Saatchi's modern art donated to hospitals

By Matthew Beard
Monday, 3 December 2001

The advertising tycoon Charles Saatchi has donated modern art worth about £1.25m to NHS hospitals.

The advertising tycoon Charles Saatchi has donated modern art worth about £1.25m to NHS hospitals.

The works include Hymn, a 20ft-high sculpture by Damien Hirst, which shows the inner workings of the human body as depicted by a plastic toy.

Saatchi has offered the sculpture to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where it is expected to be installed in the atrium, provided it is deemed not distressing for the patients.

Saatchi's gifts also include 50 paintings by artists including Simon Callery, David Combs and Nicholas May. In addition, Stephen Murphy's Rabbit shows a furry animal whose smiling eyes belong to the artist. Ointment by Robert Wilson is a still life of sausage, egg, mushrooms and baked beans

However, about 10 works have been rejected because they have been seen as inappropriate for display in a hospital. They include Carina Weidle's Olympic Chickens, a sequence showing chickens whose heads have been severed, and a Combs abstract of a naked woman.

The charity Paintings in Hospitals, which has distributed individual works given by the artists John Piper, John Bratby and Carel Weight, stressed that the art had to be "right for the healthcare environment".

Initial findings from a survey of patients at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital indicated that visual and performing arts reduced anxiety levels. But experts said yesterday that there was no proven therapeutic effect from looking at art.

Charles Saatchi: Arty Saatchi

Charles is the one who causes a sensation every time he opens his wallet in an art gallery. His latest wheeze: create a museum dedicated to his private collection and designed to take Nicholas Serota and Tate Modern down a peg or two

By Cole Moreton
Sunday, 2 December 2001

The story reads like a comedy script. Two young Jewish immigrants are eager to make their fortunes in the advertising industry, circa 1970. They have a lot of ideas but not much else. A very important potential client is on his way over to see the office of the dynamic new company they have pitched to him. Unfortunately the office is bare. The brothers have had no work, so they have no staff.

Then Charles, the elder of the two, has a brainwave. He goes out on the streets of London, cash in hand, searching for people who might pass for thrusting young advertising executives. Before long a dozen or so hired strangers are pretending to be busy at their desks while Charles and Maurice Saatchi charm their client into signing a contract.

Apocryphal or not, the story is still told 30 years later because it contains a truth about Charles Saatchi. He is a showman, a master of illusion, whose great trick is to manufacture desire – to make things appear bigger, more important, more attractive, more desirable than they are.

"I think of him as the Wizard of Oz," says Charlotte Mullins, editor of Art Review magazine. "He has created this vast and impressive empire, but in the middle of it all, behind the scenes, is just this one small man working away. He sets off all the hyperbole and lets that do the work while he stays hidden."

Saatchi likes to spend his £120m fortune on art. He is often seen strolling through degree shows and in private galleries, talking to artists and curators. Although usually unannounced, his presence soon becomes known. "A buzz goes around the room when Saatchi arrives," says Mullins. "People know he can make them."

Lately, the collector and dealer has been in negotiations with English Heritage to open a new exhibition space for his unrivalled private collection. He has at least 2,500 pieces by 350 artists and wants to show them in the debating chamber of the former Greater London Council building, County Hall, in south London. Such a bold venture will need all the publicity it can get, which may explain the sudden flurry of hyperbolic media talk about the "struggle for supremacy between the two titans of British art". These stories, wherever they come from, depend on the idea that Saatchi is involved in a venomous rivalry with Sir Nicholas Serota, the curator of Tate Modern, which is a short walk along the river from County Hall.

In 1997 Saatchi took over the Royal Academy to show off his collection under the title "Sensation". More than 300,000 people came to see it. Suddenly the nature of art was a talking-point again. Was a portrait of Myra Hindley made from children's handprints good art, bad art or art at all? Was an unmade bed strewn with soiled knickers? Was a sheep in formaldehyde?

Three years later, Tate Modern was opened by the Queen. It was hugely popular with the public and regarded as one of the best art galleries in the world. There was, however, very little Britart in it because Saatchi owns the biggest and best works by Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Chris Ofili, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin. He had bought everything they had done very early in their careers and driven up the prices by helping to market these Young British Artists. Tate Modern hoped Saatchi might lend or donate some of these works. He announced his own new museum instead.

Feuds make good newspaper stories, of course, but they get in the way of making money, as the Saatchis know well. They were involved in three successful Conservative Party electoral campaigns and masterminded the "Labour isn't working" ad – one of the classics of political advertising. Maurice Saatchi is a Tory peer. Charles is discreet about his politics these days, but he has been more influential than ever under Labour.

"As the Medicis were well aware, art is a great image-enhancer," says Louisa Buck, author of Moving Targets 2: a User's Guide to British Art Now. "The Catholic Church was quick to forgive the banking dynasty the sin of usury, just as the contemporary art world tends not to be too picky about the politics of those who patronise it."

Not that Saatchi is short of critics. When he gave 100 works to the Arts Council, people said it was because he had run out of storage space. When he funded bursaries and commissions for students at four London art schools, they said it was a way of getting new work on the cheap.

Saatchi is thick-skinned. A former bridge partner was impressed by his daring but not his manners. "He's a monster. Charles is brilliant at games of any kind, but he is also demanding, tetchy, intolerant and petulant while he's playing. He holds court and takes over the table, yet he has no obvious charm. This is a man who requires adoration. But he comes across as cocky, smug and irritable."

Charles Saatchi was born in Baghdad, Iraq, 58 years ago but came to Britain with his family in 1947. Maurice was the business manager and Charles the creative mind. His gift for the striking visual image was shown by their campaign for Silk Cut cigarettes, which circumvented advertising restrictions by showing nothing more than a slashed piece of purple silk. By 1986 Saatchi & Saatchi was the biggest advertising agency in the world, but Charles and Maurice left in 1994, after a revolt by shareholders, and formed a rival agency, M&C Saatchi.

Charles was divorced from his first wife, Doris, after 14 years. He proposed to Kay Hartenstein, an art dealer, two days after they met at a gallery. They married in 1990 and had a daughter, Phoebe. The couple were divorced last August on the grounds of his "unreasonable behaviour".

Saatchi has developed a deep friendship, perhaps more, with Nigella Lawson, widow of his friend John Diamond. Lawson has described Saatchi as "a very good friend" and chosen not to comment on reports she is about to move into his home in Belgravia, although she spends much of her time there. "Some people see me as a tragic heroine and that's what makes me acceptable to them," she has said. "The idea that I might be happy is unforgivable. Well, I'm sorry. It's better to be happy."

Saatchi may well be sharing in that happiness, but there are those who say he has lost his touch when it comes to art. Nothing he has done lately rivals Sensation, and his attempts at branding new groups of artists with names such as the Neurotic Realists have been unsuccessful.

There is evidence, too, that some young artists do not want to sell to him. However big their student overdraft, they prefer not to accept Hirst's assertion that "art is about life and the art world is about money". The problem, as they see it, is that because Saatchi buys in bulk he also sells a lot. Some dealers and collectors still take the view that if he's selling everything by a particular artist it's not worth buying. That can ruin careers before they have even begun.

"He used to be seen as the hand of God," says Ms Mullins. "Now artists are increasingly refusing to believe in him." The wizard will need to weave some new spells to keep the magic going.

Business high-flyer quits from top job at the British Museum after just two years

By David Lister
Saturday, 8 September 2001

Suzanna Taverne, the former investment banker appointed two years ago to reorganise the British Museum, yesterday quit as the managing director, just days before the £120,000 top job at the museum was to be advertised.

Suzanna Taverne, the former investment banker appointed two years ago to reorganise the British Museum, quit yesterday as managing director only days before the £120,000 top job at the museum was to be advertised.

Ms Taverne has been running the museum in tandem with Robert Anderson, who was the sole director before she arrived. The combination of a traditional curator figure, Mr Anderson, and a City figure, Ms Taverne, was heralded as the future for Britain's national museums and galleries.

An ambitious high-flyer and the daughter of the former Labour MP Dick Taverne, she was head-hunted from the Pearson media group to become the first person in the history of the British Museum to hold such a senior post with no museum experience. Before joining Pearson she was at the heart of the coup that ousted the Saatchi brothers from their own advertising empire. She had also worked for the investment bankers Warburg, and was former finance director of The Independent.

The appointment of Ms Taverne came after the 1996 Edwards report, which criticised the museum's management and noted the institution did not employ an accountant. A finance director was appointed and plans were drawn up to appoint a managing director with business sense.

But earlier this year Ms Taverne let it be known she wanted to run the institution singlehandedly when Mr Anderson retired next year.

She has been told the job will not be hers. The trustees are unwilling to entrust the world's most celebrated museum to someone with no curatorial background, whatever her financial acumen. Sources at the museum say the trustees were also unhappy that Ms Taverne had been so transpar-ent in making clear she hoped to be offered the job.

The fact that the trustees are advertising the job in The Economist shows they may still be placing as high a priority on the winning applicant's ability to keep finances in order as on curatorial and museum experience. What is clear is that they have abandoned the experiment of two people running the institution. The advert will be for one person with "academic and managerial experience".

Sir John Boyd was elected chairman-designate of the museum's board of trustees so he could chair the search committee before taking over from Graham Greene as chairman next July. Sir John said: "The trustees are seeking a director who combines cultural authority and managerial capability. We want strong and active leadership together with strategic vision."

