2004年12月24日 星期五
Arts, Briefly; Shark Tale
2004年11月29日 星期一
Saatchi clashes with Serota over £200m 'gift' of artworks to Tate
Monday, 29 November 2004
Tate Modern refused an offer by Charles Saatchi to donate his entire £200m collection of modern art, Britain's leading arts patron claimed yesterday.
Tate Modern refused an offer by Charles Saatchi to donate his entire £200m collection of modern art, Britain's leading arts patron claimed yesterday.
Mr Saatchi said the proposal, which would have turned the Tate into the world's foremost collection of contemporary art with his 2,500 works, was spurned by its director, Sir Nicholas Serota, last October because the museum "already had commitments".
Sir Nicholas insisted that the works were offered on loan only, but the disagreement has fuelled tensions between two of the most influential figures in British art.
Last November, Mr Saatchi described the Turner Prize, exhibited at the Tate, as "rehashed claptrap". He said he made his offer when he was having problems with the landlord at his County Hall gallery, close to the Tate Modern on London's Bankside, which opened in May 2003.
"I did offer my collection to Nicholas Serota last year," he said. "I was struggling with the alarming behaviour of the Japanese landlords and I remembered at the time the Tate Modern opened, Nick had told me there were extensions planned that would add half again
to the gallery capacity," Mr Saatchi told The Art Newspaper in a rare interview.
"By the time I offered the collection to Nick, the Tate already had commitments for the extension. So I lost my chance for a tastefully engraved plaque and a 21-gun salute. Now the mood has passed, and I'm happy not to have to visit Tate Modern, or its storage depot, to look at my art."
Asked to assess the Tate as a contemporary art museum, Mr Saatchi praised Sir Nicholas, who has been in the post since 1998, calling him "my hero, to have pulled it off so masterfully".
Mr Saatchi did attack the Tate, saying that its exhibition was disappointing and accusing curators of lacking ambition. He said the Tate, which receives £30m a year in government funding, missed crucial investment opportunities in the 1990s "when even the piddliest budget would have bought you a great many works".
Sir Nicholas told The Art Newspaper: "At no point was there any suggestion that the collection was being offered as a gift."
The works include Tracey Emin's My Bed, Marcus Harvey's portrait of Myra Hindley and Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde.
Last month, the Tate asked 23 artists including Lucian Freud, David Hockney and Hirst, to donate works which it said it could no longer afford. It has £56m in lottery funding and is seeking millions more to compete with museums such as New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Sir Nicholas was unavailable for comment yesterday.
THE COLLECTOR AND THE CURATOR
CHARLES SAATCHI
BORN Baghdad, Iraq in 1943, son of a merchant
EARLY DAYS Set up advertising agency with his brother Maurice in 1970. Became household name for 1979 election campaign
HIGHLIGHTS His 1997 Sensation exhibition, with its portrait of Myra Hindley
LOWLIGHTS A cast of the artist Marc Quinn's head, made from his own frozen blood, melted after builders pulled out the freezer's plug
WHAT HE SAYS "There's nothing complicated about me"
WHAT CRITICS SAY "A man of crushes cars, clothes, artists" (former wife Kay Hartenstein)
SIR NICHOLAS SEROTA
BORN London, 1946
EARLY DAYS An exhibition organiser for the Arts Council in the early 1970s
HIGHLIGHTS His reign at the Tate Modern, winning credit for its success
LOWLIGHTS Abandoning plans for a Hirst retrospective at the Tate Modern after Saatchi decided not to co-operate
WHAT HE SAYS "We're putting on a mix of popular and academic shows. I don't think it's a choice between the two. It's essential to have both"
WHAT CRITICS SAY "Serota is dangerously narrow in tastes" (Brian Sewell, art critic)
It's your bed, lie in it, Tate tells Saatchi
THE sound of elephant dung being thrown reverberated across the British art world yesterday as an indignant Charles Saatchi said that he had offered his £200 million collection as a gift to Tate Modern, but that the museum had turned him down.
A clearly wounded Mr Saatchi broke his usual silence to make a stinging attack on Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate’s director, and to accuse the museum of being “disengaged” from the art community.
