Recently I had a modest 19th century painting in a rather grand frame shipped from England to my rural Victorian home. The venerable provincial auction house said it knew what it was doing, and recommended a local firm they regularly used for art shipments. The picture was worth only a few hundred dollars, but I knew from past catastrophes that it might well be worth nothing on arrival. Insurance is all very well, but extracting the money can take months and is no compensation for ruined art. And there's no guarantee they'll pay up.
Consumed by this familiar anxiety, I sent a stream of emails to the shipper, asking for details of packaging. They were professionals, they said. They knew what they were doing. I chose the solidest, most expensive packaging option. A fortnight later a local contractor phoned me- he had a crate for me but didn't want to drive the 50 km to my place. Would I come and collect it? I'd paid for door-to-door delivery, but leapt at the chance to minimise the risk. I know what rural contractors are like.
On arriving at "The Depot" (the grizzled driver's backyard) I saw the plywood crate in his van. It had two 40 kg sacks of grain on top of it. The plywood was bowed and split. I took the box home and opened it. It had been punctured, crushed and shaken. The stretcher was separated from the frame, the gesso of which had accumulated in fragments inside the bubble-wrap. Splinters of wood festooned the battered canvas. Miraculously, the canvas itself wasn't badly damaged.
I emailed the shippers. Why had they not secured the canvas to the frame? "That's how we got it from the auction", they said. Four nails would have fixed it. Too much trouble.
This cautionary tale highlights the fact that one never has to worry about shipping art within Australia if one uses specialist art transport. The dominant east coast company was Woollahra Art Removals (WAR), which connected Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide and all obscure points between. Murray Taylor's Art Express was part of this network.
Public art galleries, auction houses and private buyers rely heavily on such specialist shipping, so the recent purchase of WAR by Kingsley Mundey of the multinational International Art Services (IAS) is an important event. IAS had previously bought out Neale Robinson's Melbourne-based art transport company Moving Pictures in 2002.
IAS is a formidable outfit. Now Barry Grady, a former owner of WAR, has come out of retirement to challenge IAS with a new company, Artwork Transport. Eight of WAR's drivers have joined this firm, including Taylor's Art Express. Taylor considers that the market power of IAS "effectively gives them control of interstate art movement".
Battle is joined. Artwork Transport now has new trucks and depots in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, as well as a weekly Adelaide run.
Presumably the consumer will benefit from the fierce competition.
