Philip Hoare: Arise, Sir Damien Hirst, and welcome to the Establishment

Sunday, 30 November 2003

Just how rebellious is contemporary art? Last week the sensational work of the Chapman brothers was defended by British justice when District Judge Brian Loosely sentenced "comedy terrorist" Aaron Barschak to 28 days in prison for tipping a pot of red paint over Jake Chapman and his Goya-derived The Rape of Creativity. It seems that the YBAs (young British artists) are now part of the establishment they once sought to subvert. At the same time, it was revealed that Damien Hirst had bought back key works from Charles Saatchi, having disapproved of the way in which they were displayed at the latter's South Bank gallery. Where Hirst once needed Saatchi's patronage, he can now afford to reclaim work for his own collection (not least because his last show at Hoxton's White Cube 2 sold out within a day, accruing £11m in the process).

Just how rebellious is contemporary art? Last week the sensational work of the Chapman brothers was defended by British justice when District Judge Brian Loosely sentenced "comedy terrorist" Aaron Barschak to 28 days in prison for tipping a pot of red paint over Jake Chapman and his Goya-derived The Rape of Creativity. It seems that the YBAs (young British artists) are now part of the establishment they once sought to subvert. At the same time, it was revealed that Damien Hirst had bought back key works from Charles Saatchi, having disapproved of the way in which they were displayed at the latter's South Bank gallery. Where Hirst once needed Saatchi's patronage, he can now afford to reclaim work for his own collection (not least because his last show at Hoxton's White Cube 2 sold out within a day, accruing £11m in the process).

I'm not a big fan of the Chapmans' brutal vision, although in person they're perfectly charming. Their art reflects a cynicism in contemporary culture - yet acts as a critique of it, too, given the violence of our times, and our continuing obsession with consumption, image and celebrity. One of most sensational works of modern art I saw last week was Michael Jackson's mugshot, taken on his arrest for suspected child abuse. The bizarre, asexualised, pantomimic face with Joan Crawford eyebrows stares quizzically, and speaks volumes for our age. Jackson's own weird, airbrushed transition from blackness to whiteness resembles nothing so much as one of Cindy Sherman's self-transformation photo-pieces, in which the American artist casts herself in characters ranging from whores to clowns.

But perhaps there's a new faith in art. For his White Cube show, Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, Hirst installed blood-spattered vitrines filled with medical symbols of the 12 martyred Apostles; and although many might take issue with his severed cow's head, there was something authentically moving about the overtly unironic manner with which Hirst treated these Christian themes, freighted as they are with 2,000 years of faith. Similarly, Bill Viola's video pieces, The Passions, at the National Gallery are proving the pulling power of emotionally and spiritually direct art. Perhaps we are finally over all that Nineties irony. Perhaps that's why the V&A's Gothic show has been so successful; and perhaps it is why Olafur Eliasson's "transformative utopian installation" at Tate Britain is one of the biggest draws in town.

And perhaps it is why artists such as Rachel Howard - brought up as a Quaker and currently showing her cruciform photographs in Dering Street - and the Mancunian feminist Linder, the muse of Morrissey, are producing gripping new work. Linder's latest project is sponsored by the British Council and opens in Prague next spring. Like Sherman, she is fascinated by identity and sexuality; only her work adopts personae from the edge of religious belief: bearded female saints or the Mother of the Shakers, Ann Lee. Others might find such performances extreme; I find them essentially restorative - not least because I've spent the past three years writing about utopian beliefs. And to paraphrase Moz, Heaven knows we need a new utopia now.

Gore beats grind

I've just spent my second week back at school. It's a strange sensation: I keep expecting to be told not to run down the corridors or (as I was taught by monks) to hear the swish of a black cassock in pursuit as my mates and I are discovered smoking in the cricket nets. In fact, I've been commissioned by Hampshire County Council's literature development officer, Emma Dolman, to teach creative writing, and my classes have ranged from sweet seven-year-olds at Sholing Infants to the rather more intimidating teenagers of Hamble Community College. (Actually a well-behaved bunch: one of them even came up and shook my hand, an act which, given the strict codes of cool operating in school society, was a true honour.)

The premise for these sorties is the subject of my last book, the vast Victorian military hospital which stood at Netley, on the eastern banks of Southampton Water. The idea is to elicit fiction from fact and to get the little darlings thinking laterally. I've realised that to silence a group of restive infants, all you have to do is to mention amputated limbs - there's nothing they like better than a bit of gore and a gruesome ghost story. Bitterne C of E Juniors particularly liked the tale of the Grey Lady, a Victorian nurse who threw herself off the chapel tower after mistakenly administering a fatal dose to her soldier-patient-lover, while the tougher nuts of Hamble preferred the macabre Pathé film from 1918 of shell-shock victims at Netley. And when we took a class from Townhill Juniors to the site itself - now the Royal Victoria Country Park - they were most excited by the cemetery.

Taken out of the daily grind of the National Curriculum, you get the sense that you are freeing young minds. That afternoon, one of the boys turned to his teacher and said, "I think Mr Philip is the best person in the world." What do you say to that? The experience has impressed on me the extraordinary things we expect teachers to do. They're entrusted with our children, shouted at by parents and beleaguered by league tables, Sats and targets. Their hours get longer as their pay gets shorter. Yet they have the responsibility of rearing a new generation.

What really brought it home to me was the fact that, as the Townhill kids wandered towards the beach, their supervisor pulled out a life preserver and had to instruct her charges how to use it should they start drowning (even though the tide was so low that they would have had to wade through mud for 30m before they got wet). It is difficult to understand a society which undervalues these professionals while its fat-cat company directors display a sense of responsibility which begins and ends with taking a 10 per cent cut in their million-pound bonuses when the shareholders cut up rough.

On my list of things to do, watching a rugby match at 9am on a Saturday ranks somewhere below root canal treatment. However, after an early-morning call from my excited sister in Sydney - she'd flown out to join her husband and sons who had tickets for the final - I felt duty-bound to spend nearly two hours watching 30 grown men wrestling in a muddy Australian field. After about half an hour, I think I'd worked out the rules. I even cared who won. But I do wonder what it says about our priorities when it is proposed that pupils get time off to watch the victory parade, while their peers who wanted to go on the anti-Bush march were threatened with punishment for truancy.

Janet Street-Porter is away

If it weren't for Saatchi's money, Hirst would probably be pickling herrings

From The Times

November 29, 2003

Ben Macintyre THE RELATIONSHIP between artist and patron is inherently unstable, and that between Damien Hirst and the art collector Charles Saatchi has now disintegrated in a miasma of lurid polka dots and bits of dead cow.

The advertising guru bought some 50 of Hirst’s works, starting with a medicine cabinet in 1990, and showcased him as the most inventive of the Britart crowd; Hirst became exceedingly rich and famous. But despite the formaldehyde, something was rotting. Hirst, it seems, came to see Saatchi not as a connoisseur, but merely as a shopper, a businessman “who only recognises art with his wallet”; Saatchi did not consult Hirst on the exhibition of his works in County Hall. Each man believed he had created the other. It is a familiar pattern: the patron who comes to see his protégé as an ungrateful prima donna; the artist who regards his patronising patron as a philistine. Hirst has now huffily reacquired a number of his works.

The Saatchi-Hirst relationship was one of the few examples of a genuinely successful patron-artist collaboration in modern Britain. Whatever the artistic value of a pickled shark, their much-hyped alliance created a new audience for art, and a buzz that went far beyond the flies breeding inside the head of a dead cow.

Hirst is one of the most popular artists alive, yet little of the popularity has rubbed off on Saatchi. In Britain we tend to regard privately funded art as somehow corrupt, an opportunity for the rich to show off that can only undermine artistic integrity. We instinctively dislike philanthropists (witness the hostility faced by Henry Tate) and distrust patrons as modern Medicis, using art to increase their social or political cachet. We like nothing better than to kick gift-horses in the mouth. The desire to nurture or rescue what we perceive to be beautiful is a universal aesthetic, whether this involves collecting matchboxes or diced sheep. Britons are notorious hoarders, yet we habitually question the motives of rich collectors.

The antipathy towards patrons goes back to the 18th century, when commerce replaced patronage as the underwriter of creativity. Samuel Johnson despised artists who relied on the rich man’s largesse. His dictionary definition: “Patron: One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.” The market alone, he believed, should dictate artistic success. That view was echoed loudly by artists who had already made good. Just as Hirst chose to diss Saatchi only once he was well and truly established, so Alexander Pope sniffed at lesser poets who scrabbled for preferment (once he was rich enough not to have to do so himself):

Like the vile straw that blows around the streets The needy poet sticks to all he meets.

Royal patronage has not been an important factor in British art for at least a century, yet the merest whiff of it is enough to elicit scorn. The mockery sometimes directed at the Poet Laureateship comes from the assumption that anything written to order is, by definition, degraded.

Yet private patronage has sustained and rescued many great artists, and still does in the US. John Dryden, William Blake and Leonardo da Vinci all lived on handouts without compromising their artistic integrity. James Joyce would never have completed Finnegans Wake without the sustained financial support of Harriet Shaw Weaver, the American benefactor who continued to write the cheques when everyone else had given up on him. Maecenas, the wealthy Roman statesman of the 7th decade BC, went out of his way to patronise young, penniless writers: which is why we have Virgil and Horace.