The controversial art collector, who is married to Nigella Lawson, the celebrity cook, said that Sir Nicholas had snubbed his offer to move his world- famous collection — including Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary made from elephant dung, Damien Hirst’s shark pickled in formaldehyde and Tracey Emin’s unmade bed — to the museum.
The advertising magnate used a rare interview to accuse the Tate of hosting “disappointing” exhibitions and said that it lacked “ambition”.
In a lofty discussion about “immortality”, Mr Saatchi said: “I did offer my collection to Nicholas Serota at the Tate last year. This was about the time I was struggling with the problems at County Hall — both the alarming behaviour of the Japanese landlords and my failure to get a grip on how to use the space well.
“I remembered that at the time Tate Modern opened, Nick had told me that there were new extensions planned that would add half again to the gallery capacity. But by the time I offered the collection to Nick, the Tate already had commitments for the extension.
“So I lost my chance for a tastefully engraved plaque and a 21-gun salute. And now the mood has passed and I’m happy not to have to visit Tate Modern, or its storage depot, to look at my art.” Mr Saatchi’s comments, in an interview with The Art Newspaper, are just the latest chapter in a long-running feud between the art collector and Sir Nicholas, the two most influential figures of “Brit Art”.
Last year Mr Saatchi dismissed the Turner Prize, exhibited at the Tate, as “pseudo-controversial rehashed claptrap”.
The Tate strongly denied last night that Mr Saatchi had offered his collection as a gift. Commentators in the art world said that the multimillionaire may have decided to stir up a high-profile row to increase interest in his new exhibition of contemporary painters, which opens in January. The Saatchi Gallery has failed to attract the number of visitors its owner had expected since it moved to the oak-panelled rooms of the former Greater London Council headquarters on the South Bank. Its most recent exhibitions have been mauled by critics.
Even before the opening of the County Hall gallery in April last year, many believed that Mr Saatchi had chosen an exhibition space as close as possible to Tate Modern, which is just a 15-minute walk along the Thames.
The Tate yesterday said in a statement: “Last year Charles Saatchi, then having difficulties with his landlord at County Hall, approached Nicholas Serota with the suggestion that he would like to move displays of his collection from County Hall to the derelict ‘oil tank’ spaces at Tate Modern. Nicholas Serota explained that these spaces could not be used without major expenditure.
“At no point was there any suggestion that the collection was being offered as a gift to Tate.
“Of course the offer of a gift of major works from Charles Saatchi’s collection would be a most generous gesture and would be much welcomed by Tate’s trustees. They have always made it clear that they would be very pleased to acquire, by gift or purchase, major works from the Saatchi collection.”
Referring sarcastically to Sir Nicholas as “my hero”, Mr Saatchi, who has been dismissed by Hirst as “childish”, said of the Tate: “The curators should get out more and see more studios and grassroots shows. They evidently lack an adventurous curatorial ambition . . . The Tate seems sadly disengaged from the young British art community. It ought to have reflected the energy and diversity of British art over the past 15 years in both its exhibitions and collecting policy. Puzzlingly, museums in Europe and the US are far more interested in examining Britain’s recent artistic achievements.”
2004年11月28日 星期日
Saatchi turns a cold eye on Britart legacy
THE LEGACY of Britart is under threat. Charles Saatchi, the country’s most influential art collector, believes most of the art movement’s controversial figures will be “nothing but footnotes” in art history.
Saatchi is the most famous buyer of modern conceptual artworks in Britain, ranging from Damien Hirst’s tiger shark pickled in a tank of formaldehyde to Tracey Emin’s unmade bed.
But the advertising magnate is understood to admit that in a decade or so the vast majority of Britart’s artists are unlikely to be considered of any lasting significance. It is a withering critique that may reflect a decision by Saatchi to give greater consideration to more traditional artistic forms.
Saatchi believes that art books produced in about 10 years’ time will identify only Hirst among the Britart movement as someone of lasting influence. He believes other modern artists likely to stand the test of time are the Americans Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock and Donald Judd.