High Art Lite, by Julian Stallabrass

By Boyd Tonkin
Saturday, 18 August 2001

Sick of Tracey, Damien, Gilbert & George, Jake'n'Dinos, and all the usual Saatchi-Turner art tarts? This swingeing, eloquent assault on the BritArt circus will delight lefties rather than fogeys (and Sewells). For it locates the shame of this amply-funded gang in the dehumanising market forces that made them, not in their Sensation-seeking style. Stallabrass recalls the John Berger of the 1970s as he thunders that "it becomes increasingly difficult to criticise art because that amounts to criticising business".

Hirst accuses his benefactor Saatchi of recognising art 'only with his wallet'

By Harvey McGavin
Monday, 13 August 2001

Damien Hirst, the man who scandalised the art establishment by exhibiting animal carcasses, has turned his predatory instincts on the hand that has fed him a fortune by launching an outspoken attack on Brit Art's biggest private collector, Charles Saatchi.

Damien Hirst, the man who scandalised the art establishment by exhibiting animal carcasses, has turned his predatory instincts on the hand that has fed him a fortune by launching an outspoken attack on Brit Art's biggest private collector, Charles Saatchi.

Mr Saatchi – who with his brother Maurice led the most successful advertising agency of the Eighties – has spent most of the subsequent decade spending millions of pounds on the work of young British Artists such as Hirst, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas.

Mr Saatchi commissioned Hirst's shark floating in formaldehyde, which was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, and last year he paid £1m for Hymn, an outsize bronze statue of the human form.

But, having grown rich on Mr Saatchi's patronage, Hirst now seems to have tired of the businessman's influence, saying he "only recognises art with his wallet" and accusing him of trying to control the art market. "Art's dragging him around on a leash and he doesn't know it. Or maybe he does know it. But there's no way he'll stop. He loves it, so he wants to possess it," Hirst says in an interview.

Hirst admits that Mr Saatchi has been "generous to artists" but calls him an "arrogant" and "childish" businessman "addicted to shopping". In interviews with the author Gordon Burn, due to be published in October, he says: "I grew up in a world where Charles Saatchi believed he could affect art values with buying power. He still believes he can do it."

Karen Wright, editor of Modern Painters, defended the role of Mr Saatchi yesterday. She insisted the patron, whose new gallery in Shoreditch, east London will be devoted to the work of Young British Artists, was a benign influence on the art world. "He's a very good thing for the arts. There are always going to be people who support art and put their money where their mouth is – it's a historical phenomenon."

Emin said more people should follow Mr Saatchi's example. "We should have more people like him and then Charles wouldn't have such a strong influence on the market. At the end of the day he's an art collector, not an arms dealer."

Portrait of a curator as a reviled man

There's turmoil in the galleries again and Nicholas Serota is in the firing line

Sarah Jane Checkland
Sunday, 24 June 2001

There's nothing we British like more than a good row among artists. It has always been the establishment versus the new.

There's nothing we British like more than a good row among artists. There was the so-called Art Quake of 1910, when The Times denounced the first exhibition of Post-Impressionism as "degenerate" and "the rejection of all that civilization has done". Then in 1935 Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, claimed Ben Nicholson's abstract reliefs had contracted "spiritual beri-beri" due to their "fatal defect of purity". It has always been the establishment versus the new.

But last week was different. Not only was the art establishment under attack for its keen espousal of avant-garde conceptual art, but the attacker-in-chief was a traditional figurative artist, complaining of the establishment's partiality. Stuart Pearson Wright, who won the £25,000 first prize at the National Portrait Gallery's BP Portrait Awards for The Six Presidents of the Royal Academy, a group portrait which features suited academics contemplating their mortality, symbolised by a dead chicken, used the occasion to proclaim that Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, should be sacked.

His misdemeanour? According to 25-year-old Pearson Wright, he is chief among the villainous members of the arts establishment who ignore young figurative artists and force them to choose between abandoning painting or surviving by "taking day jobs in Burger King".

"If such huge sums of public money are involved, this seems wrong and the public should have more of a say," said Pearson Wright. "I am going to do all I can to change this, and sacking Serota would be a step in the right direction."

Pearson Wright's view echoes those of the Stuckists, a group of painters who post regular manifestos complaining about the art establishment on the internet, and whose leader, Charles Thomson, stood unsuccessfully against the former Secretary of State for Culture, Chris Smith, at the general election.

But as the Stuckists' work is widely considered banal and naive, and their complaints hysterical, they tend to be dismissed as the lunatic fringe. What really made a difference last week was not only Pearson Wright's new-found credibility, but that his attack came shortly after that of the playwright Tom Stoppard. He too questioned the new orthodoxy in his recent speech at the Royal Academy dinner. Then on Wednesday, the spotlight fell again on Nicholas Serota, when the director of Tate Modern, Lars Nittve, resigned, allegedly due to clashes with Serota about the vision for the galleries.

Serota's position at the Tate gives him unsurpassed influence in the contemporary art world. Through gallery acquisitions and his opinions, he can make or break a career. But there is one man who comes a close second: Charles Saatchi, the advertising tycoon and art collector. Together they have embraced "cutting edge" art and their patronage has made its leading players among the most courted figures in the arts today. Artists such as Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin are celebrities. The Turner Prize secures almost as many column inches as the Booker.

As Saatchi is the Greta Garbo of the art world, and Sir Nicholas Serota was out of the country last week, it was left to Sandy Nairne, director of national and international programmes at the Tate, and Norman Rosenthal, exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy, to defend the establishment corner. Not only was the controversy "a load of utter bullshit", said Rosenthal, but it needed to be "nipped in the bud". All too many "things made in the name of art", he said, "are kitsch". The job of critics and curators was telling the difference. This, he said, he and his colleagues did "with great responsibility, through an international perspective, not a Little Englander one. It is not possible to paint like Turner these days. Indeed, it wasn't possible for Turner to paint like Titian. Art is about new territory."

Only Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Portrait Gallery, where the BP Portrait is hung each year, conceded that there was an argument for change. "For an unusually long period of time the art world has been dominated by one particular brand of practice," he said. "As a result there is a danger of this becoming the new orthodoxy." The fact that visitor numbers to the Portrait Award have doubled as a result of the row, he says, proves that "more people are interested in painting than in cutting edge art".

He points to a whole tranch of 20th-century figurative artists who were once dismissed as "oddball" but are now "seen to be fantastically dominant". The list is headed by Stanley Spencer, whose exhibition at Tate Britain closes this evening, having attracted around 90.000 visitors.

What of the painters themselves? Charles Thomson of the Stuckists heartily applauded Pearson Wright for "his courage" in joining the crusade against "the cul de sac of idiocy generated by the Serota-Saatchi axis". But the most eloquent – and influential – advocate for change was perhaps the Glasgow-based former war artist to Bosnia, Peter Howson. "Art has rules," says the 43-year-old painter. "If you break them, you are on to a false trail."

Saatchi to launch gallery for next wave of Britart

Charles Saatchi finds space to show off his signings

By Louise Jury, Media Correspondent
Wednesday, 16 May 2001

Charles Saatchi, the multimillionaire art collector and benefactor who has become Britain's leading patron of young talent, is to provide a new venue for cutting-edge works.

Charles Saatchi, the multimillionaire art collector and benefactor who has become Britain's leading patron of young talent, is to provide a new venue for cutting-edge works.

The advertising executive whose gallery in north London has helped to launch the careers of many modern artists is to open a second exhibition space to promote the students he has been supporting through college.

The new venue in Shore-ditch, east London, will be close to the premises of the influential dealers Jay Jopling and Victoria Miro, who both recently set up shop in the area.

Charlotte Mullins, the editor of Art Review magazine, which is to give details of the move next week, said: "It's almost like an authoritative stamp on the area, but it's also as if he feels he had better get in on the act. The fact that this is near Jay Jopling and Victoria Miro has not been lost on anybody.

"But picking up artists has always been his thing and he's been doing it earlier and earlier. Showing artists this way is just a bit more funky, a bit more hip."

Mr Saatchi founded bursaries for students at a number of London art colleges two years ago, including Goldsmiths', the Alma Mater of Damien Hirst, and the Royal College, which boasts Tracey Emin as an old girl, with proceeds from the £1.6m sale of works from his collection.

The students were eager to exhibit, and Mr Saatchi seized an opportunity to take over an existing space, the Underwood Street Gallery in Shoreditch, to show their work. The exhibition is expected to open on 5 June.

The move has proved a lifeline for a young dealer, Simon Hedges, who had been running the gallery until it was threatened with being sold last year.

The gallery is in a building leased from a charity. With developers taking over many of the poorer parts of London inhabited by artists, the charity looked likely to put its interests first and sell. A deal that would have seen the end of the gallery fell through at the last minute last year. But it left Mr Hedges without a settled programme of exhibitions and he decided to approach Charles Saatchi.

"He has always lent us great support," Mr Hedges told the Art Review. "He has come to all the shows, he's brought interesting people down and he's bought work from us."

Talks are still in progress about how the arrangement will work. The first exhibition was due to open next week but has been delayed to June. After the showcase of college students, it is thought that the gallery will offer space for artists in the Saatchi collection to exhibit new work.

Ms Mullins said: "The Underwood Street Gallery has always had a good reputation. This is a benevolent move, but you wonder whether he would have done it if the gallery had been in W12."