Wordsworth’s contemporaries believed that a stipend from a lordly admirer doused the fires of his early radicalism, but the reverse argument is just as strong. Without Saatchi’s cash in his pocket, Hirst might have paused before preserving his shark and settled instead for a more conservative pickled herring. Would the market have come to embrace Hirst’s dissected sheep without Saatchi’s enthusiastic and extravagant support? That Saatchi may have been acting from commercial motives is entirely irrelevant. Patrons do not create art, but they can mould taste, which helps.

Almost all patrons, with rare exceptions such as John Paul Getty II and Harriet Weaver, are at least partly motivated by self-aggrandisement. Those wealthy individuals who sponsored elaborately beautiful side-chapels in medieval cathedrals seldom did so for aesthetic reasons or to provide employment to struggling artists, but rather to increase their kudos and limit their stay in Purgatory.

Individual, risk-taking art patrons are a vital counterbalance to the potentially deadening effect of art reliant solely on state subsidy and popular taste. Arts councils tend not to attract gamblers, and it is surely no accident that some of the greatest collectors have also been canny entrepreneurs, who knew how to spot a trend ahead of time. Such individuals are rare and undervalued in Britain, but at a time of shrinking arts subsidies, they are increasingly vital.

The Hirst-Saatchi story demonstrates that, however tense it may be, the collaboration between artist and patron can be fruitful and mutually beneficial; even when it falls apart, for the value of Hirst’s work will only increase as a result of their recent tiff. This, then, is a story with a happy ending for all involved. Except the cow. And the sheep. And the shark.

Hirst deal to buy back work from Saatchi is 'ploy to stoke up price'

By Vincent Graff, Media Editor
Thursday, 27 November 2003

The conceptual artist Damien Hirst, who has embarked on a spending spree to buy back some of his most important works, was accused yesterday by experts of trying to stoke up the price of his art.

The conceptual artist Damien Hirst, who has embarked on a spending spree to buy back some of his most important works, was accused yesterday by experts of trying to stoke up the price of his art.

Overnight, Hirst has become one of the largest owners of his own works, after he agreed a deal to repurchase 12 pieces he had sold to the advertising guru and art collector Charles Saatchi.

The deal was made through White Cube, the gallery which, through Hirst's dealer Jay Jopling, has sold all his work.

In a terse statement, a spokesman for the Saatchi Gallery confirmed: "We have sold 12 Hirsts back to White Cube." The Gallery refused "for contractual reasons" to identify the works in question, but revealed details of what the haul does not include. "So that visitors to The Saatchi Gallery at County Hall aren't confused, they will still see The Shark, The Sheep, The Dots, The Butterflies, The Fish, The Flies and Hymn, the 20ft anatomical figure."

There was no word from Hirst's camp but it is thought that among the pieces that have changed hands are some of his most extreme, including his pickled, sliced pig, a rotting cow's head and flies in a pool of blood.

Neither side was prepared to comment on the value of the deal, which is likely to be a seven-figure sum. Recently at auction, a Hirst work entitled Something Solid Beneath The Surface of All Creatures Great And Small, a large glass and steel cabinet featuring mounted skeletons of small animals, was sold in the United States for $1.6m (£940,000), twice the amount it was expected to raise.

Hirst is already a rich man: a few months ago he made £11m within a fortnight of the opening of his latest exhibition, Romance in the Age of Uncertainty. In the past, he has described Saatchi, the man above all others who has bumped up prices of his works, as a businessman who "only recognises art with his wallet". But yesterday, the artist's motives were questioned by art experts, who suspect his surprise move was prompted by concerns more financial than aesthetic.

Relations between Hirst and Saatchi have recently been strained and the artist may have feared that his former friend and mentor might put all his Hirst works on to the open market at the same time.

Anna Somers Cocks, founder and group editorial director of The Art Newspaper, said: "I think we can take it for granted that he has done this to avoid a flood of his own works coming on to the market ... If a dumping operation took place, it would be very damaging."

Tom Lubbock, art critic of The Independent, said he had never in modern times heard of an artist attempting to recover such a large haul of his early works. He said: "Charles Saatchi has got rid of large amounts of work before, and he has harmed a lot of people's prices."

Hirst is not the first artist to have a desire to buy back his own works. J M W Turner bought examples of his early oeuvre, though perhaps for more noble motives. The art dealer Lowell Libson, who specialises in 18th and 19th-century British art, said Turner was driven by a mission to make sure his art was not hidden from public view in the private collections of the rich. "He was assiduous in reacquiring work when it suited him. In middle age, he was conscious of his own work, and he took a long-term view about how he wanted the public to see his art after his death."

Most artists have a problem quite unlike Hirst's or Turner's. Having conceived the works, they are unable to sell them in the first place.

The love affair that ended in a right pickle

From The Times

November 26, 2003

By Godfrey Barker

“HIRST thought he made Saatchi. Saatchi thought he made Hirst. There’s all you need for a terminal quarrel between lovers,” a Bond Street dealer close to both men said yesterday.

The quarrel has been three years in the making. “He only recognises art with his wallet,” Hirst stormed about Saatchi and his market manipulations in 2001. Quarrel turned to fury in April when Hirst went to the opening Saatchi show, “dedicated to Damian Hirst, the Alpha-Male of Contemporary British Art, Constantly Re-examining the Beauty Found in Death”, and saw the 45 or so Hirsts that Saatchi owns mostly lost in a rabbit warren of small brown County Hall backrooms down lonely corridors, where many thought they looked ineffective and absurd.

Hirst, who had no say in the exhibition, told Saatchi what he thought. He told him how he should be shown: sky-high and dramatic as in the yawning white spaces of the White Cube gallery in Hoxton. He added that he did not care to see himself mixed up with and hidden behind works by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn, Sarah Lucas and Gavin Turk.

Saatchi hit back nastily in Time Out: “Many in the art world, artists included, think they can only be seen in pristine white space . . . It’s time to break out of the White Cube timewarp . . . (art like that) condemns itself to a worryingly limited lifespan.”

Since then, Hirst has left the Saatchi retrospective off his curriculum vitae and Saatchi has more or less stopped buying Hirst. A sale has been on the cards all summer.

As Hirst’s No 1 patron since 1990 (when he paid £1,000 for a medicine cabinet) drops out of the market, is this the moment that the artist’s sliced cattle, embalmed sheep, insectocutors and tanks drop in value around the world? “No one wins,” was the instant response of one Bond Street Hirst man yesterday. “It’s bad for both of them.”

The risk is that 45 Hirsts all sold back to White Cube will bring a glut on the market. But given that they are mostly high-quality early Hirsts, made before the repetitious flood of spot-and-spin paintings, there should be no problem. There is a long line of international buyers.

Beyond that, Hirst and the dealer Jay Jopling are cash-rich and do not need to sell in any hurry. Saatchi may be providing the market with an unrepeatable chance to mop up highly desirable work.

For Saatchi — “he believes he can affect art values with buying power and he still believes he can do it” sneered Hirst in a recent book — there will, short term, be a fat, fat profit. He is almost certainly not selling back to White Cube at cost and paid under £10,000 for most of the works.

For Hirst, it may be the best thing to cut his ties with the patron who has made him and manipulated him and to rebase himself and his art on a broad international market.

COWS, PIGS, SPOTS AND SPIN

Medicine cabinets: display cases filled with empty bottles

Shark gets away as Hirst feuds with Saatchi

From The Times

November 26, 2003

Artist takes offence and buys back most of his work from the collector who made his name

By Dalya Alberge

CHARLES SAATCHI, Britain’s best-known collector of modern art, has sold almost his entire collection of work by Damien Hirst back to the artist and his dealer.

In an extraordinary secret deal, Britain’s most successful conceptual artist and Jay Jopling, his dealer, have bought back the bulk of the collection — although Mr Saatchi has kept hold of the artist’s best-known work, the shark pickled in formaldehyde that he commissioned in 1991.

The sale follows a mounting feud between the two men over how the works were displayed in the Saatchi Gallery.

Mr Saatchi began collecting Hirst long before anyone else was interested in him, buying up most of the artist’s oeuvre, from the trademark medicine cabinets to “spot” paintings among dozens of works. Now he has sold back the bulk of the collection, with the rotting cow’s head and flies in a pool of blood and a pickled sliced pig among the most famous pieces.

Both men are likely to have made a considerable profit from the deal. The rotting head alone could be worth up to $2 million (£1.4 million). The collector is thought to have acquired it for less than £50,000 while it would have cost Hirst a few hundred pounds to make.

Hirst can easily afford those prices now. Last September, within 15 days of opening his latest exhibition, Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, he personally made £11 million.

Such is the demand for his work that the top-price exhibit — Charity, a 22ft-high replica of a 1960s Spastics Society collection doll — was selling for £1.5 million. Last week, his display case filled with animal and bird skeletons sold for a record auction price of almost £700,000 in New York.

Mr Saatchi, Hirst and Mr Jopling were unavailable for comment yesterday and a spokesman for the gallery said: “We can’t go into any detail.”

The story emerged from New York after a dealer in contemporary art, Josh Baer, published a line about the “rumoured” story in a newsletter, The Baer Facts. He told The Times yesterday: “Jay did confirm that this deal had happened, that it was virtually the entire collection that had been sold.”

Several observers said that the sale comes after a rift between the two men over the display of Hirst’s work at the gallery at County Hall. One said: “There was a big falling-out between Hirst and Saatchi over the presentation at the gallery. Hirst felt the way the works were interspersed with other artists did him no justification.”

Relations between the two had soured after Hirst described his patron as a “childish” businessman who “only recognises art with his wallet”.

