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.