Charles Saatchi has long been a controversial figure in the contemporary art market, but his eye for spotting new talent has made him the envy of rivals. He has championed the careers of artists including the group known as the Young British Artists, headed by Damien Hirst, and highlights of his collection were shown to widespread acclaim at the Royal Academy in its controversial "Sensation" show.

But he has also been accused of distorting the market with his prolific purchases. Even the decision to create the bursaries was met with cynicism, with critics pointing out that a comparatively small part of the £1.6m proceeds from his auction at Christie's in 1999 had gone towards this act of philanthropy. The art colleges each received £10,000 a year for their bursaries. Simon Hedges is delighted that Charles Saatchi has stepped in and enabled them to continue to operate. "We were one of the original sites in Shoreditch, yet now we're a lifeboat for what used to be important here.

"We have become isolated as an independent, non- commercial space and it came to the point where we needed support."

Saatchi's new show promises to excite the Vice Squad again

By Louise Jury Media Correspondent
Friday, 27 April 2001

The attentions of the Vice Squad have clearly not left the Saatchi Gallery nursing any inhibitions. Its first exhibition since being raided by officers investigating complaints of obscene exhibits opens with an animated sequence of a modelling clay heroine pleasuring herself.

The attentions of the Vice Squad have clearly not left the Saatchi Gallery nursing any inhibitions. Its first exhibition since being raided by officers investigating complaints of obscene exhibits opens with an animated sequence of a modelling clay heroine pleasuring herself.

The police investigation six weeks ago into allegations that photographs of children were indecent has not deterred the gallery, owned by the advertising entrepreneur Charles Saatchi, from repeatedly showing the video of close-up masturbation by the artist Liane Lang. Jenny Blyth, the gallery's curator, defended its inclusion in the show by saying it was clearly not real. She said: "It's definitely not flesh. We perceive it as a humorous piece. It's the world of Wallace & Gromit and to use these materials in this way is so unexpected."

Ms Lang, a graduate of the Goldsmith's College that produced many of the Young British Artists, said she did not think people would be outraged. She said: "I never intended it to be offensive. There is also a distinction between showing adult sexuality and children."

The gallery came under fire last month from tabloid newspapers and a few unnamed visitors who protested that photographs by Tierney Gearon of her children were indecent. But the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was no case to answer.

The next exhibition, titled "New Labour", opens to the public next Thursday, chosen because of the initial expected date of the general election.

Emin back on the helter skelter of self-absorption

By David Lister Media and Culture Editor
Thursday, 26 April 2001

Tracey Emin, the leading member of the studiedly controversial Young British Artists, presented her first solo exhibition in London for four years yesterday.

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The business of being Tracey

Tracey Emin, the leading member of the studiedly controversial Young British Artists, presented her first solo exhibition in London for four years yesterday.

Once more using her own life as an art form in itself, she showed embroideries containing details of her sexual experiences, a video of the artist trying to meet her mother and a helter skelter as a throwback to her childhood days in Margate, Kent. The last was one of the very few new works in the exhibition. But the venue for the exhibition, the White Cube² Gallery in the East End of London, was, she claimed, notable.

Emin said: "This shows that artists are moving from the West End of London to the East End. There is a new community springing up here."

The exhibition is entitled "You Forgot To Kiss My Soul" with the reproduction of the Margate helter skelter at the centre of the gallery. Honey Luard, of White Cube², explained that it was "a fairly self-explanatory statement about the symbolism of the helter-skelter to life".

Emin, who last year sold her bed with its dirty linen to the art collector Charles Saatchi for £150,000 and then her reconstituted Whitstable beach hut to him for £ 75,000, says of her home town: "Being a virgin bride in Margate was not an option. You got broken into."

Emin's tent exhibit entitled Everyone I Have Slept With 1963-1995 contained the scrawled names of people she had slept with, including friends and relatives and sexual partners. It is not included in the new exhibition. Instead visitors can see a papier mâché Concorde, three new appliqued blankets, some neon displays, drawings and two videos, one of a conversation between Emin and her mother.

Emin was a Turner Prize nominee in 1999 and was recently awarded the eighth Cairo International Biennale Jury Prize.

Her home town, meanwhile, is trying to raise £13m for a Turner centre, which would show some of her works and those by contemporary Kent artists. Emin could yet see some of her works exhibited alongside those of Turner.

Giuliani creates 'decency panel' to keep art clean exhibits

By David Usborne in New York
Wednesday, 4 April 2001

Aspiring artists hoping for exposure in New York need to take care. If your work risks causing offence to the city's mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, or a group of his friends about to be appointed to an official "decency commission", you may be chased out of town. Steer clear of all religious depictions.

Aspiring artists hoping for exposure in New York need to take care. If your work risks causing offence to the city's mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, or a group of his friends about to be appointed to an official "decency commission", you may be chased out of town. Steer clear of all religious depictions.

The creation of the commission is Mayor Giuliani's latest big idea in his battle to keep New York's museums on the moral straight and narrow. Or that is how he sees it. Civil liberties groups consider it an illegal assault on the free expression rights of artists. For them it is censorship.

Apparently, Mr Giuliani intends his commission to root out works of art from the city's 34 publicly supported cultural institutions that may cross the line into obscenity. But where does that line lie? If there should be such a line. The panel members are buddies and aides of the mayor, who leaves office at the end of this year.

Mr Giuliani first frothed about so-called obscene art in 1999, when the Brooklyn Museum of Art opened Sensation, a collection of Saatchi-owned works, which included a black Madonna spattered with elephant dung. Mr Giuliani suspended city funding and tried to have the museum evicted, until a judge stopped him. When the museum hung a photo-parody of the Last Supper with a nude black woman in the place of Jesus he called it "disgusting".

Barbara Handman, director of People for the American Way, said yesterday: "The mayor has dragged the city through one costly, losing battle after another, as he persists in his attempt to become chooser-in-chief and impose his choices on the rest of us."

Nudists join the show as Saatchi's carnival reopens

Art controversy: Tierney Gearon's photographs of her naked children back on display as Crown Prosecution Service decides not to prosecute

By Thomas Sutcliffe
Friday, 16 March 2001

Just inside the inner entrance of the Saatchi Gallery there is an easy way to take the measure of its owner's attitude to media controversy. Some 15 feet of the wall is covered with a dense mosaic of framed newspaper articles bearing headlines such as "Art too hot to show" and "Art or outrage?"

Just inside the inner entrance of the Saatchi Gallery there is an easy way to take the measure of its owner's attitude to media controversy. Some 15 feet of the wall is covered with a dense mosaic of framed newspaper articles bearing headlines such as "Art too hot to show" and "Art or outrage?"

And after yesterday's opening, the first time the public could get in since the row over Tierney Gearon's photographs of her naked children erupted, it is clear that this memorial to moral consternation will soon stretch even further.

Journalists hoping to report on the seizure of the pictures may have been disappointed - the police stayed away pending a Crown Prosecution Service decision on whether there was a case. The CPS finally rang to say no action would be taken.

But there were plenty of consolations in the modest carnival of art lovers, students and protesters who arrived for the midday opening, not least the presence of Vincent Bethell and supporters of the Freedom To Be Yourself campaign.

For Mr Bethell, "being yourself" seems to be a matter of taking all your clothes off in public and - outraged by the assumption that nakedness might be crudely equated with indecency - he had come to do just that, stripping off with several colleagues just before noon.

The gesture prompted a stampede of astounded workmen from Jack's Café, across the road, and a clatter of camera shutters from the press photographers.

But it also demonstrated the curious terror that the human body can produce when exposed in unconventional ways. "I've got three children," yelled one incensed man. "If any one saw you mugs I'd slap the lot of you." Another, beside himself with rage at this eccentric defence of liberty, shrieked: "You fucking nonces."

"Hiding Obsesses, Revealing Heals" read the poster carried by one naked protester and for a moment it seemed all too likely that he would be able to apply this unconventional form of medicine in practice. Then the gates opened and the crowd surged down the ramp to queue for admission, clothed and unclothed united in decorous English patience.

Inside, Jenny Blyth, the gallery's curator, welcomed the naked protesters to the show and calmly fielded questions from journalists. Before the exhibition's opening, there had been no discussion of the pictures' potential to cause trouble, she claimed. In hindsight, she conceded, this might have been a little naïve, but she insisted she could still look at the pictures "with an open mind".

Joanna Needham and Catherine McCormack weren't quite so sure. In Jack's Café, before the opening, the two art history students from University College London, had reflected on John Berger's distinction between the naked and the nude. ("To be naked is to be yourself, to be nude is to be seen by others and not recognised as yourself" was how one of them recalled it.) And they had mused over what other art works might arouse the News of the World's moral outrage; Bronzino's Allegory of Cupid and Venus, in which a young boy tongue-wrestles with the goddess of love while tweaking her nipple, was elected as the prime candidate for a modern resuscitation of Victorian sexual terror.

In front of Gearon's images they were more hesitant about dismissing the fuss as mere philistinism. "We're slightly changing our minds about a couple of them," said Joanna, noting that in more than one picture there was a troubling ambiguity about the exact nature of the relationships. Kristina Henschen, whose child lay sleeping in the buggy she was pushing round the gallery, was unperturbed though. She could see no real problems with the pictures "but then I'm Swedish", she added, before turning away to attend to some journalists seeking to add a maternal viewpoint to those of obsessional nudists.