The artist turned down Mr Saatchi’s invitation to become involved in his gallery, which opened this year, while the collector’s lack of interest in buying anything from Hirst’s latest show was noticed.

Mr Saatchi’s monopoly of the work of Hirst and other young British artists has led to a huge gap in the Tate’s collection. Public funds could not match the prices he could pay.

When the Tate announced plans for a Hirst retrospective, Mr Saatchi threw them into disarray by letting it be known that he planned a full-scale exhibition of his Hirsts, including the pickled shark and Hymn, the enormous anatomical toy that he reputedly bought for £1 million. The Tate scrapped its plans, but Mr Saatchi never staged his show.

In securing a deal that avoids the works being sold on the open market, Hirst has regained control of his work. The artist is seen as so powerful that he no longer needs Mr Saatchi’s patronage.

This is not the first time that Mr Saatchi has fallen out with an artist he has nurtured. His collecting activities are widely regarded as a barometer of the art market. There have been bitter attacks from artists who have felt betrayed by him. In 1989, he was denounced by Sean Scully for selling nine of his paintings, although interest from his one-time patron had promoted the artist’s name and prices.

Recently Mr Saatchi has been turning his attention to other artists, particularly British and European painters.

REVERBERATIONS; Shocking! Offensive! But Being Pleasant Is Beside the Point

NYTimes

By JOHN ROCKWELL

Published: November 14, 2003

Although the phrase ''shock and awe'' has become as clichéd as the suffix -gate, it has dutifully been evoked in the British press to describe this year's Turner Prize entries. Actually, it is really only the entry by the brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman -- some think it's the favorite -- that has evoked, or provoked, that phrase. And awe has a lot less to do with it than shock.

Their entry, a kind of homage to Goya, is on display until Jan. 11, along with those of the three other contestants, at the Tate Modern in London. The Tate sponsors this competition for youngish British artists, with the winner to be announced on Dec. 7.

Around the gallery hang 80 reproductions of etchings from Goya's ''Disasters of War'' series, with clown faces superimposed over the original heads. In the middle are two painted bronze sculptures. One, ''Death,'' includes what looks like a couple of inflatable sex toys performing unprintable acts, complete with a vibrator. The other, ''Sex,'' is a decomposed human corpse and other animal parts hanging from a tree, with your basic assortment of maggots and ''flies, spiders, lizards, mice, rats, snails, worms and centipedes,'' in the tally of The London Observer. And a few children's toys, for spice.

All this has excited the annual Turner Prize outcry, ritualistic by now, in the British tabloids. Jake Chapman has added to the hysteria in an interview to be broadcast tonight on Channel Four in Britain, by denouncing both the Tate Modern and the collector Charles Saatchi, the brothers' principal patrons; there is a Chapmans' show at the Saatchi Gallery in London right now.

It was Mr. Saatchi who instigated the ''Sensation!'' show that shocked the Royal Academy before shocking New Yorkers at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Or at least one New Yorker, Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the mayor, who fixated on Chris Ofili's elephant dung when the more shocking Chapmans were just around the corner.

The brothers' assortment of white fiberglass children's mannequins wearing nothing but wigs and sneakers, lurking in lush tropical foliage with their mutated extra limbs and aroused genitals in unlikely places on their bodies, was for me truly disturbing. Not disturbing in that I wanted to call the morals police, but disturbing in the way art is supposed to be: it was scary and enticing and, on the surface at least, exotically beautiful.

In his Channel Four interview, Mr. Chapman said Mr. Saatchi's gallery was, in fact, neutralizing the shock by placing it in a genteel context, ''trying to soften the blow for people who may be unfamiliar with the notion that a work of art shouldn't necessarily be pleasurable.''

Hello? For centuries new art has offended, challenging the purely pleasurable. From the first Modernist outrages to this day, artists have seemed to specialize in jarring the presumably complacent bourgeoisie out of their presumed reverie into a harsh confrontation with the real world, reality being defined by the artists.

But I am not writing about the Chapmans, whose latest work I have seen only in photographs, but about shock in art. Audiences and institutions have long believed that anything that unsettles is intended to provoke. The provocation hardly needs to be sexual. It can be childlike (''My 5-year-old could do that!'') or primitive (Gauguin) or political (Grosz) or distorted (Cubism) or conceptually unsettling (Duchamp's urinal; Cage's ''4' 33' '' of silence).

For a long while, when people raged against such provocations, I would take the defiant position of assuming, unless authoritatively informed otherwise, that the artist had no intention to provoke. Morton Feldman needed to write a six-hour string quartet. Philip Glass needed to spin out his deafening electronic-keyboard arpeggiations to the end of time. Maybe even Jeff Koons needed to depict coitus with his wife at the time, an Italian pornography star and Parliament member.

Dinos Chapman may well be accurate in explaining that he and his brother have long since transcended shock in their new Goya works. ''We think they're entertaining, thoughtful, beautiful, classical,'' he told The Observer. But there can be no question that some artists set out to provoke. However beautiful the Chapmans sincerely think their own work is, they are, of course, provocateurs. As was Goya, you might muse, with his dark visions of war or even his ''Naked Maja.''

Those of us who out of wisdom or self-delusion think that we've got things pretty well figured out, who think that for all the obvious horrors to be seen nightly on television, that there are values and standards and canons, will be offended by this latter-day determination to provoke. Isn't this all a little late, a little dated?

And yet complacency is always worth tweaking, and those shocking and awe-inspiring horrors on television are indeed horrible. Goyaesque, even. The trick is not to provoke, but to provoke into a realization that the art that has disturbed you can also be ''thoughtful, beautiful and classical.'' The Chapmans may be shuffling along in the rear of that cadre of artists determined to subvert the permanence and collectibility of the artwork. And yet their own work is worth collecting. Just ask Mr. Saatchi.

Even the most blatant provocateurs are determined to do something more, something beyond merely shock. Clowns want to play Hamlet. I thought about Karen Finley the other day while she was painting and explicating my ''psychic portrait,'' along with that of our little dog, Gabby, in a half-hour appointment at the Kitchen in Chelsea. (Ms. Finley continues her sessions through tomorrow.)

If anyone has defined art shock over the last 15 years, it has been she, with her nudity and her chocolate and her incendiary role in the culture wars. Her psychic portraits, for which she sits demurely in a skirt and sweater and creates her very pretty little artworks -- I don't mean that condescendingly -- might seem a contradiction or even a repudiation.

Yet Ms. Finley has always been prim and well bred as well as extreme and outrageous; that's the dialectical secret of her charm. I don't know her or her work well enough to understand how central to her ideas of art and femininity her past nakedness has been. Self-display has often been the province of beautiful women, however ideologically explicated, as with Hannah Wilke.

Yet I'll bet that Ms. Finley's latest portraits are very much part of her entire artistic enterprise. She said at the outset of our session that she felt in an altered state when performing, that imagination itself was an out-of-body experience. She added that she had been doing psychic explorations all her life; it's just that now she's gone public.

The Chapmans' and Ms. Finley's art may or may not be great, but in the end all art must seek to disturb and provoke. Of course, there are deliberate provocateurs, sometimes for overt careerist ends. But what counts is the art. Great art is always shocking.

Saatchi Gallery joins the art world's elite - for the most expensive entrance fees

By Cahal Milmo
Friday, 14 November 2003

As the man who paid £150,000 for an unmade bed and £1m for a 20ft anatomical model, Charles Saatchi has long known that cutting edge art is an expensive business. Now, so do visitors to his showpiece exhibition space.

As the man who paid £150,000 for an unmade bed and £1m for a 20ft anatomical model, Charles Saatchi has long known that cutting edge art is an expensive business. Now, so do visitors to his showpiece exhibition space.

The Saatchi Gallery, which has attracted more than 300,000 customers since it moved into the splendour of County Hall, opposite the Houses of Parliament, has been named as one of the two most expensive museums in the world.

A survey by The Art Newspaper of 50 museums in Europe, America and Japan found that the Saatchi Gallery, which houses the highlights of Mr Saatchi's vast collection of so-called BritArt, was second only to the Guggenheim in New York by charging £8.50 for a full price adult ticket.

The fee is substantially more than that at some of the world's most important museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which charges $12 (£7.11) per adult, the Vatican Museums (€10 or £6.94), the Hermitage in St Petersburg (€8.75) and the Louvre (€7.5). The New York Guggenheim charges $15 (£8.89) while the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston also costs $15 for a ticket that allows two visits.

Critics of Mr Saatchi, who enjoys a controversial reputation as Britain's foremost patron of contemporary art, said the entrance fee to his gallery was out of proportion to its contents.

David Lee, editor of The Jackdaw magazine, said: "I would say there is an inverse relationship between the price you pay to get into the Saatchi gallery and the artistic significance of what you see.

"You can't compare it to a truly great museum like the New York Met and yet you have to pay more. If you really want a price comparison with the Saatchi then you should look at how much it costs for a seat at the circus. They are the same thing, a variety of stunts interspersed with a few bits of good work."

Supporters of the Saatchi Gallery said its prices had not discouraged visitors since it opened in April this year. By the time of the closure of its first temporary exhibition of work by Damien Hirst in September, it had been seen by 320,000 people. The Art Newspaper, one of the art world's leading journals, said it estimated the annual total would be more than 500,000, representing an income of about £4m.

The paper pointed out that its survey was not exhaustive and did not take into account the cost of living in each of the countries. But it added: "The running costs of the [Saatchi] gallery are undisclosed but on these visitor figures the gallery is likely to generate a surplus. It may prove difficult, however, to sustain visitor numbers at this level in the long term."

