Wystan Curnow said it sent shudders through the art world. Hamish Keith felt compelled to write a letter of apology for his negative response to the occasion. Warwick Brown wondered if the show had inaugurated a new era in New Zealand art. Three men from different camps all jostling to have their say about Billy Apple’s (1935–2021) notorious Art for Sale exhibition at the new Peter Webb Galleries in downtown Auckland between 27 April and 8 May 1981. I’ve been intrigued by this event and have written about it extensively, because I see it as a turning point in the artist’s practice and a milestone in the emergence of a properly contemporary art scene in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The exhibition was Apple’s response to (art impresario and soon-to-be creator of a secondary market for contemporary art) Peter Webb’s invitation to make something he could sell. After more than a decade of ephemeral art activities and installations that left spaces empty or marginally altered, Apple responded by producing ten screen prints and one large canvas all featuring the fiercely assertive word ‘SOLD’ in his distinctive red all-caps extra-bold condensed Gill Sans typeface. When visitors arrived for the opening they discovered that, true to their word, every work had been sold, for beneath the declaration, the date and amount had been filled in by the artist in his own handwriting, and he, the vendor and the buyer had all added their names, which had taken place in an invitation-only public signing the previous evening.

This was a coup orchestrated by Webb on Apple’s explicit instructions. Imagine, even now, coming to an opening where the transactional motive of the occasion was so explicitly stated! We all know the buzz when red dots are placed on a discreetly posted list of works at or prior to the opening; we’ve felt the frisson of excitement accompanying a sell-out show. But business is business and art is art, and the two are normally kept apart. It perhaps comes as no surprise that Billy Apple, as a conceptual artist who had changed his name to explore the consequences of turning himself into an artwork, would extend his concerns with the ‘givens’ of gallery spaces to the capitalist system in which objects are traded, using the cachet of the artist—who produces original and unique items—to enhance their value. But what strikes me as particularly remarkable is that, in 1981, Webb was able to pull off the artist’s challenge to find a sufficient number of collectors willing to acquire such radical work to ensure the show could go ahead.

Believe it or not, five of the ten prints were sold to public art institutions around the country, even the National Gallery of Australia bought one. The rest were snapped up by prominent lawyers and businesspeople, the first generation of contemporary art collectors. And the canvas was purchased by a consortium with the intriguing name of The Future Group. This suggests there was an openness to experiment and an excitement about embracing the output of a New York- based conceptualist that undermines the persistent myth that the country was a cultural backwater. Or perhaps, less idealistically, it proves that Aucklanders were susceptible to the persuasions of one of the best of that era’s cultural influencers.

As fascinating as it is to dissect the social underpinnings of this bold exhibition, I am drawn to it for art-historical reasons. To me, it is a vivid marker of that moment when the art market really began to exert its influence and art’s commodification ratcheted up several notches. It is also an excoriating reminder of the necessity for a critical counter, which in this case took the form of a shape-shifting conceptualism tuned to the new conditions of the 1980s. Billy Apple’s Art for Sale exhibition inaugurated his ‘Art Transactions’ series (1981–91), perhaps his best-known works, but the show’s real, ongoing significance is in its blurring of the boundaries between work and frame, art and money, artists and the social, political and economic networks within which they are embedded. There are still lessons to be learned from this exhilarating moment in Tāmaki Makaurau’s art history.