Outside a bereted figure who gave his name as Leon was stuffing copies of a manifesto for a free revolutionary art into the Saatchi Gallery postbox, a manifesto which called for "complete freedom for art". If he really wanted to take the battle directly to the forces of reaction all he had to do was cross the road, where Filippo Sardo, manning the counter at Jack's, was putting the case for censorship. If he were to display images of naked children, he declared, he'd be arrested. Call it art and stick it on the walls across the road though and you could get away with it.

In Mr Sardo's view the double standard was unacceptable and when it came to kids "nudidity" was out of order. The naked glamour models pinned to the wall suggested that, when it came to public display of nudity at least, he had a few double standards of his own.

Surprise, surprise

Friday, 16 March 2001

There's a surprise: the Crown Prosecution Service has decided, "after carefully reviewing the evidence", not to take legal action against the Saatchi Gallery over the photographs of naked children on show there (in a show sponsored by our sister newspaper, The Independent on Sunday).

There's a surprise: the Crown Prosecution Service has decided, "after carefully reviewing the evidence", not to take legal action against the Saatchi Gallery over the photographs of naked children on show there (in a show sponsored by our sister newspaper, The Independent on Sunday).

Plain-clothes police officers can now be recalled from investigating reports of cherubs in statuary at sundry locations around Britain, or depictions of them in paintings by Renaissance artists in public places.

The artificial panic over representations of children's naked bodies risked making worse the fearfulness for our children that so distorts our society.

Even amid our present, overheated paranoia about paedophilia, though, it was never remotely plausible that a jury would have convicted either the Saatchi Gallery or the artist, Tierney Gearon. It could not have been seriously argued that displaying the pictures put children at risk, even if some people found them disturbing.

Fortunately, common sense prevailed before this nonsense went that far.

Saatchi photographs are not obscene, says CPS

By Jason Bennetto, Crime Correspondent
Friday, 16 March 2001

Photographs of nude children featured in an exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London are not obscene and do not break the law, the Crown Prosecution Service ruled yesterday.

Photographs of nude children featured in an exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London are not obscene and do not break the law, the Crown Prosecution Service ruled yesterday.

Scotland Yard had threatened to seize the photographs after three complaints that the pictures, taken by two photographers, were indecent and would encourage paedophiles.

The case, which won the backing of Chris Smith, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, provoked an outcry over censorship of the arts and freedom of expression. The CPS said no action would be taken against the north London gallery - which is owned by the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi - and the Metropolitan Police said the matter was closed.

A spokeswoman for the CPS, which was sent a file of evidence by the Metropolitan Police's clubs and vice unit, said: "We do not consider that the photographs are indecent." The images, which are part of the exhibition called I Am A Camera, are mainly taken by Tierney Gearon, an artist from the US who lives in London. They feature her two children, Emily, six, and Michael, four. The exhibition is sponsored by the Independent on Sunday.

In one photograph the children are wearing theatrical masks and are standing naked on a beach; in another, Michael is urinating in the snow with his sister in the background.

Ms Gearon said: "My children are my entire life ... and these are beautiful, innocent pictures. You have to understand the context ... which is that I was documenting my family for two years."

A spokesman for the gallery said: "Everyone at the Saatchi Gallery is very relieved as are all the artists in the show. It's been a very worrying time for the two artists involved and their families. We are extremely grateful to the public and press who have supported the artists and the gallery."

The exhibitors were facing prosecution under the 1978 Protection of Children Act, but the crown prosecutors said that the photographs were not considered indecent and that the Saatchi Gallery could successfully use the defence that it had a legitimate reason to show the images because they are considered works of art.

The Act makes it a crime, punishable by up to three years' imprisonment and a fine of up to £10,000, to make indecent photographs of children (anyone under 16) for possession, distribution or show.

A CPS statement said: "In reaching this decision, the CPS considered whether the photographs in question were indecent, and the likely defence of the gallery, ie whether they had a legitimate reason for showing them." Under the current law the definition of indecency is anything that "is likely to offend right-minded people".

The photographs will remain on display until the end of the exhibition on 15 April.

Prosecution ruled out over naked children photos

Thursday, 15 March 2001

The Saatchi Gallery will not be prosecuted for displaying controversial photographs of naked children despite claims the exhibition was obscene, the Crown Prosecution Service said today.

The Saatchi Gallery will not be prosecuted for displaying controversial photographs of naked children despite claims the exhibition was obscene, the Crown Prosecution Service said today.

Police were called to the gallery in north London last week after complaints that the pictures - taken by American photographers Tierney Gearon and Nan Goldin - were indecent and would appeal to paedophiles.

But a CPS spokesman said that after careful consideration there was no realistic prospect of any conviction under the Protection of Children Act 1978.

An attempt to make sense of our fractured lives

But Is It Art? by Cynthia Freeland (Oxford University Press, £11.99)

By Sue Hubbard
Wednesday, 14 March 2001

So now it seems that, among their other duties, the officers of the Metropolitan Police have become art critics. When they paid a visit to the Saatchi Gallery to denounce the work of the photographer Tierney Gearon, who had taken nude photographs of her children, it would have been interesting to hear what arguments the police used, and with which critical theory they substantiated their case.

So now it seems that, among their other duties, the officers of the Metropolitan Police have become art critics. When they paid a visit to the Saatchi Gallery to denounce the work of the photographer Tierney Gearon, who had taken nude photographs of her children, it would have been interesting to hear what arguments the police used, and with which critical theory they substantiated their case.

Contemporary art, more than any other creative form, seems to invoke the ire of the middlebrow. There appears to be a brooding anxiety that those clever-dick artists are pulling the wool over their eyes. Dripped paint, elephant dung, unmade beds - a child could do that!

In But Is It Art?, Cynthia Freeland, professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, has written a book of simplicity and clarity that may well come to rival John Berger's Ways of Seeing as a reader's digest of the rubric of theories that make up contemporary art criticism. What becomes manifest is that, so often, the wrong question is asked. The pertinent query would be: "But is it good art?"

In concise language, mercifully free of art-speak, Freeland challenges the sacred cow of obfuscation so prevalent in art writing: "A theory should help things make sense rather than create obscurity through jargon and weighty words." She cavorts with aplomb through theories about blood, ritual, beauty and sexual politics. She moves with consummate skill, ducking and weaving through readings of Greek tragedy, Chartres cathedral, African sculpture and Native American dance to the relevance of Walter Benjamin's theories on reproduction to digital media and MTV.

Freeland reminds us that, for most tribal people, art and artefact are not distinguishable; that the notion of the individualistic artist is a modern, Western construct. Medieval European Christians did not make "art" as we understand it, but saw themselves as skilled craftsmen who tried to imitate God's divine beauty. She starts in myth and ritual to show how art gave cohesion to older societies, pointing out that modern artists cannot take this consensus of shared beliefs for granted, and that meaning is therefore mutable. This, she suggests, can lead to a sense of shock and abandonment, so that art may be perceived as something alien. Symbols used in religious art, such as blood, become shocking when employed by artists such as Andres Serrano in his infamous Piss Christ (1987).

Kant is named as the predecessor to the scientific psychologists who judge concepts of beauty by studying viewers' eye movements. His influential definition of beauty is explained as "purposiveness without a purpose". This sense of an art work's "rightness", manifest largely through form rather than meaning, developed into the modernist theories of "significant form" expounded by Roger Fry.

Wagner, Kant's notion of the Sublime, and Andy Warhol are all discussed. Freeland illustrates that it is now impossible to separate art theories from practice, so interdependent have they become. The "primitive", the "exotic" and the feminine are all rapidly explored. While Freeland is careful not to give one philosophical stance privilege over another, one senses that her own view probably accords with the critic John Dewey, who claimed that art "expresses the life of a community".

This is a valuable book for anyone perplexed by the arcane theorising of contemporary art. It is, in the end, optimistic, displaying the respectable degree of scepticism illustrated in a quote from the environmental artist Robert Irwin - that art "has come to mean so many things that it doesn't mean anything any more". None the less, Freeland endorses his view that art is perhaps best described as "a continuous expansion of our awareness of the world around us".

Art can enhance an awareness of ourselves, as well as challenge and expand our perceptual relationship to our surroundings. For this reason - dead sheep or no - we will continue to create it, and look at it, in an attempt to make sense of our fractured modern lives.

Galleries face new guidelines over child photos row

By Louise Jury and Jade Garrett
Wednesday, 14 March 2001

The museum world's leading body said yesterday that last week's police raid on the Saatchi Gallery in London had serious implications for art collections throughout Britain.

The museum world's leading body said yesterday that last week's police raid on the Saatchi Gallery in London had serious implications for art collections throughout Britain.

As other galleries monitored the case, police said they would take no further action against the gallery until the Crown Prosecution Service decided whether it would prosecute. Mark Taylor, the director of the Museums Association, which represents nearly all museums and their staff, said it may have to issue advice to members for the first time if the Saatchi case ended in court.

The Saatchi Gallery, which is owned by the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, has been told it faces prosecution under the 1978 Protection of Children Act because of images of naked children in its current exhibition, I Am a Camera.

A file has been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service by Scotland Yard's obscene publications unit and is being considered. Mr Taylor said his organisation had no existing guidelines on such issues but would have to consider issuing advice if the Saatchi display was found guilty of offences.