Those outside such a pantheon include Emin, the Chapman brothers (Jake and Dinos), whose artworks include mannequins adorned with adult genitalia in place of their mouths and eyes, and Ron Mueck, who produced a 3ft representation of his father’s corpse entitled Dead Dad. “Charles is entitled to his view,” said Emin yesterday. “Anyway, I’m sure he hasn’t said this to insult me.”
Saatchi bought Emin’s infamous unmade bed in 2000 for £150,000. It has since been displayed in his gallery on London’s South Bank, which opened in April 2003.
“I’m with him on Warhol and Pollock,” said the art critic Brian Sewell. “Maybe Judd, too, though perhaps I might have gone for Serra instead.” Richard Serra is the highly regarded American sculptor. “But I’m not at all sure about Hirst,” said Sewell. “I once took him seriously. That seriousness might simply have been in the eye of the beholder. I now think he will end up just as a joker. He’s become a playboy.”
In an interview in December’s The Art Newspaper, Saatchi also reopens the wound between himself and Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate galleries, because he suggests that he offered his collection to Tate Modern towards the end of last year.
Saatchi was at the time having difficulties with his landlord, a Japanese property firm, at the former London county hall building.
He apparently suggested his works could be moved to an undeveloped area, known as the old tank space, beside Tate Modern.
It never happened and in the interview it is understood Saatchi attacks Tate Modern for lacking ambition and adventure and, in particular, for failing to represent the young English artists of the past 15 years.
Yesterday, however, Serota disputed the Saatchi offer. “I had one conversation with him,” he said.
“I pointed out it would cost millions to develop the space and that we anyway were planning to use it for ourselves later on.”
Serota also claimed Saatchi had hardly shown any enthusiasm to donate or sell his works to the Tate over the past 15 years — and denied his galleries lacked ambition.
2004年11月27日 星期六
Another Round for Saatchi vs. Tate
Published: November 27, 2004
Jonathan Player for The New York Times "Hymn," by Damien Hirst, at Charles Saatchi's gallery, a short walk from the Tate.
ONDON, Nov. 26 - The longstanding rivalry between Charles Saatchi, the British advertising magnate and art collector, and Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate here, is heating up again. Mr. Saatchi says Sir Nicholas turned down his offer to give the Tate his entire collection, while Sir Nicholas says no such offer was made.
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When the space opened, contemporary-art experts said Mr. Saatchi had purposely chosen a space near the Tate Modern to compete with it. He has given little to the Tate. In 1992, he donated works by many young British artists, a gift estimated then to be worth about $170,000.
Unlike the Tate, which is free, the Saatchi Gallery charges $16.50 for admission. It has not attracted the large number of visitors Mr. Saatchi had hoped, experts said. They also said Mr. Saatchi was looking at spaces in central London, where he would like to move the gallery in an effort to draw more of the art world, rather than the tourist crowd that goes to the London Eye.
Since the space at County Hall opened, it has attracted 800,000 visitors, said Ben Rawlingson Plant, a spokesman for Mr. Saatchi. Mr. Saatchi declined to be interviewed for this article, but in a question-and-answer piece scheduled to appear in The Daily Telegraph tomorrow and in The Art Newspaper next week, Mr. Saatchi says that Sir Nicholas rejected a recent offer of his collection of hundreds of contemporary artworks, largely by young British artists like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, the Chapman brothers, Rachel Whiteread, Marc Quinn, Peter Doig and Chris Ofili. Sir Nicholas denies such an offer was made.
"Last year Charles Saatchi, then having difficulties with his landlord at County Hall, approached me about moving his exhibition program from County Hall to the derelict oil tank spaces at the Tate Modern," Sir Nicholas said in a telephone interview Friday, referring to raw space off Turbine Hall in the museum, a converted power station. "I explained that it would cost tens of millions of pounds to make the space usable, and in the long term the Tate wanted to use that space for its permanent collection. At no point did he offer to give his collection to the Tate."