The gallery, which says that the majority of its visitors would not be classified as traditional "art enthusiasts", refused to comment on the survey's findings. But a spokeswoman, who said the gallery's visitor numbers had "far exceeded expectations", pointed out that the entrance charge covered both the permanent collection and a temporary exhibition. Entry to other current temporary exhibitions costs £7 at the National Gallery, £8 at Tate Modern and £9 at the Royal Academy.

Mr Saatchi, who made his name as half of the advertising agency he ran with his brother Maurice, has personal control over what is displayed in the gallery from his 2,000-piececollection. Among the exhibits are works that have fuelled debate on the value of contemp-orary art, including Tracey Emin's My Bed, her unmade bed featuring cigarette packs and condoms, and Damien Hirst's Hymn, a 20ft anatomic model.

The survey said Spain was the cheapest of those countries that charge for entry to their museums, with the Prado in Madrid costing just €3.

ENTRY PRICES FOR COSTLIEST MUSEUMS

1: Guggenheim, New York $15 (£8.89)

2: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston $15 (£8.89) (includes two visits)

3: Saatchi Gallery, London £8.50

4: Mori Museum, Tokyo ¥1,500 (£8.22)

5: Fondation Beyler, Berne Sfr16 (£7.07)

6: Frick Collection, New York $12 (£7.11)

7: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York $12 (£7.11)

8: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York $12 (£7.11)

9: Vatican Museums, Rome €10 (£6.94)

10: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna €10 (£6.94)

Source: The Art Newspaper

The ****ing row over Saatchi's vanishing art

Britart's biggest collector moves 10 major pieces as feud with landlord escalates

• David Smith, arts and media correspondent
• The Observer,
• Sunday November 9 2003
• Article history

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This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday November 09 2003 on p3 of the News section. It was last updated at 15:06 on November 10 2003.

Vandals of modern art often claim to be making their own artistic statement, but the latest attack, which saw a £250,000 sculpture of a woman spat upon and left without a nose, is set against a somewhat baser struggle involving alleged foul-mouthed abuse, a clash of millionaires - and a loo.

The assault on American sculptor Duane Hanson's life-sized figure of a woman pushing a pram, which caused more than £5,000 of damage, comes amid a bitter feud between the Saatchi Gallery and Mac Okamoto, its Japanese landlord.

Staff at the gallery have accused Okamoto of 'abusive and intimidating' behaviour, poisoning the atmosphere at a venue launched with great fanfare earlier this year as a showcase for Charles Saatchi's unrivalled collection of Britart.

Tensions appear to be escalating by the day and admirers of the gallery, containing signature works including Damien Hirst's shark and Tracey Emin's unmade bed, are concerned for its future.

The Hanson sculpture, Lady with Stroller, is another of the gallery's iconic works. Staff were shocked to discover one morning that its nose had been scraped off and one of its arms had been spat upon so fiercely it had lost its paint coating.

Lady with Stroller was displayed in the foyer of County Hall on London's South Bank, along with other Saatchi-owned artworks. But the incident has prompted Saatchi to move 10 major pieces to the safety of the exhibition proper or - as in the case of Hirst's paint-spotted Mini that was parked halfway down the grand staircase - into storage where they are out of view altogether.

The foyer area was being used with the permission of Okamoto and security staff clocked off when the gallery itself shut each evening. Who set about wrecking Hanson's sculpture in the middle of the night remains a riddle.

Okamoto has previously been accused of kicking an exhibit called Nomad - a sculpture by Gavin Turk of a homeless person curled up in a sleeping bag - at the gallery entrance. He has allegedly screamed abuse at staff who fail to recognise him.

Last month Okamoto appeared to flex his muscles by changing the locks on the gallery's single disabled toilet, forcing employees to mount a sign saying: 'Not for public use or clients of The Saatchi Gallery.' The gesture could now backfire on the Japanese businessman as campaigners threaten to take him to court.

The Disability Rights Commission has written to Okamoto complaining of blatant discrimination and warning of legal action if disabled visitors continue to be denied use of the lavatory.

Bert Massie, chairman of the Commission, wrote: 'The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 makes it unlawful to deny disabled people access for reasons related to their disability without a legal justification. Withdrawing the use of toilet facilities for disabled visitors in this manner would appear to constitute a gross and unlawful act of discrimination.

'The Disability Rights Commission will take whatever action is necessary to counter such obstructive attitudes and work with business to open up their services to disabled customers.'

Saatchi has already instructed his lawyers to address the toilet question and the wider problem of relations with Okamoto, who is European head of the Shirayama Shokusan Corporation, a property development company which for a decade has run County Hall. Other tenants have expressed discontent at his antics.

In September Okamoto reportedly had a furious confrontation with a female supervisor at the gallery who failed to recognise him as he tried to pass a sign instructing visitors the building was closed. She claimed: 'He passed me swearing. He asked: "What the f*** is this sign doing here?" I said if he had a problem he could speak to a member of security.

'He then retorted with: "This is my property, I am the landlord." He turned and came at me in a threatening manner, saying "Go f*** yourself" and "F*** you, girl".'

Security guard Rami Al Jaabari allegedly approached Okamoto when he saw him entering the gallery through a side door. 'I told him politely he had no rights to be inside the gallery unless given permission by the management,' he said. 'His reply was: "Tell your manager to f*** off. I am the f*****g owner of this place." With a complete disregard to security and health and safety rules, he continued to enter the gallery on numerous occasions.'

A spokesman for the Saatchi Gallery said last night: 'We have decided to remove the art from the foyer after one of the pieces by Duane Hanson was damaged after we had shut for the evening. As a result the work has required major restoration.' The spokesman declined to comment on wider points of conflict with the landlord.

Okamoto is no stranger to controversy. In 1998 he was accused of bombarding his general manager, Lisa-Jane Statton, with sexist and racist comments.

She told an employment tribunal he had pestered her for after-work dinner appointments because he wanted to have sex with her. She also alleged he described British women as 'bloody fat pigs' and Diana, Princess of Wales, as 'that big-nosed princess'. She said he had also made jokes about Jews, Americans and Pearl Harbor. Statton withdrew her allegations after Shirayama paid an undisclosed sum to settle the case.

Although his English wife, Olivia, was photographed by her husband's side after the settlement, he admitted she had threatened to leave him after reading reports of the case. Okamoto later claimed: 'I never said that English women were fat pigs. I never used that word. My wife is 49 and she has quite slim legs.'

Okamoto was unavailable for comment last night.

I doubt whether Damien Hirst really cares that he's moved up thirteen places

By Janet Street-Porter
Thursday, 30 October 2003

Last weekend was dominated by the Big Read, the BBC's attempt to find the most popular book ever, and now we have the ArtReview Power 100, allegedly the most influential people in the art world over the last year.

Last weekend was dominated by the Big Read, the BBC's attempt to find the most popular book ever, and now we have the ArtReview Power 100, allegedly the most influential people in the art world over the last year. Lists are ludicrous. Once I was voted the 27th most influential woman in Britain, now I probably rank in the hundreds. But such is our current obsession with listing everything from the 10 best electronic records to the most perfect bottoms in pop, that not a day goes by without a fresh one being published, broadcast, and picked over. The ArtReview list is a marketing device dreamt up by eager staffers anxious to sell at least 100 extra copies of this trade magazine to people who may be included on it.

They've thrown in all the usual suspects, from gallerists like the White Cube's Jay Jopling, to collectors like David Geffen of Dreamworks and museum executives like the Tate's Nicholas Serota, up from position 6 to 3. On the basis of his latest show, Common Wealth, I would personally have pushed him down to the third division.

Norman Rosenthal from the Royal Academy also drops from 32 to 42, but with his current shows, the Andrew Lloyd Webber collection of Pre-Raphaelites and the appaling Georgio Armani frock retrospective, Norman seems to have lost his touch.

Why push Charles Saatchi down from the top slot to number six, when he is still putting his money where his passion lies, buying and showing ground breaking art, including a wonderful new show of work by Turner prize nominees, the Chapman Brothers? Included for the first time are established American artists such as Ed Ruscha and the architect David Adjaye. He's just designed my new house, so I have my own opinions on that. Collectors like Miuccia Prada figure for the first time, but this is plainly ridiculous as Miuccia and her husband have displayed their collection of BritArt to the public in Milan long before some of the artists received recognition in public galleries in this country. I also doubt whether Damien Hirst cares whether this year he figures at 49 as opposed to last year's 62. Also, Michael Bloomberg, whose company still sponsors huge amount of new art events in London, has inexplicably fallen out of the list. The whole thing seems a petty exercise in score-settling, and you can bet that the biggest advertisers in the magazine will still be gratified to find their existence validated in the editorial part of the publication.

The problem with saying that anyone 'makes a difference' and quantifying that with a ranking, is that it reduces something wonderful, challenging and rewarding, which is the contemporary art scene, to being about as interesting as the colour range of next season's pantyhose.

Anyone who buys art deserves support, as do those who create it and show it. Sadly most of the people who write about it would be better suited to penning the Nigel Dempster diary, which, by the way, is now defunct.

Make-up tycoon topples Saatchi as art's greatest power

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Thursday, 30 October 2003

Charles Saatchi may have lost his touch but Sir Nicholas Serota has more power than ever. Damien Hirst is in, Tracey Emin out. And a doorman at Christie's, New York, is an unknown force to be reckoned with.