He said: "You have to say, if those pictures are obscene, it doesn't say much for some of the naked bodies in the National Gallery. This potential threat is very odd and, if it is followed through, then it would mean a lot of pictures being taken off the wall, which is presumably not what the authorities want."

Jenny Blyth, the gallery's curator, said it would not remove the pictures. Mr Saatchi refused to comment yesterday.

The Saatchi Gallery's I Am a Camera exhibition

The photographer Tierney Gearon contributed to the Saatchi Gallery's I Am a Camera exhibition. The show is now the subject of a police investigation and the News of the World has branded the pictures 'grotesque' and 'child porn' masquerading as art. Here, the artist expresses her shock and dismay at the way in which her accusers have 'polluted' the innocent images of her family and friends

Tuesday, 13 March 2001

It came as such a complete shock, when I turned up at the Saatchi Gallery in London on Thursday morning, to find that the police were already there - and that the reason they were there was because of the pictures of my family that are included in the exhibition I Am a Camera. That shock turned to disbelief when they explained to me that, because of my photographs, I might even be prosecuted for obscenity.

It came as such a complete shock, when I turned up at the Saatchi Gallery in London on Thursday morning, to find that the police were already there - and that the reason they were there was because of the pictures of my family that are included in the exhibition I Am a Camera. That shock turned to disbelief when they explained to me that, because of my photographs, I might even be prosecuted for obscenity.

Among my first thoughts were, "Why now?" After all, the I Am a Camera show had opened as long ago as January, and it got some great reviews back then; "brilliant" and "stunning" were among some of the words used to praise it. All my family were there for the opening, including the children, and they were so proud. I look back on all that now as a very happy time - though after the excitement of the opening, I was glad when things naturally calmed down. I thought that I could get back to normal life. And then, seven weeks later, this bombshell - a threat that I could be arrested. I was so shocked that I felt numb.

Even now, I find it difficult to understand. One of the pictures that the police complained about is one I took on a ski holiday, of my son Michael peeing - he was four at the time. To me, it's just a really comical image: as any parent knows, when little boys need to pee, they really need to go. I never thought it was anything other than funny and cute. So I was doubly shocked on Sunday when the News of the World decided they were "lurid" and "grotesque" instead. To me, it was a simple case of "when a boy's got to go, a boy's got to go..."

The picture on the beach, of Michael and his sister Emilee wearing masks, was taken when we were on holiday. We were waiting for a plane. I just saw the colours on the sea, and I thought it looked beautiful. I had been carrying round a bag of masks, we'd been playing with them, and I asked the children if they wanted to put two of the masks on. They liked the idea. Sometimes they want to, sometimes they don't. I didn't tell them: "You stand here, you stand there." They just ran around, and they stood the way they wanted to. There was nothing more sinister to it than that.

Now, reading the hysterical criticism of the News of the World and its attack on the publisher of this newspaper for sponsoring the exhibition, I'm left with a strange feeling. Indeed, until last week, it never even entered my head that there could be something seedy about these photographs. They're my family and friends, after all. Now I see my pictures described as child pornography, which is sad for so many reasons - but mainly because the accusers have polluted my images. If people go to an exhibition without being told what to think, they will just see whatever they see. But now a seed has been planted in people's heads, that seed will grow, at least among those who only read the tabloids. It horrifies me to think that people who may otherwise have seen the images and thought they were beautiful, might now see something different - because others have planted those ideas there.

I think of myself as a wholesome person. I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't do drugs. Things at home are simple. What I was trying to do here is to give people a taste of the innocence in life. So many artists these days want to portray the dark side that it's difficult to make everyday life seem interesting - the things that make us laugh and feel good, the simple things in life. That's what I was trying to show.

I used to be a fashion photographer, doing work for glossy magazines such as Vogue, Elle and Marie Claire. I stopped for a while after I had my children, because I lost interest. Then, two years ago, I started to document my family. It was just an idea, which lit up in my head when a colleague said to me: "Nobody has been able to portray the kind of family you come from." The work of the acclaimed photographer Richard Billingham, one of the star exhibits at the Sensation show at the Royal Academy and now hanging alongside mine in the I Am a Camera show, documents his alcoholic father. It's so much more interesting - and disturbing - than my pictures. It's incredibly blistering. Whereas, when somebody looks at my family on holiday, it's: "Oh, boooring." There's no edge there. To take snapshots of a picture-perfect family - who wants to see those?

Of course, when I started photographing my family two years ago, I never dreamt any of this would happen. I was just focussing my camera and my attention on everyday moments that make us laugh, and - I hoped - touch us all. If I have succeeded, it is in taking little ordinary moments of life and making them look interesting. Now, if you're on the beach with children, then you get nudity, again as any parent knows. That's life - though in any case not all of the pictures include nudity. Of the 15 images, just six include nakedness. And I honestly can't understand the fuss.

I was born in the United States, but I've lived in London for 10 years. But though I feel at home here now, I don't know how to begin to understand the reaction in the media and elsewhere. To me, it's very unsettling, and very strange. When these people see Old Master paintings of naked Cupids - what do they see there? My pictures, by comparison, are very unsensual, very unsexual. They're humorous, if anything. My children were happy to be in the photographs. More than that, they were proud. Nor can I imagine that they will feel differently when they are older - I would not have done.

Before the nightmare of the last few days, my career as a photographer had felt more like a fairy tale. I'd never dreamed my pictures might end up on the walls of the prestigious Saatchi Gallery. I thought that if I was lucky I might publish a book in 20 years' time. But then, by chance, Charles Saatchi's wife Kay saw my photographs, liked them, and asked if she could have one to enter in Baby 2000, a charity art auction, raising money for people with pregnancy-related problems.

Then another charity - Together, a charity for the homeless - asked if I would donate an image. I gave them the picture of my son Michael on a pedestal and his grandmother looking up at him with a smile. Charles Saatchi located that image, and purchased it, too. I met other people who saw my images and loved them. Gradually, I came to believe in myself: these pictures are good. Then in March, Saatchi came to my studio, and said he wanted to buy a collection of the photographs. I thought it was a joke. "This isn't a joke," he replied. And on the basis of those photographs, he decided to do an exhibition relating photography and painting, showing the fine line between the two.

Even then, I didn't realise how big the show was going to be. I was just touched that somebody liked my pictures - until I came to the gallery at the end of last year, and saw the pictures hanging on the wall before the opening. That was when I realised that something important was happening. Everybody who saw the pictures loved them. Just one person found them a bit disturbing, and that worried me. The funny thing is, that person has in the meantime become a close friend. Now she knows my family, and loves the images, too.

As an artist and as a mother, I can only look at the images the way I see them - as wholesome. So I just hope the current furore gets diluted by time, and gets back under the shelf. After all, if these simple, innocent pictures really become a new standard for what is unacceptable, for what is pornographic, that is really frightening, and not just for me.

We have to fight it. If we don't, then something really is wrong. Personally, I haven't slept for four days. I toss and turn, I have migraines, I'm worried about my children. I've told my children: "Somebody doesn't like Mama's photos." They cannot believe it. My seven-year-old daughter Emilee asked: "Why wouldn't somebody like your pictures, Mama? What kind of person would say that? They're beautiful!"

For me, this has been a big family event. At the opening in January, the whole clan was there to support me -- and my children, when they walked in, were so proud to see their images on the wall. That night, any doubt in my mind, if I had had any, which I didn't - would have been settled. My children and their friends were so proud of themselves, and of me.

As for the reaction in the British press: who can say? I don't think it's really about British society, it's only about the media. I heard about the story of Julia Somerville, who was questioned a few years ago because of pictures of her children naked in the bath. Maybe it's because the papers don't have anything to write about any more. When I saw the pictures in the News of the World - "Child Porn They Call Art", the headline said - they put black bands across my children's genitals. The pictures looked dirty for the first time. You can't even see their genitals, and yet there's still something dirty about the way those pictures look in the News of the World, whereas on the wall, they look pure and clean. Those big black boxes succeed in making my pictures look dirty.

The police are trying for a court order to remove the photographs on Thursday. I just hope that they don't succeed. The world I've brought my children up in is a free, positive world. All I want is for that not to change.

The Saatchi Gallery should be congratulated: it is standing up for childhood

Tuesday, 13 March 2001

One jerk of the knee is bad enough, but when you get two - in precisely opposed directions - things can very easily get out of hand. You can see the effect in the debate over the Metropolitan Police warning to the Saatchi Gallery that it faces prosecution unless it removes two photographs by Tierney Gearon of her naked children. On one side, the terror of censorship provokes alarms about hysteria and police over-reaction; on the other, the fear of paedophilia generates an adjectival froth of revulsion.

One jerk of the knee is bad enough, but when you get two - in precisely opposed directions - things can very easily get out of hand. You can see the effect in the debate over the Metropolitan Police warning to the Saatchi Gallery that it faces prosecution unless it removes two photographs by Tierney Gearon of her naked children. On one side, the terror of censorship provokes alarms about hysteria and police over-reaction; on the other, the fear of paedophilia generates an adjectival froth of revulsion.

But, whatever its origins, this is not a synthetic fuss. The pictures are unsettling, as the gallery must have known they would be. It's possible that the artist - a model turned photographer - is as guileless and bemused by the row as she presents herself to be. Even if that is true, it is surely safe to assume that Mr Saatchi and his gallery employees were more sophisticated about the ambiguity of these photographs.