Mr. Saatchi's collection is well known to American museumgoers. The exhibition "Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection" opened at the Royal Academy here in 1997 and then traveled to the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and finally to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where Rudolph W. Giuliani, mayor of New York City at the time, called the exhibition "sick stuff" and threatened to cut off city subsidies because Mr. Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary included clumps of elephant dung.
Over the years Mr. Saatchi has gained an international reputation for going on wild shopping sprees, spending millions of dollars on the works of contemporary artists and then selling them in bulk, sending the prices for some of these artists on a roller-coaster ride. He bought dozens of works by the Italian artist Sandro Chia, then turned around and sold them, thus depressing Mr. Chia's market.
A year ago Mr. Saatchi sold about a dozen works by Mr. Hirst back to the artist and his dealer, Jay Jopling, in a deal that people familiar with the negotiations said was worth around $15 million. Over the years Mr. Saatchi has also sold dozens of artworks at a time at Sotheby's and Christie's in auctions in New York and London.
Sir Nicholas pointed out that if Mr. Saatchi was so eager to give his collection to the Tate, he could have offered to donate "Ghost," a seminal sculpture by Ms. Whiteread that art lovers say should stay in Britain. Instead, last month, the National Gallery of Art in Washington announced that Mitchell P. Rales, a Washington collector, had bought "Ghost," a 1990 plaster cast of a living room modeled after the one from Ms. Whiteread's childhood home in North London, for the gallery. "Ghost," in which window frames, light sockets, a fireplace and grooves left by doors are etched in plaster, had been on view at the Gagosian Gallery in London. Contemporary-art experts said it was worth about $2 million. "I saw it at Gagosian," Sir Nicholas said, "and was told it was not for sale."
2004年11月4日 星期四
A childish spat: Stuckists tear into Britart's finest
Thursday, 4 November 2004
* In this Turner Prize season, some of the biggest names in British art are to be subjected to a first rate character assassination.
* In this Turner Prize season, some of the biggest names in British art are to be subjected to a first rate character assassination.
The Stuckists, a group of contemporary artists opposed to conceptual art, are about to publish their first book. It's called Punk Victorian, and contains some hard-hitting stuff.
Damien Hirst is dismissed as a "Harry Enfield-type character", and "a ridiculous yob artist". The Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota, is a "hypocrite", and Charles Saatchi a "copycat", responsible for a "dysfunctional decade of art".
But it is Tracey Emin who cops the most stick. Before achieving fame, Emin had an affair with the Stuckist, Billy Childish. The book picks over this, and credits Childish with "discovering" her. It also alleges that Emin has erased him from her CV.
"Tracey Emin has hidden a significant part of her life from the world, which, for a confessional artist, is interesting to note," remarks the book's author, Stuckist co-founder Charles Thomson.
Pertinently, the book is published by the National Museum of Liverpool, whose trustees such pillars of the establishment as Sir Neil Cossons and Loyd Grossman.
"The museum was a bit paranoid about libel, but if Saatchi or Tracey sue, we'll have a field day," adds Thomson.
* A bohemian moment at the party for the new Vanity Fair film - written by society superstar Julian Fellowes - on Monday.
In the wee hours, Pandora spotted the film's bubbly, award-winning director Mira Nair, above, chuffing away on what looked (and smelt) like a "jazz cigarette".
"I've no idea what I'm smoking," she smiled, when I asked if illegal substances were being consumed. "Somebody just gave it to me."
There our conversation ended. I'd love to take the matter further, but Nair's agent says she's spent much of the past couple of days in bed, with "a bug', so can't chat.
* Trevor McDonald has made peace with Jonathan Sayeed, the Tory MP who accused him of "having benefited from positive discrimination".
Sayeed has written to Sir Trevor apologising and saying the accusation - in an e-mail to this column - was the result of a typing error.
Sir Trevor has now written back: "I'm glad you explained how it all came about," he says. "I never thought that you would seriously make such a comment. I fully accept what you say, in which case no apology is necessary." Now let that be the end of it!
* How much longer will Naim Attallah stay silent about the memoir of his former employee Jennie Erdal?