Charles Saatchi may have lost his touch but Sir Nicholas Serota has more power than ever. Damien Hirst is in, Tracey Emin out. And a doorman at Christie's, New York, is an unknown force to be reckoned with.

A list of the 100 most powerful people in the art world will provoke dissent and debate from the heart of contemporary British art in Hoxton, east London, to the wealthiest galleries in New York.

After the ArtReview magazine's inaugural Power 100 last year, the London publication today releases its new snapshot of the artists and dealers, the collectors and the museum directors, who have made the most difference to 20th and 21st-century art in the past year. The dominant force, the magazine ruled, was the cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder, who knocked Charles Saatchi, Britain's best-known collector, off the top. Mr Lauder has funded a high-profile collection and a new museum in New York. But perhaps his role in retrieving art stolen by the Nazis has enabled him to pip those who are simply wealthy and/or discerning.

In second place, as last year, is Francois Pinault, the owner of the Christie's auction house. The Tate director, Nicholas Serota, rises to third place, though with a question mark over how he can avoid undermining individual gallery chiefs in the parts of his empire in London, Liverpool and St Ives.

The top 10 includes the German painter Gerhard Richter, the Japanese artist and Louis Vuitton designer Takashi Murakami and the Greek industrialist and collector Dakis Joannou. Ossian Ward, the editor of ArtReview, who compiled the rankings with contributors, said: "All the key figures in Britain are still there and perhaps more have crept in. Some of our younger dealers, Sadie Coles, and Maureen Paley, are now included. Nicholas Serota moving up is an indication of the international status of the Tate. It is the most important global-branded museum."

The ambivalent reaction from many artists and critics to Charles Saatchi's gallery in the old County Hall contributed to his fall. But Ossian Ward said this was no indicator of where Mr Saatchi might end up. "Saatchi has obviously moved down but he's still one of the few British collectors actively shopping in the East End every week. Other British collectors aren't that voracious, but he could still discover the next generation of Young British Artists."

Jay Jopling, who acts for Hirst and other big names from his White Cube gallery, and Norman Rosenthal, the idiosyncratic exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy in London, slip slightly. But Hirst, buoyed by new shows and ventures including sending paintings into space, rises up the rankings. And Jake and Dinos Chapman, hot favourites to win this year's Turner, make it for the first time as does the Pop Art veteran Bridget Riley, 72.

After a dearth of architects last year, Zaha Hadid and David Adjaye are added. But Ossian Ward said everything could change next year. "If this is going to be an annual barometer we need to reflect that in the ups and downs of people," he said. Number 100 must be a prime example. Adrian Mullish is a dentist who treated many Young British Artists when they were poor and paid him with art. The doorman at Christie's Rockefeller Centre headquarters is Gil Perez, who knows everyone who buys or sells.

The top 50

1 (3) Ronald Lauder: Cosmetics billionaire who founded the Neue Galerie in New York

2 (2) François Pinault: Owner of Christie's

3 (6) Nicholas Serota: Director of Tate galleries

4 (23) Larry Gagosian: New York dealer, with an enviable stable of artists and clients

5 (4) Gerhard Richter: Reputedly the world's most expensive living artist

6 (1) Charles Saatchi: Advertising executive

7 (­) Takashi Murakami: Japanese artist involved in commercial ventures

8 (­) Maja Oeri Hoffmann: President of a Swiss foundation which buys contemporary art, pictured above right

9 (­) Leonard Lauder: Ronald's older brother. Chairs the Whitney Museum of American Art

10 (20) Dakis Joannou: Greek industrialist who has run his own museum of contemporary art

11 (­) Santiago Sierra: Subversive Spanish-born artist

12 (37) David Geffen: Record tycoon who moved to house his art collection

13 (­) Herzog & de Meuron: Tate Modern architects who won an architectural prize for the Laban Dance Centre

14 (­) Glenn Lowry: Ambitious director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

15 (61) Samuel Keller: Controls growing franchise of art fairs starting with Basel, Switzerland

16 (­) Leonard Riggio: Founder of Barnes & Noble bookstores who backed a new museum

17 (­) Iwan Wirth: Swiss dealer, described as Europe's most important commercial gallerist

18 (­) Barbara Gladstone: US dealer and talent spotter

19 (16) Eli Broad: A collector, donor and patron of 25 major American institutions

20 (­) Tobias Meyer: Deputy chairman of Sotheby's Europe

21 (­) Zaha Hadid: Anglo-Iraqi architect, pictured right, who designed a museum in Cincinnati

22 (­) Dan Cameron: Senior curator of New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art

23 (58) Matthew Barney: Artist and film-maker

24 (­) Maurizio Cattelan: Maverick Italian artist

25 (18) Jay Jopling: London's White Cube gallery owner

26 (­) Adam Weinberg: Director of New York's Whitney Museum

27 (­) Sadie Coles: London art dealer

28 (44) Marian Goodman: New York gallerist whose roster of stars includes Gerhard Richter

29 (­) Peter-Klaus Schuster: German who has run Berlin's 17 state museums since 1999

30 (­) Ed Ruscha: US artist

31 (51) Andreas Gursky: German photographer

32 (­) David Zwirner: son of powerful Cologne dealer Rudolf Zwirner, has taken the family business to New York

33 (7) Francesco Bonami: director of the 2003 Venice Biennale

34 (­) Karlheinz & Agnes Essl: Viennese collectors who built their own foundation to house their collection of contemporary art

35 (­) Sigmar Polke: German artist currently the subject of a major show at Tate Modern

36 (­) Brett Gorvey: In charge of the major sales of post-war art at Christie's, New York. Also a respected writer

37 (­) Rafael Vinoly: Uruguay-born, New York-based architect who was a finalist in the competition to rebuild ground zero

38 (­) Jeffrey Deitch: New York dealer whose two galleries dominate the downtown art scene

39 (­) Gavin Brown: notoriously impolite Croydon-bred gallerist now based in New York

40 (­) Louise Bourgeois: Tate Modern's inaugural turbine hall artist who is still working at 92

41 (59) Gerard Goodrow: director of the modern and contemporary art fair in Cologne

42 (32) Norman Rosenthal: hugely influential exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy, London

43 (­) Mick Flick: Mercedes car factory heir whose $300m art collection of contemporary works will go on public display next year

44 (78) Matthew Marks: New York gallerist who represents Nan Goldin and Andreas Gursky

45 (­) Alanna Heiss: promoter of minimalist and conceptual art

46 (15) Bernard Arnault: a notable private collector

47 (­) Yvon Lambert: a French dealer now opening a new gallery in New York

48 (24) Jeff Koons: the artist, above, whose giant sculptures reveal a strong sense of humour

49 (62) Damien Hirst: British artist still intent on shocking

50 (­) Gil Perez: the doorman at Christie's headquarters

Revealed: UK's best and worst art buys

By James Morrison, Arts and Media Correspondent
Sunday, 12 October 2003

A chalk sketch of a naked Adam by Michelangelo - bought by the British Museum for £600 in 1926 but now worth an estimated £15m - is today proclaimed the nation's best-value art buy of all time.

A chalk sketch of a naked Adam by Michelangelo - bought by the British Museum for £600 in 1926 but now worth an estimated £15m - is today proclaimed the nation's best-value art buy of all time.

The study for the vault of the Sistine Chapel is one of several masterpieces whose market prices have multiplied since they were saved for the nation, according to the National Art Collections Fund, Britain's leading art charity.

But for every undisputed "bargain" snatched from the jaws of private investors by forward-thinking galleries and museums, there has been a tragically misguided purchase whose value has plummeted since its original sale.

A painting credited to Giorgione and bought by the National Gallery with the Art Fund's help for the equivalent of £566,000 has since been valued at a fraction of its original price after being re-attributed to a lesser artist. Similarly, an elaborate Bronze Age torque sold to Ulster Museum for £5,000 in 1968 is judged to be almost worthless, having recently been exposed as a 20th-century fake.

The Art Fund has compiled its list of "best and worst art buys" to coincide with its centenary celebrations, which will be marked with an exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery, sponsored by The Independent on Sunday.

The charity hopes the list will encourage institutions to buy more high-quality items by emerging artists at an early stage, in anticipation of their prices rising as and when they become famous. It wants galleries to collaborate more, to give them a better chance of saving works for the nation.

However, the Art Fund's call to arms comes with a warning. In recognition of its own past errors, it aims to discourage galleries from impetuous purchases on the basis of questionable advice about the prospects of promising artists. Such folly has been blamed for the decision by galleries in the early 20th century to snap up paintings by the all-but-forgotten Alfred Stevens, instead of paying similar sums for works by masters such as Monet.

Not everyone feels that the charity's candid advice goes far enough. The veteran critic Brian Sewell called on it to warn public galleries against "wasting" their scarce resources on "worthless" Brit Art works by the likes of Damien Hirst and Julian Opie.

The Art Fund has illustrated its "dos and don'ts" of art-buying using a series of examples of past purchases that it helped to finance. Of the Michelangelo drawing, Study for the Creation of Adam, which was bought for £600 (equivalent to £21,836 today) 77 years ago, it says: "At £600, this Michelangelo, which is probably one of the most famous studies in the history of art, looks like an absolute bargain. It would probably fetch up to £15m if it came up for sale today."

Similarly,The Toilet of Venus by Velazquez - better known as "the Rokeby Venus" - was presented as a gift to the National Gallery by the Art Fund in 1906. The painting, bought for £45,000 (£3.13m in today's money) is now "conservatively valued" at £70m.

