Australia’s indigenous art market has taken a beating in the past 12 months, with sales going south and still weathering a readjustment to recently introduced government regulations and codes of conduct.
Australia’s indigenous art market has taken a beating in the past 12 months, with sales going south and still weathering a readjustment to recently introduced government regulations and codes of conduct.
The Australian Art Sales Digest reported $10 million of indigenous art was sold by auction in Australia last year, a drop from $26 million in 2007.
Gallery owners and auction houses have put some of this down to the Resale Royalties Legislation, which was introduced last June with the aim of enforcing ethical practices in an industry that has long been plagued by stories of dodgy contra deals and price scandals that fill the pockets of agents, not artists.
The legislation reportedly delivers 5 per cent of any artwork’s price over $1000 to the original artist.
Indigenart gallery owner Diane Mossenson said the RRL had been burdensome for gallery owners and called it onerous and difficult to comply with. “The inconvenience of the resale royalties is huge,” she said.
The six-step process of lodging a royalty sale includes registering the sale on the website of administrative body Copyright Agency Limited, contacting the artist who has to opt in or out of each royalty and sending the fees to CAL which then distributes them to the artist.
A majority of this process is completed online, a system with obvious impracticalities for remote communities that don’t have ready access to the internet.
Mr Mossenson said regional and remote indigenous art centres, which commonly acted as agencies for indigenous artists, were feeling the added pressure of RRL.
“The guys in the art centres are finding it extremely difficult to be compliant,” she said.
“There was a time when they were fairly bullish but they are all noticing a drop in sales and a decline in the market, so things have changed for them as well.”
GFL Fine Art director Ian Flanagan said he was not against the resale royalty in theory, but he too opposed the convoluted system that had been adopted.
He said in the same way there was a minimum price for a resale royalty, there should be a ceiling price as well, and royalties should not continue once the artist died. The system currently paid posthumous royalties for 70 years.
“The Aboriginal art market was suffering before that was introduced and it’s been in a lot of trouble since,” Mr Flanagan said.
Another art industry criticism has been that 10 per cent of the royalty payments go into the profit-based Copyright Agency’s pocket.
Not all those in the art industry are focused on the pinch of RRL.
Artist advocacy organisation Artsource’s executive director, Jude van der Merwe, said the 5 per cent cost did not have to be absorbed by the galleries and auction houses, and protecting artists’ rights could not possibly be a bad thing.
“The proposal that there should be resale rights ongoing for artists for additional sales of their work seems so fundamental to me that it is difficult to see where the argument is that has come from the auctions houses and galleries that deal in secondary sales,” Ms van der Merwe said.
“Given every other practitioner gets ongoing rights; writers, authors, screenplay writers, musicians, get ongoing benefit from their creativity, I don’t see how you could justify that visual artists wouldn’t.”
She said stories of artists being duped by someone who paid only a couple of thousand dollars for a piece, only for it to be sold 10 years later for hundreds of thousands are too common and there should be legislation in place to protect artists’ interests.
One of the major issues in the indigenous art market since the 1970s has been third-party squandering of artists’ revenues.
In an effort to overcome unethical practices of old, the government introduced a Commercial Code of Conduct earlier this year, a response to a senate report into securing the future of indigenous art.
The code aims to establish a set of industry standards, provide a benchmark for ethical behaviour and give consumers greater certainty that the artworks they buy come through ethical processes.
Ms van der Merwe said it was important to distinguish this was a ‘code’, not a ‘rule’, which established a good baseline.
