Quotes of the Day

When Philip Batty first came to Papunya, he was met with an almost utopian vision. It was 1977, and Batty had come to work as an art teacher at the government settlement in Central Australia; to his joy, artists had taken over the town, some even gathering in his front yard to paint. "There were few places in Papunya that had front lawns and I inherited the policeman's house," recalls Batty, now senior curator for Central Australian Collections at Museum Victoria. "And people like Clifford Possum and Johnny Warangkula used to come around and paint." He was met with an altogether different picture on returning recently. In nearby Alice Springs, he found budget hotels "chock-a-block full of artists, pumping the art out. I've got mixed feelings about it," Batty says. "On the one hand it's good to see Aboriginal people making money and leaving their poverty, but on the other I'm sure there's quite a lot of exploitation there, and that remains unwanted and goes unnoticed."

Not any more. Recent media reports have illuminated a darker side of this art movement, documenting cases of well-known artists being lured away from desert communities by unscrupulous dealers, to be plied with fast money, drugs and alcohol in exchange for hastily completed canvases, often of poor quality. The message is worrying buyers as far afield as France. "'dreamtime artist hit by nightmare of sex and fraud'—did you see that in the paper?" asks Arts d'Australie gallery dealer Stéphane Jacob over the phone from Paris. "It's really something that is affecting the credibility of Aboriginal art overseas."

With the business thought to be worth $A200 million a year—and even more in terms of the livelihood and self-esteem of remote communities—market leaders went into crisis mode. In April, Australia's Arts Minister Rod Kemp announced a crackdown on exploitation in the industry, hinting at a parliamentary inquiry in the coming months. The Australia Council's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board launched a $A3 million scheme to help combat the problem, including a new code of conduct for dealers and their customers. "The time is right to get it right," says the board's chair Chris Sarra. "It's not only Aboriginal artists benefiting from the industry. It's all Australians."

Calls for an inquiry come at a time when Aboriginal art is, ironically, on the crest of a wave. When the Musée du quai Branly opens next month, a dazzling Aboriginal showcase will bring unprecedented attention to this diverse and dynamic art form. It will also highlight an amazing story of cultural survival, with traditional lifestyles often being maintained on the earnings from art production. "Aboriginal art has been the one shining light that people have been able to refer to when they talk about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander achievements," says Paul Sweeney, manager of Papunya Tula Artists, the oldest and most successful of the desert art centers, "and it's getting knocked about a bit at the moment." Industry observers blame a small number of rogue traders working outside the art-center system; others cite skyrocketing auction prices; some accuse the artists themselves. Says Sarra: "It's much more complex than it seems."

What is certain is that the activity is generally confined to the Western Desert communities around Alice Springs, where the highest concentration of artists live. Here the pressure has been mounting ever since Geoffrey Bardon began marketing the prized work of his Papunya artists in 1971. Incorporated the following year, Papunya Tula Artists were turning over $A1 million a year by 1988, and their success did not go unnoticed. When the exhibition "Dreamings" toured to New York in 1988, "all of a sudden taxi drivers and carpetbaggers from the desert were rocking up with works by the same artists rolled up under their arms and flogging them to naïve collectors," Tim Klingender of Sotheby's auction house recalls.

It's also increasingly evident that the Western Desert artists being targeted are the least experienced of all in the ways of the white world. As Philip Batty's current exhibition "Colliding Worlds" dramatically shows, the last Pintupi tribes emerged from the desert as recently as 1984. "They were still coming out of the bush when I was there," he recalls. While that lack of Western contact brought a remarkably fresh quality to their painting, it didn't equip them well for the art market. "You've got all sorts of traditional beliefs and values basically slamming head-on into Western economics," Sweeney observes. In 1993, when Klingender set up the contemporary art department at Sotheby's in Melbourne, he introduced Aboriginal work into their regular auctions for the first time; soon they comprised two-thirds of his sales: "It made me realize that here was a field that could stand alone." Ten years ago their Aboriginal art department was born. In its first year, a Johnny Warangkula board sold for a record $A20,000; three years later, his Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa brought $A486,500. Klingender noticed something else interesting as well: more than half his sales were going overseas. "A large percentage of Australians buy Aboriginal art for investment or for their super funds," he says. "International collectors are buying to own and love and bequeath."

By 2001, when Rover Thomas' All That Big Rain Coming Down from Top Side created an auction record for an Aboriginal painting, the market had evolved into a highly sophisticated industry with the best work being sourced from the community art centers where provenance was assured. But rogue dealers wanted a piece of the action, approaching in-demand artists direct. "Some artists I'm convinced will never paint enough paintings to satisfy the number of people who want them," says Sweeney. "So you've got something that's just exploded."

Welcome to the Aboriginal art market in 2006. Sweeney talks of cases where ailing artists are flown by dealers to sweatshops as far away as Melbourne: "Now if that's an 80-year-old woman, you don't have to think too hard about what's wrong with this picture." After a fact-finding trip to Central Australia earlier this month, Arts Minister Kemp acknowledged the need to protect arts centers from such practices. "The art centers are the life blood of the community," says Klingender. "They are obviously key to documenting and authenticating works—which is crucially important—but they also ensure an artist is paid correctly and ethically." With the opening of the MQB in Paris, it's time to put a fair price on Australia's greatest cultural legacy.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• The greed of exploitative dealers and venal practitioners threatens to devalue the currency of Aboriginal art