What the critics say

TWO curators from Munich's cutting-edge contemporary art gallery the Kunstverein arrive this week for a 10-day scout around the New Zealand art scene. Maria Lind and Soren Grammel are here courtesy of Artspace and Creative NZ's joint initiative, the International Visitors Programme, which each year brings in key artists, curators and critics as part of a push to get our edgier artists noticed overseas.


Lind and Grammel will visit Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland. Grammel will give a public lecture at Auckland Art Gallery auditorium on Thursday at 1pm, with Lind speaking at the same venue the following Monday at the same time. With collective experience at the Kunstverein, Stockholm's Moderna Museet and the Whitney Independent Study Programme in New York, they should offer invaluable insights to anyone interested in - and/or puzzled by - contemporary art.


Saatchi cries foul:


Speaking of which, time for another Turner Prize story: British advertising tycoon and bigtime contemporary art collector Charles Saatchi has attacked this year's finalists as "pseudo-controversial claptrap", claiming that a series of sculptures for which he paid £1 million in October should have been included in the shortlist instead. The Independent reports that Saatchi, voted the most influential figure in the art world in the December issue of Art Review magazine, said works such as finalist Liam Gillick's Coats of Asbestos Spangled with Mica (pictured below) showed the judges of the £20,000 prize were out of touch, while his recently purchased work by Jake and Dinos Chapman was superior: 24 child-sized mannequins sporting genitalia on their faces and holding McDonald's burgers. "That is what great art is," he told the Sunday Telegraph. The Turner Prize winner will be announced next Sunday.


Award winners:


The four winners of the annual Alex Lindsay Memorial Award have been announced: Jane Kircher (bassoon, $3000), a Victoria University graduate who is studying for a music masters degree at the Manhattan School of Music in New York; Mok-hyun Gibson-Lane (cello, $3000), another Vic graduate who is studying at Rice University in Texas; Simeon Broom (violin, $1000), an Auckland University graduate who will study at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Dusseldorf next year: and Bede Williams (trumpet, $500), a 17-year-old who will study at Vic next year. The awards, founded in memory of former NZSO concertmaster Alex Lindsay, have helped more than 70 talented young musicians since 1975.


- Linda Herrick


Four Sculptures for all Seasons, Terry Stringer, FhE Galleries:


Terry Stringer's sculptural invention continues to flourish. He turns a weighty still-life into a lively face by a deft turn in space and makes from the twist something that is more than a game but suggests the deep unity of all things. And a whisk round the corner to the FhE G2 Gallery is well worth it to see the splendour of the kete and neck ornaments decorated with feathers by Alicia Courtney which hover somewhere between art and craft; until Christmas.


- T. J. McNamara


Orfeo ed Euridice, by C. W. Gluck:


Following from last year's acclaimed production of La Clemenza di Tito, director Raymond Hawthorne and Auckland Chamber Orchestra musical director Peter Scholes present Gluck's interpretation of the Greek love-is-eternal myth; with Zan McKendree-Wright as Orfeo, Katherine Wiles as Euridice and Sarah-Jane Rennie as Amor; and four mime actors as dramatic support. Auckland Town Hall concert chamber, December 9; book through Ticketek.

- Linda Herrick


Peeling Back the Paint, Artspace:


Picked best comedy in this year's Wellington Fringe Festival; writer/performer Jo Randerson, along with Jackie van Beek and Jeremy Randerson, satirise the world of art through a mock debate described as "Jerry Springer meets The Big Art Trip"; December 5-7, 11-14 at 6.30pm.


- Linda Herrick