It's hard to believe that no one raised the possibility that they might touch a nerve in a culture that is hypersensitive about the threatened innocence of childhood. Indeed, that's the point of them. Innocence is not a quality that can be measured quantitatively and written alongside the dimensions, date and materials of a work of art - it has to be thought about. These photographs oblige you to do just that.

The important question is a simple one, but one that must be taken seriously. Do the pictures put children at risk? We should start with these two children in particular. Ms Gearon's argument that they were excited and pleased to have their images displayed is a spurious one. We do not, for good reasons, treat young children as legitimate authorities on their own safety and protection.

But it is hard to feel that they've been exposed to anything worse than the familiar embarrassments that parents have always visited on their children. All the pictures were taken by someone they trusted, and not taken furtively but in the presence of other protective adults. They may well be embarrassed in time - but a teenager's prospective embarrassment is no matter for the state. If Ms Gearon is found guilty of taking an indecent photograph of a child then anyone who has ever snapped a picture of their child in the bath is guilty too. Is this the society we want? One hopes not.

Do the pictures, then, represent a hazard for children in general? Some have argued that, by "sending out the wrong signals", they do. Paedophiles will use such respectable exhibitions as a sanction for their own activities; I'm an artist, they will insist, not a pervert. This can't be ruled out - paedophiles will try anything, after all - but if this argument is true, any depiction of a naked child, in whatever medium, might also be found guilty of being an accessory to child abuse. What is to stop a paedophile from using a Botticelli painting or an illustration to The Water-Babies to underpin his claims to purely artistic motivation?

There is another kind of risk that needs to be taken into account - that of creating a culture in which children's bodies can be seen only as a potential crime scene. Ironically, the Saatchi row blows up just as the sociologist Frank Furedi publishes a book arguing that our fearfulness for our children is distorting their lives. He is talking principally about the conditions of benign house-arrest under which many children now grow up, but his arguments are relevant here too.

The Saatchi Gallery is right to resist the steady colonisation of children's bodies by anxiety, fearfulness and paranoia. In so doing, it should be congratulated for its bravery in standing up for the idea of innocence, not condemned for damaging it.

We want to be inspired, not mimicked

From an Institute of Ideas talk by Craig Mawdsley at the National Portrait Gallery given by the senior planner at Saatchi & Saatchi

Monday, 12 March 2001

It is a time of unprecedentedly low participation in conventional politics. More people vote to evict people from the Big Brother house than vote in many elections. So what do politicians do about all of this? They try to look more like us - William Hague drinks people under the table and all Cabinet ministers are card-carrying football supporters. They wear jeans and appear on Richard and Judy.

It is a time of unprecedentedly low participation in conventional politics. More people vote to evict people from the Big Brother house than vote in many elections. So what do politicians do about all of this? They try to look more like us - William Hague drinks people under the table and all Cabinet ministers are card-carrying football supporters. They wear jeans and appear on Richard and Judy.

But none of this works. It doesn't work, because these people aren't remotely ordinary. They're politicians. There's nothing ordinary about being the Prime Minister and something deeply disturbing about wanting to be leader of the Conservative Party since you were 15 years old. No one can carry it off because it's not them. By and large, these are extraordinary people who have achieved a lot and get little credit for it. They think that we would like them more if they were like us. But they're missing the point.

George W Bush is the conclusion of all this, and I don't think we want to go there. A man who was elected president because he was less well qualified to do the job than the other guy. "Yes, he's a bit dumb like us, and he's never left the country either, so we'll have him. At least we know that he's not smart enough to confuse us."

This pursuit of ordinariness renders the institutions these people represent completely obsolete. Prime ministers are meant to be special people with vision and leadership ability. They're not meant to be your next door neighbour. Take the royal family - The entire principle of royalty is that you have a mystique, a magic surrounding the institution that makes you believe they have a special significance. If they end up succeeding in saying "hey, I'm just like you," then you end up with a group of fairly unappealing individuals who cost us all a vast amount of money for no apparent return.

They understand this in Hollywood. Julia Roberts' publicists aren't falling over themselves to send her to Patagonia to clean toilets. Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones didn't get married in a registry office in Carmarthen to prove that they're just like us. These are people who are fascinating to us because they are extraordinary and lead lives that fascinate us, precisely because they are so different to our own. Catherine Zeta Jones is simultaneously us and what many of us want to be. She can appear in films wearing Prada and lounging in the California sunshine, but she still has a vestige of a Welsh accent that reminds us who she is - both familiar and extraordinary at the same time.

Even the most oft-quoted example, is not really an argument for ordinariness. Victoria and David Beckham are about as far from ordinary as you could ever imagine. You have a woman who has pretty much given up her life for the pursuit of fame and fortune. She's working extraordinarily hard to win the hearts and minds of 12-year-olds across the globe. She's one of the most successful marketing people of the last decade. Her husband is the most gifted football player of his generation, combining the looks of a fashion model with the skills and reflexes of a gifted sportsman.

These people are not remotely ordinary, and that's why they're fascinating. The problem the politicians have is that their undoubted talents are not really coming to the fore. The pursuit of ordinariness in all things prevents us from seeing what they're really for - delivering a vision and working hard to implement it.

It's important to work out what people's aspirations are and try to help them achieve them. That's what politicians should be for. Working out what people are like and then trying to look, talk and dress like them rather misses the point. People would rather be inspired than mimicked.

Don't tell police what they'd see in the National Gallery or Wallace Collection

Comment: Philip Hensher
Monday, 12 March 2001

Thomas Mann's short story Mario and the Magician, a fable on the rise of fascism in Italy, begins with a small episode that seems unconnected to the main theme but, on contemplation, is intimately linked to it.

Thomas Mann's short story Mario and the Magician, a fable on the rise of fascism in Italy, begins with a small episode that seems unconnected to the main theme but, on contemplation, is intimately linked to it.

It is directly taken from an episode from Mann's own life, when he took his family on holiday to an Italian beach resort. In the story, a liberal German family allows its eight-year-old daughter to take off her swimsuit, which is stiff with sand, to rinse it in the sea.

The Italians on the beach are outraged, and mount a public protest.

The narrator is puzzled.

"In the last decade our attitude towards the nude body and our feelings about it have undergone a fundamental change all over the world. There are things we 'never think about' any more, and among these is the freedom we had permitted to this by no means provocative little childish body. But in these parts it was taken as a challenge."

Not just, it seems, in the context of Mussolini's Italy.

Last week, the police mounted a raid on the Saatchi gallery in London, and there were suggestions that several works of art by Tierney Gearon, an American photographer, be removed. A number of complaints from members of the public had been received, and the police had come to the view that the display of Gearon's photographs of naked, masked children on a beach may contravene child-protection legislation.

This heavy-handed action roused, unsurprisingly, condemnation from across the board. Baroness Warnock said that she "couldn't imagine anything more terrible than police coming in and saying this photographer can't take pictures of their own children". Alan Yentob was "sure they are completely innocent pictures". Blake Morrison said, rightly, that our current touchstone for obscenity has become the photographing of a naked child, and that this would have baffled all previous ages.

It is certainly an extraordinary action to take, and, personally, I cannot see what rational person could view these pictures as obscene.

By the same standards, our galleries are absolutely full of works of art which might contravene the Children Acts; not just Mapplethorpe's deliberately sexual images of children, but Bronzino's National Gallery allegory, with some decidedly under-age and incestuous sexual contact going on.

And for heaven's sake, no one tell the Met about the Wallace Collection, stuffed as it is with French rococo putti, all intently observing the lewdest scenes. And there is, of course, some art of previous ages that no painter or photographer could possibly get away with now; there is a Fragonard in Munich, which depicts a barely pubescent girl masturbating with a dog.

Next to a fairly average Boucher, Ms Gearon's photographs seem statements of utter blamelessness. What's wrong with them, then, that they have aroused the ire of the coppers? Well, first, the items in the Saatchi gallery are photographs, and therefore, as Blake Morrison says, "real - in a way that a figurative painting could never be". But, second, there has been a shift in belief, one that is as evident in the defenders of the work of art as in its official detractors.

The only defence now available for a work of art of this sort is that it is "innocent"; that there is no conceivable sexual content in it that would be apparent to any serious investigator. I don't see it. Childhood sexuality is an insistent presence in these photographs, with their masks and their forward posing. The question ought to be not whether these photographs are innocent of sexual implication, but whether that is an improper subject for the investigation of serious art?

The innocence of children is the principal belief that paedophiles fervently share with their official prosecutors. Paedophiles need to believe that children are innocent; the great desire of sexual abusers is of initiation into knowledge. They are more unwilling than anyone to admit what everyone has always known - that children have some form of sexuality.

To say that is not to think that the potential for desire in children should on its own ever lead to sexual practice, but it is entirely proper to say that their sexuality is a reasonable subject for the investigation of artists, as well as scientists.

Of course, any photographer who corrupted his models should be prosecuted. But no one can possibly think that Ms Gearon, photographing her own children, did any such thing. And to say that artists should not be permitted, within these bounds, to talk about the subject with freedom is to sacrifice an important civil principle to a single dubious proposition.

What readings will be drawn from Ms Gearon's photographs, a Bronzino allegory, Lolita or, for that matter, Little Dorrit, by someone who is already deeply disturbed, no one can say. If these subjects cannot be talked about by artists, then we have begun to lose our belief in the value a civilised society should place on art altogether.