Mrs Erdal's book Ghosting claims - as reported by Pandora - that she acted as Attallah's ghostwriter during the 1980s and 1990s. The colourful publisher may well disagree, but has yet to make his feelings public.
Erdal's final chapter might tempt him to, though. "All story-tellers are liars, not to be trusted," it says. "They have an excessive need to make sense of experience, and so things get twisted and shaped to suit."
Says a literary source: "This passage raises questions about how much of her memoir we can actually trust."
* The photographer Bob Carlos Clarke - heir apparent to Helmut Newton - has sold an erotic snap to one of London's top suits.
David Ross, the co-founder of Carphone Warehouse, sneaked into Clarke's latest exhibition on Tuesday, and bought a black and white study of a naked blonde for £3,000.
"We'd no idea who he was till the credit card came out," says a source at the gallery. "It's rather ironic: the model's sitting next to a giant mobile phone, with a keypad that has sexual positions instead of numbers." The work, by the way, is called "Nookia".
2004年10月28日 星期四
Sensation! British movers and shakers are losing their grip on international art
Thursday, 28 October 2004
They are the most powerful players in the multimillion-pound world of art, organising exhibitions that attract thousands or selling works that make headline news - and many, including Charles Saatchi, are based in Britain.
They are the most powerful players in the multimillion-pound world of art, organising exhibitions that attract thousands or selling works that make headline news - and many, including Charles Saatchi, are based in Britain.
But today, in the third annual list of the men and women who matter published by an art magazine, Britain appeared to be losing its grip with the millionaire collector Mr Saatchi falling from sixth to 17th place, having held the top spot in 2002.
Other British names, including the Turner Prize-winning artist Damien Hirst and gallery owners Jay Jopling, Victoria Miro, Maureen Paley and Sadie Coles, have all fallen in the rankings chosen by international critics and academics. Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate galleries, claimed a place in the top 10 and there are some British "newcomers".
Anish Kapoor, another Turner Prize winner who stunned Americans this year with a giant new work, Cloud Gate, in Chicago, makes his first entry at number 73. Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, founders of the Frieze art fair, which brought thousands of art-lovers and international dealers to London this month, leap in at 32.
This list, also known as the Power 100, in Art Magazine shows America retaining its dominance as the powerhouse of the art market, by virtue of the immense wealth of its collectors. But the list also suggests that as countries such as China stand up to be counted, Britain appears to be losing its influence.
Mr Saatchi topped the rankings when they were launched three years ago but is now replaced by the controversial American dealer Larry Gagosian, who made a major impact in London this year with a spectacular new gallery at King's Cross.
More controversially, Jack Vettriano, the self-taught Scottish artist shunned by major galleries but adored by the public, squeezes in at 100. But there is no space for Tracey Emin or curators such as Norman Rosenthal at the Royal Academy.
Rebecca Wilson, the Art Review's editor, said that Americans remained dominant, but the seats of influence were shifting. "There are countries that are entering the list in a bigger way than before. China is much more prominent than in the past, as is Germany."
The list was not an indicator of artists or dealers in long-term decline, she said, simply a pointer to what had been most exciting in the past year.
Mr Serota maintained third place by virtue of several excellent exhibitions, including Brancusi and Hopper, and initiatives such as encouraging leading artists to donate works. The Scandinavian-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson makes 29th place on the back of his giant sun installation that thrilled Tate Modern visitors last year.
By contrast, Mr Saatchi has proved less successful with his new gallery on the South Bank, which opened with the much criticised exhibition, New Blood. Yet he should not be written off. "He's still the highest ranked British collector. He's still buying and apparently buying more interesting work," said Ms Wilson. Artists on the list tend to be those with financial as well as artistic clout. Money alone will not suffice. Hirst's ranking has gone down because of the poor critical reaction to his collaboration with the photographer David Bailey, she said. But it gets Vettriano on to the list.
"He's not had a major museum show but his past painting sold for £800,000 and he gets £500,000 royalties from images on postcards. He's the highest-selling Scottish artist," she said.
Zaha Hadid and Will Alsop, architects, get a mention. Hadid, who was born in Baghdad but is based in London, moves up a place to 20 after winning the prestigious Pritzker Prize for the Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati. Alsop is a new entrant at 96 for designing several galleries.