Among the most embarrassing of the "worst buys" is a supposedly Bronze Age neck torque purchased by Ulster Museum for £5,000 (£53,300 today) in 1968 with the help of a generous £1,000 Arts Fund grant. It was later debunked as a fake.

However, the charity is keen to trumpet its achievements. Its director, David Barrie, said: "Given that more than half a million objects have been acquired with our help over the last 100 years, it would be a miracle if a few misattributions or downright fakes had not crept in. If museums and galleries always played safe, then some wonderful opportunities would be lost."

Mr Sewell is unconvinced. "You can put a value on something when there is a standard market for it, but with something like The Toilet of Venus there has only ever been one," he said. "How do you put a price on something that can never be equalled?"

Rounding on the Art Fund for supporting acquisitions of works by Young British Artists, he said: "Everything they bought which has been made since 1970 is a waste of money."

'Saved! 100 Years of the National Art Collections Fund' will run at the Hayward Gallery from 23 October to 18 January

The best: Michelangelo's 'Studies of a reclining male nude'

What is it: Adam in the fresco 'The Creation of Man' (1508-12).

What they paid: Bought outright by the National Art Collections Fund for £600 in 1926 (£22,000 at today's prices) and presented to the British Museum.

Why it was a good buy: Widely admired at the time, it is now viewed as one of the finest studies in the history of art.

What it's worth: Would fetch about £15m if it came up for sale today.

The worst: Giorgione's 'Tebaldeo'

What is it: Giorgione's 'Scenes from an Eclogue of Tebaldeo' (circa 1505).

What they paid: Art Fund grant of £2,000 (£81,000) towards £14,000 (£565,000) purchase by the National Gallery in 1937.

Why it went wrong: Turned out to be by a little-known Italian named Fernando Previtali.

What it's worth: Previtali's work sells for as little as £80.

Chapman brothers hit out at Tate

The Turner Prize-nominated artists Jake and Dinos Chapman have angrily attacked Tate Liverpool for dropping a retrospective of their work.

Art world insiders say the gallery decided to shelve next month's exhibition because of fears it would be eclipsed by a rival show being staged in London by Charles Saatchi.

And it would have been impossible to mount a Tate retrospective without Mr Saatchi's co-operation. As the Chapman brothers' biggest patron, he owns the bulk of their most celebrated works.

The director of Tate Liverpool, Christophe Grunenberg, said he decided a year ago to postpone the show after realising the dates conflicted with the Saatchi exhibition. He then put it off indefinitely, fearing the artists' Turner nomination and success at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition would make another exhibition seem like "overkill".

The Chapmans reacted angrily to the news. "We are not that interested in just having a huge rambling retrospective show going around the country anyway," said Dinos Chapman. "We would have tried to do something different for the Tate, so if the argument is that there's a Chapman 'overkill' it wouldn't be, because we would've made new work for it."

Lloyd Webber to leave his art collection to the nation

By James Morrison, Arts and Media Correspondent
Sunday, 14 September 2003

Lord Lloyd-Webber is to leave his priceless art collection in trust to the nation when he dies - together with sets and costumes from the musicals that earned him his millions.

Lord Lloyd-Webber is to leave his priceless art collection in trust to the nation when he dies - together with sets and costumes from the musicals that earned him his millions.

The songwriter and impresario has unveiled plans to put his vast array of art works and theatrical memorabilia on public display after his death in a museum at Sydmonton Court, his sprawling country home in Berkshire.

Lloyd Webber makes his pledge publicly on television this week, on the eve of the opening of an exhibition of his Pre-Raphaelite and 20th-century masters at the Royal Academy. He details the scheme further in an interview with the latest edition of the London gallery's own magazine, in which he outlines plans for visitors to be ferried to his house in batches from a "staging post" by the nearby A34.

Lloyd Webber's philanthropic gesture will be especially welcomed by fans of Victorian art, as his Pre-Raphaelite collection is regarded as one of the world's finest. It includes one of only five oil paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in private hands and enough works by Sir Edward Burne-Jones to fill the RA's largest room.

Among the other highlights of the exhibition will be Picasso's Blue Period portrait, Angel Fernandez de Soto, famously bought by the peer for £18m, and Canaletto's The Old Horse Guards from St James's Park.

Lloyd Webber's extraordinary promise to leave his collection to posterity in his will is made as he gives Lord Bragg a guided tour of Sydmonton on a special edition on Friday of ITV1's The South Bank Show. Standing beside Richard Dadd's Contradiction: Oberon and Titania, a painting that is now so fragile he has been advised never to lend it out again, the 55-year-old peer says: "It will be eventually part of my whole plan to put my entire art collection, hopefully in situ, when I am dead ... on display."

In the RA magazine, he adds: "We've bought a site near Sydmonton, which could be a staging post. I think people would quite like to see the collection in the context of where I lived. That's my wish: to keep it in one place."

It is not just Lloyd Webber's art collection which will be put on public view after his death. The proposed displays will house props, sets and costumes from his most celebrated stage musicals, among them Cats, Starlight Express and The Phantom of the Opera. He is undecided about whether to charge the public for viewing the collection.

Lloyd Webber's new appetite for philanthropy has received an idiosyncratic welcome from Norman Rosenthal, the RA's exhibitions secretary. While describing the loaned artworks as looking "like the proverbial million dollars", he said of the peer: "He's like Charles Saatchi. Both of them are, in the nicest sense of the word, insecure about what they are doing. All great collectors have a touch of madness about them."

'Pre-Raphaelites and Other Masters: The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection' runs at the Royal Academy from 20 September until 12 December

Meet Mr Kim, the Britart benefactor who has Damien Hirst and Saatchi in his sights

By Robin Stummer
Sunday, 7 September 2003

As Damien Hirst's first solo exhibition for eight years opens this week in London, the artist's major new benefactor, poised to replace Charles Saatchi as Britart's bankroller-in-chief, can be revealed as a mysterious South Korean millionaire-cum-artist.

As Damien Hirst's first solo exhibition for eight years opens this week in London, the artist's major new benefactor, poised to replace Charles Saatchi as Britart's bankroller-in-chief, can be revealed as a mysterious South Korean millionaire-cum-artist.

Kim Chang-il, a collector, entrepreneur and self-proclaimed aesthete, is the mastermind of an assault on London's claim to be the natural home of great British modern art.

Mr Kim, The Independent on Sunday can reveal, has bought Charity, the massive centrepiece of the new Hirst show, opening this Wednesday. He intends Charity - a 22ft-high, six-ton bronze based on the 1960s Spastics Society collection box girl - to be the crowning glory of his extensive collection of modern art, much of it British.

Mr Kim's investment means that the epicentre of the highly lucrative Britart revolution could well shift 5,500 miles from the heart of London to Cheonan, the anonymous shopping-and-sleeping suburb of Seoul, South Korea, where he keeps his art. Here, from next month, you will find one of the world's greatest private collections of Britart from the past 10 years, housed in a new gallery space specially created for dozens of works - including pieces by two enfants terribles, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Farewell Saatchi's Cool Britannia, hello Kim's Cool Korea.

On the face of it, Mr Kim is an unlikely successor to Charles Saatchi. Aged 53, Mr Kim made his fortune in retail and transport, and owns a chain of 14 restaurants, as well as a department store and entertainment complex.

The store, called Arario, has an art gallery housing hundreds of modern artworks culled from around the world, but for the past 15 years Mr Kim has been focusing on buying work created in Britain. As well as pieces by Hirst, he owns five works by Emin, and others by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Mona Hatoum, Marc Quinn, Gilbert & George and Antony Gormley.

Two years ago Mr Kim paid £1.3m for Hirst's Hymn, a 20ft-high sculpture in the style of a medical student's model of the human body, and installed it in the entrance to his department store. Around the same time, another version of Hymn was bought by Charles Saatchi for about £1m.

Though Mr Kim has long been known to art dealers, his sudden arrival as a key player on the international gallery circuit comes as the rift between Hirst and Mr Saatchi appears to be widening. Interviewed on Radio 4's Front Row last week, Hirst said he had no interest in Mr Saatchi's showpiece new modern art gallery on the South Bank, London, which has staged a retrospective of Hirst's work. "I think museums are for dead artists," he said. "I've seen all that work before in Charles's place. I don't think I'd like it really." Earlier this year, Hirst was conspicuously absent from the Saatchi Gallery's opening night party, calling the gallery "pointless" and "a waste of time".

If anything, Mr Kim's vision of how to offer modern British art to the public is even more acute and astute than Mr Saatchi's. "My dream is to provide the customer with what he or she wants," he says in the latest edition of the Art Newspaper, "but constantly to raise the consumer's expectation, to encourage them to dream... As a businessman I want the customer to see my art and the art of others and be rewarded with pleasure."

"Mr Kim is very happy with Charity," a spokeswoman for the Arario Gallery told The Independent on Sunday last week. "It complements Hymn. We are interested in modern art that is cutting edge, and British art is certainly that."

Charity is to be the centrepiece of Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, a major exhibition of Hirst's recent work that opens this week at the White Cube in Hoxton, east London. Mr Kim's office declined to reveal how much he has paid for Charity, but a figure in excess of the £1.3m paid for Hymn is likely. Art market sources told the IoS that all works at the Hirst exhibition have already been sold - but to whom?