Art lovers and culture minister defend artist over 'family snapshots'

By David Lister, Media and Culture Editor
Monday, 12 March 2001

The Culture Secretary, Chris Smith, yesterday spoke out against censorship in art after police warnings that the gallery run by contemporary art collector Charles Saatchi could be prosecuted for exhibiting photographs of naked children.

The Culture Secretary, Chris Smith, yesterday spoke out against censorship in art after police warnings that the gallery run by contemporary art collector Charles Saatchi could be prosecuted for exhibiting photographs of naked children.

For eight weeks of the exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in north London the exhibition has attracted the attention only of those interested in contemporary art.

Then at the end of last week police visited the gallery, possibly studying art history, but equally possibly because they were tipped off by the News of the World, which ran a long excoriation of the exhibition at the weekend. Believing there was at least a case that the photographs constituted pornography rather than art, the Metropolitan Police have referred the case, concerning the exhibition called 'I am a Camera', to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The pictures involved are images by the London-based American photographer Tierney Gearon, 37. They depict her young children, Emilee, 7, and Michael, 4, clad only in masks.

Yesterday the debate moved from being between the gallery owner Charles Saatchi and the police to involving the government. The Culture Secretary, who has not seen the exhibition, became involved, warning of the dangers of censorship.

Speaking in a television interview Chris Smith said the key was to strike the difficult balance between the need to protect children from exploitation and maintain free speech.

"We must be very careful in this country before we start censoring things that are happening, either in newspapers or in art galleries," he told Sky's Sunday with Adam Boulton programme.

"We are a country that believes in free speech and we need to hold very fast to that principle. If there is material that is exploitative of children then obviously you need to have some degree of protection. Balancing those two objectives is what difficult questions of this kind have to be about."

Under the Protection of Children Act, it is an offence to take or exhibit "indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of a child."

Raids on art galleries are rare. In 1966, police raided the Victoria and Albert Museum to investigate pictures by 19th century artist Aubrey Beardsley. In 1970, under obscenity laws police confiscated sexually explicit lithographs by John Lennon from a gallery.

Six years ago David Hockney spoke out at the Royal Academy in defence of the depiction of naked children, saying it was a tradition in art.

And, among those defending the exhibition, Lady Warnock, the moral philosopher, said: "I can't imagine anything more terrible than police coming in and saying this photographer can't take pictures of her own children. It is something artists have always done." The feminist writer and art critic Germaine Greer also defended the pictures saying they could be misused, but then so could images of the Virgin Mary.

Alan Yentob, one of the BBC's most senior executives, added: "The implication of obscenity has only been made as a consequence of the vice squad going to the gallery in a lumbering way. Have they not got better things to do?"

But not everyone even among the liberal intelligentsia, was prepared to defend the photographs. Andreas Whittam Smith, president of the British board of Film Classification, was critical of their inclusion in the exhibition and critical of the Saatchi Gallery for not taking the pictures down following the police visit.

Mr Whittam Smith said: "People will try to argue this is another Lady Chatterley case, but it isn't. The Protection of Children Act is just that. It's there to protect children. The people from the Obscenity Squad at Scotland Yard are highly professional and in touch with public opinion. The fact that these pictures are taken by a mother and exhibited in a public gallery is a gift to paedophiles. It shows it as normal and official and validated.

Visitors to the gallery yesterday did not suffer any adverse reactions to the exhibition. Eric de Bruyn, 30, a fine art student said: "I feel English people always have a problem with nudity whether it's adult or children. There is nothing obscene about these photographs. I don't think they are adult masks the children are wearing. I see them just as cartoon masks." Simon Hodson, 28, a consultant, added: "It's totally far-fetched to call this pornographic material. If you ask any family with children they will all have snapshots of a similar nature."

Jenny Blyth, the curator at the Saatchi gallery, has said she was stunned when the police arrived. "There were a couple of images they wanted us to remove and if we did not remove then they would get a warrant and remove the exhibits themselves. I was so surprised I couldn't believe it. They said they were looking at the threat of prosecution."

Ms Gearon defended her images, saying they were completely innocent and were part of a two-year project of documenting her family. "My children are beautiful and these are beautiful, innocent pictures," she said. I am immensely proud of my exhibition. I do not accept that I have done anything wrong. When people ask if I am sexually exploiting my children I honestly don't know what to say. It simply isn't true."

Edward Booth-Clibborn, the publisher of a book on which the exhibition is based, said police had told him to pull all copies from book stores. "They warned me that the book... was in contravention of the obscenity acts," he said. "This is not child pornography. These are brilliant works of art."

The exhibition, which has been mounted in association with The Independent on Sunday, runs at the Saatchi Gallery for a further two weeks.

Art world defends Saatchi child photos

By Cole Moreton
Sunday, 11 March 2001

The art world responded in dismay yesterday to news that police had raided the Saatchi Gallery in London and threatened to close down an exhibition that includes photographs of naked children.

The art world responded in dismay yesterday to news that police had raided the Saatchi Gallery in London and threatened to close down an exhibition that includes photographs of naked children.

"I'm all in favour of the police becoming art critics as long as criminals can become magistrates," said Jake Chapman, whose partnership with his brother Dinos has taken the modern art world by storm in recent years. "Art criticism should not be based on the Obscenity Act, which is as melodramatic as its name implies."

Scotland Yard's obscene publications unit has told the gallery to remove pictures by the American artist Tierney Gearon before it next opens on Thursday or face charges. The Crown Prosecution Service believes images of the photographer's children naked on a beach and urinating into snow may contravene child protection legislation.

The gallery does not intend to remove them. Last night artists and critics were unanimous in their condemnation of the raid, and warned that it could create a dangerous precedent that threatened artistic freedoms.

"I am sure they are completely innocent pictures," said Alan Yentob, the BBC's director of drama. "The implication of obscenity has only been made as a consequence of the vice squad going to the gallery in a lumbering way. Have they not got better things to do?"

Photographers had always been fascinated by the innocence of youth, he said. "I was very surprised that that such action should take place in a sophisticated city like London."

David Grobb of Eyestorm, an art dealer specialising in popular editions of work by contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst, agreed that the pictures were "pretty innocent. I'd have thought paedophiles would get more turned on by naturist magazines".

The images came across as "a celebration of family life", said Paul Wombell, director of the Photographers' Gallery in London. "A lot of parents take photographs of their children at this kind of age on holiday and they rarely have clothes on."

Jon Norton, the artist, banker and husband of Mo Mowlam, said: "In society, we need to have the greatest freedom of expression of art. And therefore art should never be constrained, however shocking or disturbing it is to society."

The critic Germaine Greer said the pictures did not represent "anything that other people don't do". They could be misused, she said, but then so could images of the Virgin Mary. "The annoying thing is that all the people who think they are not going to like it will go along to the gallery and make a nuisance of themselves - and the rest of the people who might understand it will probably stay away."

Karen Wright, editor of the magazine Modern Painters, said the CPS would be setting a "dangerous precedent" if it chose to pursue a case. "The masks used in some of the photos transform them into something quite eye-catching and eerie, but I don't think they are obscene or titillating."

Jake Chapman warned against an over-reaction to the actions of "a group of unsophisticated, superstitious police officers. They encourage avant-garde protestations and make it more pleasurable to make more crude art."

Naked nonsense

Sunday, 11 March 2001

Acting (it would appear) on the promptings of a Murdoch-owned tabloid newspaper, officers of Scotland Yard's Obscene Publications Unit have visited London's Saatchi Gallery and warned that they will return to seize pictures from the current exhibition, "I am a Camera" (sponsored, incidentally, by The Independent on Sunday), unless some offending photographs are removed. Meanwhile, other police from North Wales have asked the BBC for a videotape of "winker" Anne Robinson's appearance on Room 101 following complaints of anti-Welsh racism. What a joy to know that our boys in blue have so much time on their hands.

Acting (it would appear) on the promptings of a Murdoch-owned tabloid newspaper, officers of Scotland Yard's Obscene Publications Unit have visited London's Saatchi Gallery and warned that they will return to seize pictures from the current exhibition, "I am a Camera" (sponsored, incidentally, by The Independent on Sunday), unless some offending photographs are removed. Meanwhile, other police from North Wales have asked the BBC for a videotape of "winker" Anne Robinson's appearance on Room 101 following complaints of anti-Welsh racism. What a joy to know that our boys in blue have so much time on their hands.

Only they haven't, of course. Like all the public services, the police are hard-pressed trying to follow their worthwhile duties, without time- and resource-wasting exercises such as these. The photographs in question are the work of the American photographer Tierney Gearon, and depict her children, naked, wearing masks and urinating on snow. Reprinted several times in broadsheet newspapers and glossy magazines, they are undoubtedly provocative; to some they are disturbing. That is the point of them. It is doubtless why Charles Saatchi bought them, and why his gallery displays them.

But these photos are in a different league from the illegal and non-consensual violent images of children available on the internet. To compare them is not only to insult the artist and her children - it is to devalue the damage done to children by real paedophiles. The gallery's curator, Jenny Blyth, remarked, "They [the photographs] are funny and delightful. Tierney Gearon is totally devoted to her children. They are snapshots of children at play. They are not depraved in any way."

Of course, there is a fine line between art, pornography and an innocent depiction of reality. It would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise. It is a line of which Norman Tebbit was well aware when he compared Rupert Murdoch's Page Three girls to the nude paintings of Rubens. We must be vigilant about the blurring of that line. But this stand against the photographs in the Saatchi Gallery - or against Ms Robinson's remarks on the Welsh - makes the law look an ass.