Other British entrants are: Nicholas Logsdail, owner of the Lisson Gallery, whose artists include Sol LeWitt, Kapoor and Santiago Sierra, up from 77 to 26; Richard Green, Britain's top dealer by sales with a £95m turnover; Toby Webster, director of The Modern Institute in Glasgow; and Harry Blain and Graham Southern, owners of the Haunch of Venison gallery in London. Hotly tipped for inclusion next year are a younger generation. Among them are Jens Hoffmann, the new curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the dealer-curator duo of David Risley and Soraya Rodriguez, whose Zoo Art Fair this month was dedicated to London galleries under three years old.
New York may have the collectors and the big money which makes the whole dizzying art world go round. But London retains a buzz.
THE 10 MOST POWERFUL PEOPLE IN WORLD ART1 Larry Gagosian (Position last year: 4) Known as "GoGo", Gagosian built up major businesses in Los Angeles and New York before moving into London. Now owns the biggest private gallery in the capital.
2 Glenn D Lowry (14)The director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the past decade, has directed $850m expansion plans that will see the opening of new headquarters in Manhattan.
3 Nicholas Serota (3) The director of the Tate galleries is sometimes criticised for keeping a tight rein on his empire, but few doubt his dynamic influence.
4Maurizio Cattelan (24) The Italian artist captured British attention when he hung a stuffed horse from the ceiling of Tate Britain - it later sold at auction for $2.1m. Known for his love of controversy.
5Samuel Keller (15) The director of the Art Basel fair since 2000, and the driving force behind its offshoot, Art Basel Miami Beach. Known for his marketing innovation and stylish venues.
6 Dakis Joannou (10) The Greek industrialist and collector made himself the most imposing Mediterranean figure in the arts when he opened the Deste Foundation in 1983.
7William Ruprecht (new) Took over as chief executive officer of Sotheby's auctioneers after Diana Brooks departed in 2000 over the price-fixing scandal. Has since presided over a substantial improvement in the company's position.
8Ronald Lauder (1) The cosmetics millionaire has been a major fundraiser for the new headquarters of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he is the chairman.
9Robert Storr (new) Highly regarded curator at the Museum of Modern Art, moved on to the Institute of Fine Arts, New York.
10Takashi Murakami (7): One of the Japanese artist's major works will feature in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
2004年10月20日 星期三
From pickled sharks to the world of business: the expansion of an artist's empire
Wednesday, 20 October 2004
Damien Hirst's soaring reputation as an artist has been matched only by the rapid growth in his personal wealth.
Damien Hirst's soaring reputation as an artist has been matched only by the rapid growth in his personal wealth.
Even before Monday night, when with characteristic alchemy he converted the contents of his failed restaurant Pharmacy into a personal payday of £9.6m, he was worth more than £35m.
Prices paid for his works are riding high. According to artprice.com, which provides information to the fine art world, £100 invested in a Damien Hirst in 1997, before Pharmacy even opened its doors, would now be worth £389. This is a return of about 30 times greater than the same amount invested in the FTSE 100 over the same period.
Last year, at his first exhibition since 1995, Romance in the Age of Uncertainty held at the White Cube, Hirst made £11m, making him Britain's most successful conceptual artist. He used most of the money to buy back 12 pieces from his former mentor Charles Saatchi, including his pickled shark, sheep and cows.
The deal was brokered by Jay Jopling of the White Cube. Hirst and Saatchi fell out after riding the Britart wave together from the early 1990s. The advertising tycoon saw a phenomenal return on his investment in the emerging artist.
The top price in the 2003 sale was achieved by Charity , a 22ft bronze replica of the Spastics Society collecting doll from the 1960s. Hirst made three of the statues, one of which was sold to Kim Chang II, a businessman who displayed it at his Seoul department store. Another was damaged in the fire that swept through the Momart warehouses in east London earlier this year, destroying 17 of Hirst's works. The artist received a seven figure cheque from his insurers for the disaster.