The White Cube would not reveal any names, but the tally of recent investors in the Hirst oeuvre throws up a strange group of possibilities. Sir Elton John is known to own works by Hirst, and, this summer, David Beckham bought one of his prized "butterfly" works as a fourth wedding anniversary present for his wife, Victoria. And it might be unwise to rule out a Saatchi interest. Married last week to the TV cook Nigella Lawson, he might already have the perfect wedding present on order.

Enfant terrible

From Times Online

August 24, 2003

He's given up drink. He's given up drugs. Even more shockingly, Damien Hirst has found God. But dabbling in religious imagery has still left him with blood on his hands

By Waldemar Januszczak

We elect these front-line wild guys to be rebellious in ways we perhaps might be if we were not the wimps we are. So the news that Damien Hirst has given up drink and drugs completely, and that his first one-man show in Britain for a decade is to be devoted overwhelmingly to religious imagery, will send ripples of raw anxiety through the faux-rebel population at large. Oh, no. Not Damien. Not 'the alpha male of British contemporary art', as they call him at the Saatchi Gallery. Not the man who massacres flies by the million and kills killer sharks. Please don't let it be Damien. But it is. Sort of.

I have in my hand as I write - and I think this is an exclusive - a sheaf of poems that Damien
Hirst has produced specially for his new show. That's right. Poems. There are 13 of them. Twelve for each of the apostles and a separate one for Jesus. Each of these poems will accompany a glass box filled with medicinal and symbolic bric-a-brac that seeks also to portray these same 12 apostles and Jesus. 'A trillion dancing spandrels/of light surrounded you,' goes the second of the unexpected poems. 'Slow motion, weightless/ Generous before the blight/soft rotted figs fell from the tree of life.'

When a man starts writing poems about trillions of dancing spandrels of light, and generous figs falling from the tree of life, then his days of rampaging through the Groucho Club high on coke are clearly over and something significant is afoot in his psyche. The glass cabinets, some of which have holes drilled into them at the points where the relevant saints were nailed to the cross, as well as lots of blood, will be fixed to the walls in a dark and gory glazed surround that seeks to set the
tone for Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, as Damien's new show is called.

I think it is safe to conclude that the Age of Uncertainty describes the bad times we are living through, and that Damien himself is on the side of Romance, fragile stuff in our world, as easy to buffet as a butterfly in a gale. 'I remember living in the world of desire/before the age of romance/A love now crushed in the vice-like grip of truth,' he warbles in poem number five. It's not Auden, for sure. But it makes its point atmospherically enough. Things used to be nice. Now they are not.

'Do you believe in God?' I ask him straight out, as we settle down for confessions and explanations in the library of his rambling country residence in Devon. I've been invited to spend the weekend with the corpse meister as he prepares to reveal these dark, new religious conundrums to the public.

'I don't know,' he mumbles back, a tad nervously. 'It's a very complicated word. I mean, you find yourself thinking about death a lot as you get older, and I was starting to think that maybe, when you're older, it becomes the only option or something. Some kind of safety net that you build for yourself. I think it needs revisiting. Let's see, you know. Let's see how the church is getting on. I mean, it's failed so miserably. And they defend it so badly.'

So there you have it. Straight from the shark's mouth. Damien Hirst has sort of found God, and he's sort of making religious art because he sort of feels the church needs him. What we have here, reader, is a wolf who has whipped off his black pelt to reveal the fluffy little baa-lamb hiding beneath.

I have to admit I saw it coming. I have long suspected that the man who saws cows in half and then peeps inquisitively into their expired corpses is himself a big softie inside. My dealings with Damien over the years have divided fairly evenly into encounters with the good Damien and the bad one. The bad one was pretty damn naughty, it has to be said. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who has seen him drop his trousers and insert things into his penis. It was a favourite drinking trick. He'd usually attempt it while staggering about the Groucho Club in the company of that excessively decadent pal of his, Keith Allen, possibly the worst influence on anyone else available in the whole of Britain, and the only star of screen and stage ever to stick his tongue down my throat. It was Keith's horrible way of saying hello. He'd been eating fish.

Those two together were a menace to society on so many psychosocial levels. You may remember them storming up the pop charts a couple of European Championships ago in the unpleasant guise of Fat Les, the manufactured pop moron who put his podgy pop finger on the crude backbeat that activates our nation's football hooligans with a galumphing terrace ditty called Vindaloo. I'm afraid I sang along with it as well.

To my knowledge, Damien Hirst is still the only important British artist ever to appear on
Top of the Pops. Fat Les, sighs Damien, keeps coming back. Like everyone else in the country, he has been on the Atkins diet recently, as part of his spectacular return to healthiness, so he knows what he's talking about when he suggests that Fat Les may be reappearing as Fat Loss.

He looks good. Clean, lean, with a snazzy pair of blue-tinted specs. He's been off toxics since the end of last year and was already sober when his great friend Joe Strummer of the Clash died suddenly of a heart attack a couple of days before Christmas. Joe lived near Damien in Devon. They were close.

When Damien challenges me to a game of snooker in the specially constructed snooker salon attached to his house, and beats me 3-0, with some explosive long-potting, and a few devious little nudges and calls he thought I hadn't spotted, it's the Clash who supply the soundtrack. London Calling blares out again and again from the snooker jukebox.

Damien was a punk back in Leeds, where he grew up. The Clash were his gods. When he went on the wagon, Joe used to try to tempt him off it. He was only 50 when he died. As soon as he heard of Joe's horribly premature death, Damien got a gang of his people over to Joe's house to catalogue and collect everything in Joe's studio, down to the last Rizla paper. He's donating it all to the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, where it will form a shrine to Joe Strummer.

In the old days, in the Age of Inebriation, I met Damien a couple of times at the Glastonbury festival weaving around backstage with large chunks of intoxicant coursing through his veins, mixing it with his pop-star pals - the chaps out of Blur, Strummer, the dreaded Keith Allen out of Fat Les - while his mother, Mary, looked after his children and kept them safe - not easy backstage at Glastonbury. Damien, off his head, in the company of pop stars, was a compelling advertisement for sobriety. His skin had a flaky look to it, as if he too had been immersed overlong in formaldehyde, like that unfortunate shark of his that popped up at the Sensation show moulting chunks of its body into its liquid surrounds. When Damien's hair started to go grey and thin out, it took on a sticky sheen, as if dogs had been licking it. 'I was turning into Jeffrey Bernard,' he now admits.

But even while Damien's decomposition was taking place in full view of the rest of us, there was, of course, another, gentler, kinder, truer, inner Damien on prominent display at the same time: in his work, silly. One of the biggest mysteries in British modern art is how he has managed so successfully to maintain his reputation as a crazed, bloodthirsty shock artist when even the most cursory examination of the stuff he produces reveals a soppy and spectacularly softhearted romantic.

If Damien were a Christmas card he'd be the one with the most robins in it, the one with the whitest snow, the most holly.

For instance, has anyone ever produced art that is quite as sentimental and lovey-dovey as his butterfly pictures? No wonder David Beckham has just bought one for Victoria. A Damien Hirst butterfly picture would melt the heart of Roy Keane, let alone a notorious family man like the boy David: all those beautiful little butterflies, with all those gorgeous colours in their wings, stuck so poignantly to the canvas, in such huge numbers.

Did I know, asks Damien, that he is now Britain's biggest importer of butterflies? No, I certainly did not. His new butterfly pictures use up so many of the things that he cannot get enough of them and has to salvage extra specimens wherever he can. Three people are at work full-time in his studio in Gloucestershire making butterfly pictures. The pictures use more butterflies than ever. So densely are they packed with geometric configurations of lepidopteral wonders that, from a distance, they look like stained-glass windows. When his new show goes up, his butterfly pictures will do their bit by creating a dark, religious glow.

I've interviewed Damien a couple of times before when he was sober and he has always been the soul of politeness: full of insights and snappy opinions. So when all those intriguing rumours began to circulate around the art world that he had cleaned up his act - no more drink or drugs, no more inserting things into his penis - and found God, my ears pricked up. He's joined AA, said the rumour-spreaders. He's following the 12 steps, and that's where God fits in.

Alarmed by these garbled reports of the forest-load of new leaves that he was supposed to have turned over, I fixed up to see him first at his studio, where his new work was being finished for the big show, and then at his house, where he was going to cook me dinner. The last time I went to interview him, for a TV film, he made a delicious wild garlic soup from the plants the two of us picked in his private wood. This time he promised me lamb. I love lamb.

The deal was that I would turn up at the studio after 4 o'clock on a Friday, and then spend the Saturday with him. I couldn't come any earlier because Damien was receiving some buyers. No, it wasn't David Beckham. Just somebody else I shouldn't see. The studio is in a converted factory by the side of a trout stream near Stroud. It's huge. Outside, wrapped in spectacular quantities of swaddling, stands the unmistakable outline of Hymn, the giant medical model of the inside of a man of which Damien has made three casts, one of which Charles Saatchi bought for £1m.

Damien has now fallen out with Saatchi over the hanging of the Damien Hirst retrospective with which Saatchi chose to open his new museum in London's County Hall. Saatchi asked Damien for suggestions, and then ignored them when Damien made some. Even though it contains almost all his best-known work, Damien refuses to see the Saatchi show.

In the middle of his studio is a crucified cow. I never imagined that a cow with its legs outstretched would look this big. What a sight. It's the first of three of them, a bovine recreation of Christ and the two thieves on Calvary, that is due to go on show at the Prada museum in Milan.

