THE ANATOMY OF AN ART AUCTION
We’ve heard a lot about how Covid has driven up house prices in New Zealand, but there’s another sector where auctions are booming: the art market. It’s an increasingly competitive business, partly due to the pandemic freeing up a lot of dollars that would normally be spent on high-end international travel. Here we follow the progress of one significant painting, Te Henga by Don Binney, from consignment to sale, taking a peek inside the intriguing subculture of those who buy and sell art.
THE OWNER
Bridget Orr grew up in a house surrounded by art. Her father, Gordon Orr, was secretary of justice, dean of the Law School Victoria University of Wellington and a Waitangi Tribunal member. Her mother, Elizabeth Orr, was Victoria University’s first woman chancellor. They died in March 2015 and April 2021 respectively.
The Orrs’ generation helped establish the value of New Zealand artists such as Rita Angus and Toss Woollaston, and later Robin White and Pat Hanly, in the cultural landscape. Their support, in the form of purchases for their collections, not only helped the artists financially but also helped them to take art seriously as a career. “A lot of postwar, idealistic public servants didn’t have enormous incomes but were committed to local culture,” says Bridget, who is now an English professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. “My parents in their own small way were part of that.” As curator and Orr family friend Philip Clarke writes, the Orrs’ “art collection … like their professional lives, was an opportunity to imagine new possibilities for Aotearoa New Zealand and being New Zealanders”.
Bridget recalls that the family started acquiring significant paintings when she was around 11 or 12 — a time when her father was more senior in his job and could afford to collect art more seriously. The paintings became a focus of family conversations when
