The Māori portraits, Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure and Chief Ngatai-Raure, were painted by the Czech-New Zealand artist in 1884. The art works were stolen from the International Art Centre gallery and auction house in a “smash-and-grab” incident in April 2017, only a few days before they were to be sold.

The thieves reversed a stolen van into the front window of the gallery and auction house before loading the two paintings into a white Holden Commodore SSV sedan.

The paintings were two examples of Lindauer’s prolific portrait work featuring Māori subjects, ranging from leaders to ordinary people. In March, an auction for a portrait of Harawira Te Mahikai, chief of the Ngāti Kahungunu Tribe, sold for nearly $615,000 US including fees ($1,009,008 NZD).

Last December, New Zealand police announced that Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure and Chief Ngatai-Raure had been returned with only minor damage. According to the Herald, police were “deliberately vague” in providing details on what happened to the portraits, referring only to “an intermediary who sought to return the paintings on behalf of others” to the artworks’ owners.

“To me this is a good news story,” Detective Inspector Scott Beard said at a press conference in December. “You get involved in investigations, you want to resolve them, you want to solve them. The cultural significance and value of these paintings, we never gave up hope. And now we’ve had them returned.”

“We’re still looking for people to come with information that can assist us solving who did the burglary and who stole these [paintings].”

On June 7, the Herald reported the return of the two stolen Lindauer portraits was made through an agreement with two senior criminal figures, but “wide-ranging suppression orders” made by the country’s Court of Appeal will permanently suppress their identities. “Strict non-publication orders” also prevent the reporting and public disclosure of how the Lindauer paintings were safely returned to police.

“The gang members are currently serving long periods of imprisonment but their criminal offending cannot be reported without breaching the suppression orders,” reported the Herald‘s investigative journalist Jared Savage. “There is no suggestion either of the two gang members was involved in the theft of the paintings, rather that they were able to use their standing in the criminal world to obtain access to something the police wanted.”

When Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure and Chief Ngatai-Raure were returned to police, there was fingerprint and DNA testing done. However, no charges have been laid.

“This is about fairness. It underlines our Government’s commitment to honoring the tremendous artistic skill and creativity of so many of our visual artists,” Carmel Sepuloni, New Zealand’s Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, said in a statement.

The Artist Resale Royalty Scheme guarantees artists a flat 5 percent royalty fee when their works are sold in the secondary market in the 80 other nations where such resale rights exist, among them France and the United Kingdom. The scheme is to be implemented as a part of New Zealand’s new trade agreement with Europe and the U.K.

“The establishment of this Scheme is a really important step to support emerging and established visual artists in Aotearoa, ensuring that they can continue to see benefits for creating amazing art and enabling the creative sector to thrive,” Sepuloni said.

New Zealand’s art market expanded significantly in 2021, prompting debate about the secondary art market and the formation of activist group Equity for Artists. The group, which was founded by artists Judy Darragh, Dane Mitchell and Reuben Paterson, has the express purpose of pushing for resale rights.

Critics of royalties rights claim that arts professionals are being forced to bear an unnecessary burden that could negatively impact the market. Sepuloni mentioned in the release, however, that the government did its due diligence to reach out to the New Zealand art sector. Government officials had spoken with “Māori and Pacific artists, art experts, art market professionals, public galleries and museums, and key sector organizations” before initiating the scheme, Sepuloni said.

New Zealand isn’t the only commonwealth country making a push for resale rights. Canadian government officials have also been pursuing amendments to their Copyright Act that would allow for resale rights for visual artists.

“Resale rights for artists are an important step towards improving economic conditions for artists in Canada and a tangible way of ensuring that visual artists are better compensated for their work,” a government representative wrote to ARTnews in an email.

During a July 13 meeting of Culture and Heritage ministers, the amendment was discussed. “In the coming months, the Government will find opportunities to further engage with key stakeholders and partners to identify the best options for allowing resale rights for artists,” the representative said.

The United States has no such royalty scheme for visual artists, although some have been campaigning for such rights since the ’60s, when artists began observing huge markups in their work on the secondary market, according to the Center for Art Law. In 1978, the Visual Artists’ Residual Rights Act was introduced to Congress but failed to pass. The American Royalties Too (ART) Act was floated in Congress in 2018; that piece of legislation met a similar fate.