Looming even taller is another new work: Charity, a giant little girl clasping a teddy bear, based on those collecting boxes that used to stand outside newsagents, into which we were encouraged to drop our spare change. Charity, who is roughly the height of a double-decker bus, is going to stand in the middle of the square in Hoxton when Damien's new show opens at the White Cube. Alas, her collecting box has been jemmied open. That's what happens to charity in the Age of Uncertainty.

What's that smell, Damien? Oh, that's the fly factory. A chap called James is in there right now stocking it with fresh maggots bought from a fisherman's supplier. Hundreds of the little lovelies are buzzing around James keenly, and they'll soon be joined by thousands more. The fly's role in Damien's art is to die for him. A big, black picture called The Fear consists, I see, when I get up close to it, of nothing but dead flies stuck on in creepy cakes of death, many centimetres thick. Now that's what I call a sacrifice.

Also in the new exhibition will be a work called The Last Supper, which consists of a Formica table around which 13 ping-pong balls are kept up in the air on jets of wine. And a cow with six legs, suspended in formaldehyde. It's a real cow: one of the Almighty's unpleasant little jokes.

Did I know, explains an enthusiastic Damien, as he leads me past the 12 increasingly gory cabinets dripping with deer's blood that represent the apostles, that only one of Jesus's disciples met a natural death? All the rest died violently? No, I didn't. But I can certainly believe it now. By the time he has placed a severed cow's head in front of each of his apostolic cabinets, as he plans to do, his comeback show will have created for itself a macabrely funereal atmosphere worthy of a Christian slaughter in Rome's catacombs. Yes, he's found Jesus, but not perhaps in ways that Cliff Richard would applaud.

I ask about his past. There's nothing much on record about his childhood in Leeds. But the black and gory Catholicism seeping out of him today had to come from somewhere. So where? Instead of talking me through his origins, he gives me his mother's number and suggests I speak to her.

Damien's mother, Mary, is a minor art-world celebrity these days. Like Warhol's mother, or Hockney's, she's carved out a curious little niche for herself as a conspicuous maternal presence to whom a famous artistic son is unusually devoted. Mary lives in Devon with Damien, his girlfriend, Maia, a surfing designer, and their two boys, gentle Connor, 8, and naughty Cassius, 3. She has a separate house. You can't miss it. Outside is a big mailbox with Mary written on it in huge letters, as if she were a cartoon neighbour in a Tom & Jerry story.

I'd met Mary a couple of times before, at Glastonbury and the like, where her task was to remain sober and grounded while all around her drifted away to other planets. To be honest, I'd imagined her to be a touch flaky too, otherwise why would she be traipsing so dutifully along in the wake of her wayward son? I now see that I was wrong. Not only is she an interestingly responsible mother, she's also terribly wise and amusing. Damien's gift of the gab obviously comes from Mary. So, I suspect, does his fierce appetite for romance in uncertain ages.

Damien didn't know his father. 'Neither did I. Though I thought I did,' chirps Mary in a comfortable Yorkshire accent you want to trust. He was a photographer on Jersey. Mary met him while working on the island, and was absolutely besotted with him. 'I'm one of those people: it's all or nothing with me.'

The photographer would take pictures of tourists and then deliver the prints to them the next morning, which meant working in the darkroom through the night. Mary would hang around in there with him, and was soon pregnant. She arrived on Jersey as a 21-year-old virgin, and left a few months later with Damien inside her. The photographer didn't want to know.

She was unlucky to get pregnant, I suggest. Mary giggles. 'Oh yes, I never get away with anything.' She recently passed her driving test, and already she's been done for speeding. She would not consider an abortion. That would have been murder. So she went to Bristol and had Damien at a Catholic home for unmarried mothers run by nuns. Then she went back to Leeds and got married to a boy she'd grown up with called Hirst. But there was no passion there, and they are now divorced. To this day, she is afraid of phoning the Jersey photographer in case her heart starts fluttering again.

Damien, now 38, has never met his biological father.

Her parents were strict Irish Catholics, who loved Damien, a sweet and self-contained lad. 'He would always amuse himself. He'd never need amusing. He was a very quiet, very gentle and very caring child. Even now he is, but he doesn't let it show very much. He wanted to be the clown of the class. You give yourself these personas and they take over.' Young Damien was always drawing. 'I thought, he's going to do something with his art. I knew he would always do it. Even if he was a pavement artist or something.'

As for the Catholicism, she was a passionate churchgoer herself until Damien went to secondary school. She'd had two more children and fell out with her priest over issues she will only discuss with me off the record. It is not betraying her trust, I think, to record that her argument with the church concerned contraception. So these were Damien's origins. Mary calls him 'the best mistake I ever made'.

But the Catholicism he inherited from her would have been complex and active, rippling with guilts and confusions. She knows him better than anyone. But even she is surprised by the extraordinary reappearance of the papal faith in his work. 'I never thought that Catholicism had much effect on him.'

Damien has grown outrageously rich since we last met. He has negotiated a new deal with his gallery, and is now on 70:30, rather than the traditional 50:50. And he's been encouraging his artist friends to do the same. Why should an artist be on 50:50? he demands. Why indeed? While I'm there he buys a house that's come up for sale next to his studio. It takes him all of 10 seconds to decide.

Back at the studio, Damien's people make jokes about wishing he were still on the bottle. There was less work to do in the old days. Now he's insatiable. He doesn't see his clean new lifestyle as giving anything up. It's about gaining something. 'I suppose being sober is a bit like a new drug.
I think maybe I was running out of roads to go down and now I feel there are lots of them. I mean, I spent a good few years when I was either off my tits or recovering' - I know Damien, I know - 'and I think you devote a hell of a lot of time to that. One thing you definitely notice with having kids is that you want to wake up and be in the same state that they are in.'

Surely this has never been a problem for him? Damien has always been particularly adept at achieving creative childishness. His notorious spin paintings, those round pictures, covered in runny colours, that go for thousands of pounds in auction, home in ruthlessly on the child within. There's a machine for churning them out set up in his studio foyer. It is operated by a converted Black & Decker drill that he himself invented. And take it from me, it's great fun squirting kiddy colours onto madly revolving surfaces, and then watching them run hither and thither in exciting new patterns, just as they used to do on my annual childhood visits to the Ideal Home Exhibition. Damien has me produce four of the things: he pedals while I squirt.

The way he's managed to turn this banal kiddy process into excessively valuable Brit art provides intriguing proof of the fact that inside every stern adult with money to burn there resides a giggling toddler. Hirst senses this more acutely than any other artist practising in the world. It is one of the chief secrets of his success. When Charles Saatchi was showing me around his new museum in County Hall he suddenly blurted out that his favourite work of art in the world was Damien's Away from the Flock: a fluffy little white lamb suspended in formaldehyde. I thought Saatchi was going to start crying when he admitted this. He obviously identified like crazy with the lonely little lamb. Damien targets the vulnerable inner child in his collectors with the skill of a trained assassin in a Frederic Raphael novel.

Not that I think he does it cynically, just to sell his stuff. Being half Irish, he too is genetically primed to sob into his Guinness. I remember him standing up to speak when he won the Turner prize in 1995, and wistfully insist that his greatest creation was his son Connor. It was an admission straight from the soft Irish centre of his heart, an organ that does much of his thinking for him.

A heartless English wag in the audience, the low-grade English conceptualist Mark Wallinger, shouted out: 'So why don't you pickle him?' There were guffaws around the Wallinger table, but none from me. It was typical of Damien to out himself as a big softie at the coolest event in the British arts calendar.

To my mind, there is not a sliver of doubt that Damien Hirst's arrival on the art scene changed the relationship between modern art and the British people. Without him, I suggest, there would be no Tate Modern; or at least no hugely successful Tate Modern with long queues outside it. Before Damien Hirst came along, nobody queued to see contemporary art. I was there.

I remember the lack of public interest absolutely vividly. Then Damien unveiled his boxed sharks and his divided cows and suddenly Brit art was as newsworthy as Posh and Becks.

'I've always thought you have to get people listening to you before you can change their minds,' he explains. The pickled sharks, the expiring flies, the sliced-up pigs, are intent on getting themselves noticed, sure, but once they've done that, the message they seek to convey is a charmingly old-fashioned one. Life is short and precious. Death is dark and inevitable.

Given his exceptional impact, how perverse that when Tate Modern opened up, all they had on show of Damien's was a small cabinet in a poky corridor. Damien remains puzzled by this lack of Tate interest. He's spoken to the director, Nick Serota. He's even offered to give him work for free. But he has never heard back from the Tate. It's my turn to comfort him. The Tate doesn't do humanity, I tell him. They only do anally retentive modernist cool. The Tate hasn't taken to Damien for the same reason that vegans don't eat steaks. And Puritan churches don't contain big, gory blood-splattered crucifixions.

It's fair to say that nobody in the British art world has led his observers on such a ridiculous dance as Damien Hirst. He is, of course, the most famous Brit artist of them all, and an instantly recognisable brand name around the world. But maintaining this pre-eminence has involved keeping the surprises coming: a sapping effort. Whenever you expect him to skip to the left, he's skipped to the right. This mad waywardness has been a deliberate feature of his career.

But nothing he has done so far, no outrageous manoeuvre he has attempted, feels quite as risky or out of step with the timbre of the times as this wild-eyed return to the gory darknesses and impenetrable mysteries of his Catholic past

Romance in the Age of Uncertainty is at the White Cube Gallery, Hoxton Square, London N1, from September 10 to October 19, tel: 020 7749 7450