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.
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