Talking Through Your Arts – The Dealer is the Devil
The Dealer is the Devil is an anecdotal account of the prospering sales of Aboriginal Art that has emerged during the 20th and 21st centuries within the Australian and international art market.
The author, Adrian Newstead, has more than 30 years of experience working in Aboriginal and Australian contemporary art. He established Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery, Australia’s oldest continuing Aboriginal art gallery, in 1961.
Newstead’s book took seven years to write, it is part memoir, part history and part political commentary.
The book begins with his own personal experience of dispossession in the outback when his car was stolen and valuable artworks were taken. They were recovered from the bottom of the Kimberley River. Newstead is quick to defend his reasons for starting the book in this way, “I wanted people to understand the content of the paintings and the culture from which they come.”
From the outset Newstead intended the book to be specifically on the art market opposed to the Aboriginal art movement, but from sending draft runs to respected readers, the overwhelming response was to find a way to integrate the two areas.
Newstead argues that Aboriginal art has been the most transcendental chapter in the history of Australian art. He challenges readers to consider the last 200 years as being a significant period of reconciliation for Australia and its remote Indigenous communities who are desperate to paint their history for future generations.
These rectangle frames Newstead describes are long narrative cartoons that have been scattered on “the commercial winds of exchange to the far corners of the Earth”. While Newstead considers the most interesting recordings of history are those written from a personal view, he acknowledges that the little jigsaw cartoons that will be regathered for the world’s visual heritage archives will continue to shape these pictorial translations into words.
There is a pervading philosophy in Newstead’s standpoint that is encouraging the enterprise opportunities for independent Aboriginal artists over sales exclusivity facilitated through intermediary management, such as art centres. Despite the profiteering, he said of his experience in weighing-up a contemporary approach, he considers there has been far too much made of exploitation, “to try and consign Aboriginal people into a traditional straight-jacket is a form of Euro-centric tyranny!” (AS)
The Dealer is the Devil: An Insider’s History of Aboriginal Art Trade, cooeeart.com.au
BY ANGELA STRETCH