New Zealand-born, Berlin-based artist Simon Denny’s exhibition “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” on view through Sept. 7 at MoMA PS1, combines several years’ worth of projects, rethinking the retrospective form as a dense, content-packed trade show. Denny collaborated with online platform Genius.com to host a live annotation during the opening. The artist Skyped with A.i.A. from Venice, where he is representing New Zealand in the upcoming Biennale, for a conversation about Genius, embracing corporate aesthetics, and why he doesn’t have a favorite color.

KEVIN CHAMPOUX  I’m curious how you and MoMA PS1 curator Peter Eleey decided on the trade show format of “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”

SIMON DENNY  We both wanted to show a range of work, so I tried to think about practical solutions for that but also conceptual solutions. And we naturally both came to this trade show idea, which I think is something I use as a native language in my work anyhow.

CHAMPOUX  Something that can efficiently show a range of ideas.

DENNY  Exactly. We came up with the idea to display the work on platforms. Of course then it was a question of what was the best way to mirror the genre of the trade show in an art context, so that it wouldn’t be a cheesy event.

Of course there’s aspects of cheese, but you want a balance between what you’re taking from and what you want to evoke. I have an investment in the art-ness of it, let’s say. So the platforms came first as a very good solution. I think they work incredibly well to demarcate space and suggest that this could actually be a trade show environment. The icing on the cake was hanging signs that we managed to source, which really say “trade show” with no effort. From there, I wanted to focus on my past projects dealing with startup culture and corporate aesthetics and imagery.

The collaboration with Genius.com and Emily Segal [from K-HOLE] was the next important piece of the puzzle. Oftentimes when I start generating content for a show, I try to connect it to a particular space in a way that makes sense for people in the audience. And I felt Genius was a great company to work with because they’re quite visible in the New York tech world.

CHAMPOUX  And in the art scene as well.

DENNY  They have this nice situation where they’re kind of iconoclastic and challenging—I mean, it’s somewhat received wisdom that companies should be like this—and I wanted to have this kind of edge in the performance as well. The co-founder Tom [Lehman] was very up for it and so was Emily. She was one of the people who did my TEDxVaduz event [at the Kunstmuseum in Liechtenstein in 2013] so we had an existing dialogue that was cool to revisit. I wanted to fold those things together in a way that made sense.

CHAMPOUX  At the opening, I felt—surprisingly—that the crowds were actually beneficial to seeing the art, as opposed to getting in the way of it. Because the show was set up like a trade fair, the work was energized by being seen in a space filled with people

DENNY  It feels a bit like an art fair as well. There are other artists’ works in much of the show. 

CHAMPOUX  In addition to Soundcloud, Genius, and K-HOLE (which floats between art and corporate culture), what are some other young startups that you feel have a particular connection to art, or are also functioning as art practices?

DENNY  This is a space I really like, and for me K-HOLE will always be the best example. I like where Emily is taking it with her move into the commercial realm, specifically working for a company like Genius [where she is the creative director]. We made a lanyard that looked at some of the feedback she was getting from within the Genius community about her rebranding exercise. I’m a fan of this history from the Artist Placement Group onwards, the John Latham or Robert Smithson vision of what artists should be. I’m also a fan of Michael Shamberg and the people who were involved in television in the ’70s in an art context, who then moved into a much, much broader space like film production. I definitely see Emily’s move into making billboards and swag, really defining the look and output of a company, as a very interesting move for art also.

CHAMPOUX  Especially with the branding of merchandise, there are higher stakes than for somebody who is designing for a gallery show.

DENNY  Higher than my stakes usually are. She has to deal with a whole community’s idea of what her brand is. That’s intense. I venture out here and there, but I stay firmly within my craft and within the art tradition. I really enjoy presenting exhibitions in museums and galleries. While I look to the tech community and participate in it to some degree, it doesn’t look like I’ll be making that shift, even though I’m a fan of that direction of art-making.

CHAMPOUX  Do you have certain attachment to the cleanness of the tech aesthetic?

