by Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Last Wednesday night an Australian Aboriginal female's painting fetched over $1,000,000 at auction for the first time. This enormous artwork by the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Earth’s Creation, is a masterful work but the price tag again brings into question what can be done for present day artists living in poverty while their art is sold and resold for very high figures. All people involved in marketing Aboriginal art are making good profits from the selling and reselling of these works except for the original creator.
To remedy this I propose that Aboriginal art simply be sold strictly under license. If the work changes ownership by way of gift to a person or public museum, gallery or foundation the value of the work is to be estimated and a residual paid by the institution every year to the artist or the artist’s heirs.
Licensing royalties is not a new thing it has applied to many creative endeavours for over 100 years. Literature, music, film, television, inventions, computer software &etc, all have economic systems in place that return money to their original creators.
A Contemporary Starting Point.
From a certain date every sale and resale of an original Indigenous Australian artwork, and/or a reproduction of the work, is made on condition that 10% of the gross figure paid for the art, or reproduction, will go directly to the artist; if the artist is deceased, to the artist’s heirs for 75 years.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, who didn’t take up painting seriously until she reached her eighties, lived in a community known as Utopia in central Australia. She fostered an art movement there and many artists, mostly women, are now making their own reputations internationally thanks to her. I visited Utopia when researching my latest book interestingly enough titled Utopia. I saw first hand the artists at work and heard stories of deals being done by unscrupulous ‘buyers’. http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/regions/utopia-2.php
No comments:
Post a Comment