Favour the brave

There are days in the Auckland art world when I wonder how a city of one and a half million people pulls this off. There’s the joy and rampant kookiness of placing Michael Parekōwhai’s The Lighthouse on our waterfront, or letting Ronnie van Hout’s giant boy stride through Potters Park, or confusing the hell out of everyone with that crazy tangle of noodles on Dominion Rd, by Seung Yul Oh.

There’s the rebuilt, vastly improved Auckland Art Gallery. There are the last three artists we’ve sent to the Venice Biennale — Simon Denny, Lisa Reihana and Dane Mitchell — each of them, in their own way, a triumph. And since 2010, a succession of fantastic contemporary artists — Dan Arps, Kate Newby, Luke Willis Thompson, Shannon Te Ao and Ruth Buchanan — have won the biennial Walters Prize.

Then there are the days when