DENNY  Not necessarily. I mean, I love it. It looks beautiful. I’m of the very classic conceptual tradition of using the aesthetic that suits the material. I try to use this clean thing because it works so well in the tech context. It’s clean but it’s also quick. Fabricated but also commercially available. It’s not amazing stuff. It’s quite run-of-the-mill fabrication. I think there’s a very specific space within this clean aesthetic that works very well for that material. But, for example, if I were to make an exhibition about mud . . . I would get right in there (laughs).

CHAMPOUX  I would love to see a Simon Denny show about mud.

DENNY  I’ve always been a content-makes-form person. It has to have more than the visual going on for me. Obviously the visual is my expertise and my access point. But rhetoric and deployment and contact—all these other great things that are undivorceable from the visual—that’s what makes an attractive object for me, rather than because it’s green or it’s blue. I don’t have a favorite color or a favorite shape. That’s not interesting to me. I don’t have a fundamentally phenomenological exploration or motivation. It’s more like, What are these things doing?

CHAMPOUX  There’s a need to telegraph a lot of information. There’s a lot of data and you need the most efficient route to the viewer.

DENNY  Or at least to know the most efficient method. You can choose not to use it, too. You can decide the speed of delivery. Often it’s the most efficient. But not always.

CHAMPOUX  When these projects are brought together, there’s a shift in the reading of the work. For example, the work about Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, who was arrested in New Zealand in 2012 on online piracy-related charges (The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom, 2013) gains significance when all of the objects presented in the gallery are singularly his. One person stands in for a whole culture. But in this show, his stuff is mixed in installations with all these other different branded products, from organizations like Soundcloud or TED. Was that a deliberate attempt to insert new meaning into the work or to make it difficult to understand?

DENNY  One of the problems I face as an artist is that I like to work in a very project-based way. I’ve been making this body of work in separate venues and circumstances, but they all contribute to a central conversation. Bringing that work together as a readable oeuvre is a challenge, but it was one of the aims with the show. So while this exhibition maybe complicates a reading of Kim’s stuff as stuff in a room—less tightly framed, spatially speaking—I think, conceptually speaking, it’s nice because it shows a range of my interests in tech. You have TED, on the one hand; Samsung, which is a much bigger legacy brand, on the other—they have a relationship with each other but are not quite the same. Hopefully, I created a cohesive look around rather than just a look in one direction.

CHAMPOUX  Are there yet-untouched areas of tech that you’re dying to explore?

DENNY  There are! The end of the first dot-com bubble is an interesting moment for me. And there’s an outfit called Fucked Company which is a tech meta-firm from Web 1.0 that wanted to make commentary about companies. Commentary from within the community. But at the moment I’m just going from the airport to the library.

CHAMPOUX  You’re referring to the venues for your work at the upcoming Biennale.

DENNY  Yes, I’m in Venice right now. I’m staying at an airport hotel because one of my two venues for the New Zealand pavilion is the airport. You can only work in the airport at night, because otherwise there are too many passengers coming through. We start work at 11 P.M. But it’s amazing to work with the marketing department of the airport.

CHAMPOUX  Is it the first time you’ve worked with this kind of group?

DENNY  It is. It’s the first time I’ve worked at an airport and the first time I’ve been so involved with commercial people—the marketing department at the airport and Clear Channel, which does all the advertisements. They’re really doing the installation for me.

CHAMPOUX  Are there restrictions on what you can do, given their branding of the airport?

DENNY  Well, I based my proposal on an initial conversation I had with the marketing manager at the airport. I tried to pitch him something within the language of what I felt would be attractive for the airport, what would natively make sense with their advertising. The pitch was for Clear Channel as well. They want to feature the work in an advertisement. Airline magazines want to publish something on it. This is the type of attention that I wanted to gain from the project. I really wanted to enter the organization, not only doing a kind of intervention but also working directly with them.

CHAMPOUX  It’s a more cerebral take on the outsourcing of fabrication. Their expertise is less about a physical product than about a sensibility that is impossible to have when you’re working strictly in an art context.

DENNY  That’s a great way to put it. I think our profession in the arts is distanced by nature, but getting close to things and letting those other voices in has been very helpful for me, in order to make some rather unusual content.