CPS to consider charges over naked children in photographic exhibition

By Jade Garrett and Elaine Cole
Saturday, 10 March 2001

The Crown Prosecution Service is considering whether to take action against the Saatchi Gallery over an American photographer's exhibition containing naked pictures of her children

The Crown Prosecution Service is considering whether to take action against the Saatchi Gallery over an American photographer's exhibition containing naked pictures of her children

Police told the gallery that the photographs of Tierney Gearon's children naked on the beach and urinating into the snow on a skiing holiday may contravene child protectionlegislation.

Jenny Blyth, the curator of the gallery, confirmed that police had visited the I am a Camera exhibition and interviewed her and Gearon. "The police said they were acting on what they described as 'widespread' complaints about the exhibition, which the police felt contravened the Child Protection Act," she said. She claimed the police had told her to remove the pictures by next Thursday or they would return with a warrant.

A spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police said officers had made two visits to the gallery, but denied ordering that the pictures be removed. "We were concerned about the nature of some of the photos," she said. "We have not ordered their removal as we have no power to do that unless a law has been contravened, but we have sent a report to the Crown Prosecution Service for a decision on whether to prosecute."

Ms Blyth said that the gallery would continue to exhibit Gearon's pictures, which have been widely published in magazines and national newspapers. "The two pictures that the police have commented upon are harmless photographs of her children disporting themselves on holiday," she said. "They lack any prurient interest and are neither lewd, nor sexually provocative." She said that any prosecution would be a breach of an undertaking given to Parliament when the Children Act was passed.

I am a Camera, which is sponsored by The Independent on Sunday, has been at the Saatchi Gallery since the middle of January and has attracted up to 3,000 visitors at the weekends. The gallery has extended its run because of high public demand.

Saatchi, pure and simple

The brothers have taken revenge on their eponymous agency. In a rare interview, Maurice Saatchi talks about how he is an ad man reborn

By Jade Garrett
Tuesday, 20 February 2001

"Pop star" is not a description you would readily apply to Lord (Maurice) Saatchi of Staplefield. But that's how one of his chief executives describes him. "Pop star", "hustler", "the arch-simplifier"... the list goes on. Everyone has an opinion, but few of the descriptions seem to sit well with the man himself.

"Pop star" is not a description you would readily apply to Lord (Maurice) Saatchi of Staplefield. But that's how one of his chief executives describes him. "Pop star", "hustler", "the arch-simplifier"... the list goes on. Everyone has an opinion, but few of the descriptions seem to sit well with the man himself.

M&C Saatchi enters its seventh year with the satisfaction that it has outstripped Saatchi & Saatchi, the agency the brothers founded in 1970 and were subsequently ousted from, for the first time in a new business league table. As a business story, it received blanket coverage in the national press; to Lord Saatchi, it had an "air of inevitability about it".

A combination of hard-nosed determination and an inherent fear of failure is what pulled in £250m last year - not forgetting a little help from some of the best top-level contacts in the business. Lord Saatchi's associates will tell you he spends practically every night out, entertaining clients. Staff will tell you how the agency's reception area is continually redecorated before important clients' visits.

Lord Saatchi's standards are what prised a slice of the £25m Sainsbury's account away from a rival agency that had held it for 20 years. He also refused to accept that his agency had been turned down for the £40m Rover account when it came up for review. He called the troops back to the agency in the middle of the night to rework the pitch, and eventually won.

I'm sitting in a glass-walled meeting-room on the seventh floor of M&C Saatchi's Golden Square offices, looking out towards the London Eye, waiting for my first glimpse of those famous specs. This is where the agency's five partners reside: Maurice and Charles Saatchi, Jeremy Sinclair, Bill Muirhead and David Kershaw.

Two minutes later, Lord Saatchi appears and instantly starts negotiating the sort of piece he wants me to write before telling me that all personal questions are off-limits.

For the record, he is the son of Iraqi Jews who were forced to rebuild their lives in post-war Britain. He has been married to the writer Josephine Hart - the author of Damage and Oblivion - for nearly 20 years. It's his second marriage. And he has one young stepson and a son from his marriage to Hart.

He is fiercely protective of his private life, and the "pop star" tag is undoubtedly not one he would care to promote. But you can see why it's applied. Despite his insistence on singling out other members of the management team for praise, he remains the star attraction at M&C, in the eyes of both the staff that work for him and the clients he serves.

In six years, M&C has become the UK's sixth largest agency, one place above S&S, with a staff of more than 250 and an international network of 10 offices. Fronting the agency today are the joint chief executives, Moray MacLennan and Nick Hurrell, and managing director, Tim Duffy. Chairman James Lowther and creative director Simon Dicketts complete the top-level line-up. While MacLennan may be comfortable admitting that under the circumstances it's difficult not to feel smug, Lord Saatchi is more cautious.

What was his reaction on beating Saatchi & Saatchi?

"It was noted," he says.

But the reality must have been much sweeter than he's letting on. In 1994, Maurice and Charles Saatchi suffered the indignity of seeing the agency they founded wrested from them by an American investment fund that controlled the majority of shares. Maurice resigned after being stripped of his executive role, and Charles followed. At the time, it was described as the biggest bust-up in advertising history.

Senior Saatchi & Saatchi management and multimillion-pound business followed them out the door. In January 1995, The New Saatchi Agency was born (later to become M&C Saatchi) and its launch made the national News at Ten.

Then in April 1995, British Airways joined the ranks. One condition to winning the account was that the brothers opened three other offices in New York, Australia and Hong Kong. So that's what they did.

M&C was founded with the slogan "brutal simplicity of thought", and Lord Saatchi has built an agency that prides itself on being able to get straight to the point. "There is an astonishing amount of waffle and vagueness, a lack of clarity. Precise thinking and simplicity are the qualities we admire."

The witchcraft comes, he says, in turning simple thinking into striking images. "I find walking into this building an elevating experience. The average age is 28, so it has a very exuberant atmosphere. It is non-political in a way that I have never experienced before. There are no corridor conversations. You can say what you really believe without feeling that it is going to cause hurt or resentment. There is none of the electric tension that exists in most corporate meetings."

Second time around, Lord Saatchi has binned the management books. He maintains that there was no plan other than to make the agency the opposite of everything that Saatchi & Saatchi stood for.

"Paranoia and fear motivate us pretty strongly," adds MacLennan. "It comes from the way the company was born. A spotlight was on us, everybody waiting for us to fail."

At the time of M&C's launch, there were 35 legal writs between the two agencies. "Saatchi & Saatchi tried to strangle us at birth, tie us up in legal matters so that we couldn't operate," says MacLennan.

But it's the lack of a guiding principle that critics home in on today. While other agencies refuse to advertise to children and shun the multimillion pound cigarette or alcohol accounts on principle, what is M&C's enduring business philosophy?

"It's true to say there isn't one," says Lord Saatchi. "The company started without a philosophy, without a plan. It was more like a tidal wave that took us along with it. Aimlessness has been an asset because we don't have the linear ambitions of Saatchi & Saatchi, a company driven by its aim to become the number one agency in the world. It was obsessed by league tables and its position in them. We have raised aimlessness to a high art."

The agency stands accused of always chasing the money and ignoring the issues - ditching its Health Department anti-smoking campaigns in favour of Silk Cut, and, after famously helping the Tories to power, they now work with the Central Office of Information. Lord Saatchi doesn't see the harm in this, and compares it to the work of a barrister. "The idea of being choosy about your clients according to some philosophy is very pompous."

The reason he no longer works with the Tories, he says, is because 22 years was long enough.

And what of the ads? While other agencies have made their names on the back of a single client - Levi's for Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Volkswagen for BMP DDB and Tango for HHCL and Partners - what single ad campaign defines M&C? "There are no defining campaigns," says Lord Saatchi, "because we are eclectic. We do the press advertising for Currys and Dixons, which is certainly the best retail advertising in the country, alongside posters for 'Euro No' and TV campaigns for police recruitment and British Airways. It's very varied, but I hope what they all share is clear thinking."

"They're in for the quick kill," says one of Saatchi's original shareholders. "They are good hustlers with big names that do good work, but I'm not sure it can be classed as great work."

Thirty years in the business are said to have mellowed Lord Saatchi considerably. The man who once famously said "It's not enough for us to succeed, others must fail", now has words like "softly, softly" applied to him. But while M&C might pride itself on an open approach and clarity, Lord Saatchi can be frustratingly vague. What does the future hold? He'd like more of the same. Why is the agency so unloved in the industry? He's unaware that it is. Can he imagine a time when he won't be so involved in the running of M&C? Not really.

And most importantly, what does he make of the rumour that M&C is soon to surrender to the advances of the French giant Publicis? After all, the two already work together on BA. He says he hasn't heard that one. Odd, then, that his two chief executives have. If he were to sell, would Publicis be an obvious choice? You guessed it, he doesn't know.

But what is behind his loathing of being interviewed? He'll tell you it's because the real glory belongs to his team, but a big part of it harks back to something Charles once said. His elder brother hasn't given an interview about the business in over 20 years, some say because he is worried people will be disappointed with the real him.

And no amount of probing will ever convince Lord Saatchi to tell you anything he doesn't want to. For him too, perhaps, the perception is reality.