenders due to the often-fraught relationship between Indigenous people and Australia’s justice system.
It is therefore prudent for buyers to carefully check the validity of any purported provenance documents before they buy, regardless of a seller’s industry code of conduct memberships. Where a legitimate art centre-issued certificate exists, a gallery-issued certificate of authenticity should not be accepted in its place.
Final thoughts
The late Australian art critic Robert Hughes said that Australian Indigenous art was the greatest art movement of the late 20th century. Many would extend his assertion to the present day. No other art movement offers us a direct connection to the beginnings of living human memory. It’s a movement informed by over 50,000 years of continuous culture; the stories at the centre of genuine works are complex, profound and mysterious. The best of these artworks have the power to move and transform us. I have seen normally composed and intellectual types become misty-eyed or stunned into wide-eyed awe in the presence of art by powerful Elders.
I’ve heard several Indigenous artists say that paintings done for quick money or under duress, are “empty”. They tell the dealer what s/he wants to hear but the artists have deliberately excluded any part of themselves or their traditional stories, thereby rendering the works purely decorative. This withholding of cultural authenticity is then a deliberate act of defiance to protect culture and negate value; it gives them some sense of power and control in inequitable situations. In the artists’ view, a painting without culture is worthless.
If you are new to buying Indigenous art, take some time to research the primary and secondary markets, check the affiliations of galleries and dealers, do not take membership of an industry association on face value (some dealers use this for marketing leverage), and look carefully at what works are being acquired by Australian art museums and from which sources. Impeccable provenance is always king.
FOOTNOTES
[i] I use the term “Indigenous” here to include all people who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. “Aboriginal” is commonly used for people whose traditional country or countries is mainland Australia, including Tasmania, and the surrounding islands. “Torres Strait Islander” refers specifically to those from the Torres Strait Islands; they see themselves as culturally distinct from people from the mainland. More recently, “First Nations people” is increasingly used for anyone who identifies as having traditional ancestral ties to Australia.
[ii] Ackerman, A. “Millions made from selling fake Indigenous works”, The Australian, 26 January 2015. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/visual-arts/millions-made-from-selling-fake-Indigenous-works/story-fn9d3avm-1227196444091
[iii] Ackerman, A. “APY artists see red as pop up auction peddles fake works” The Weekend Australian, 3 January 2015. http://m.theaustralian.com.au/arts/apy-artists-see-red-as-pop-up-auctions-peddle-fake-works/story-e6frg8n6-1227173160199