Major works are commanding major prices. This week his medicine cabinet The Fragile Truth , sold for £1.2m when the auctioneer's commission was added. A second, The Sleep of Reason , sold for slightly more than £1m.
Hirst's industrial-level of production is down to the closely managed studio system he has built. He employs a staff of 30 mainly at his company Science Ltd which he runs from his rented office, an imposing Victorian house in Gower Street, central London. The cost of employing such a staff can be met with "two paintings a year", he says.
This summer he applied to expand his studios in Gloucestershire where most of his pieces are created. Stroud District Council is considering whether to approve the plans.
His business ambitions are far ranging. He is listed as a director of nine companies including Science Ltd, whose stated endeavour is recorded at Companies House as artistic and literary creation. Then there is Turtleneck Ltd, an art media company, Other Criteria Ltd, a general commercial company, Windows on the World Ltd, a computer company, Murderme Ltd and Overthesofa.com Ltd, which operate arts facilities, and the most recent - Under The Sofa.com Ltd and Under The Sofa Ltd which again specialise in artistic and literary creation. All are registered to a building in Charing Cross Road, central London, the home of Hirst's accountants. A ninth, Is Good Limited, is described merely as a general commercial enterprise.
Hirst is also a former director of 11 The Quay in the unfashionable North Devon town of Ilfracombe where he financed the restoration of the harbourside Victorian inn that houses it.
Hirst lives with his wife in Combe Martin, north Devon. He also has a house boat in Chelsea. He recently added four properties to his portfolio in Lambeth, south London, which are likely to provide studio space and recording facilities.
He is building a house by the coast in Mexico, described as resembling Cinderella's castle, which he plans to rent out as a holiday destination.
Hirst's next major exhibition will be in the United States with an exhibition of his paintings at the New York Gallery in March 2005.
2004年10月15日 星期五
Turner Prize winner charts his insecurities in pottery
Friday, 15 October 2004
Grayson Perry's first exhibition since winning the Turner Prize picks up where he left off when he collected the accolade dressed as his female alter ego, Claire.
Grayson Perry's first exhibition since winning the Turner Prize picks up where he left off when he collected the accolade dressed as his female alter ego, Claire.
Making an acceptance speech in a satin dress and patent red shoes last year, he wryly commented: "It's about time a transvestite won the Turner Prize."
That quote is emblazoned inside a speech bubble on one of Perry's signature ceramic pots, and features among his new work at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, which opened yesterday and runs until 13 November. In another artistic reference to the night, a glazed pot, entitled A Network of Cracks, recreates the seating plan of the awards ceremony.
Perry's exploration of modern-day masculinity is a dominant theme in the exhibition, which consists of 14 ornate pots, a textile work and large-scale maps on paper. "It's an interesting time to be a man. I think the traditional role of the 'utility man' has been pushed out and we have not found a good way to replace him. Everything is so up in the air for men at the moment and we are fishing around for role models. I seek to capture some of that in my work," he said.
An ornate work,Precious Boys, depicting the sartorial elegance of a group of transvestites, represents the "psychological lack" experienced by boys which leads them to "dress up" later in life.
He said: "It's looking at the reasons men dress up, and whether they know it or not, it is about not being able to access the feelings of being 'precious' as boys. Boys do not often get that experience of 'being precious' just for being children. Transvestism is partly a manifestation of that psychological lack."
Another pottery work,Black Dog, refers to Winston Churchill's famous aphorism for depression, and captures silhouetted images which represent the artist's insecurities, including an image of a terrified boy wearing a Victorian smock. "The silhouettes represent the inner voices that tell you that you are rubbish. We all carry them with us," he said.
Perry, 44, said he chose pottery as a medium because it was humble and "not macho". Sir Nicholas Serota is featured as the Pope and the art collector Charles Saatchi is emperor, with London's art galleries transformed into cathedrals on a medieval, Mappa Mundi-style pot, Balloon, which makes a metaphor of contemporary art as the 21st century's religion.
A large etching,Map of an Englishman, depicts, Perry said, the "landscape of my beliefs" in the style of a 16th-century Dutch map - the corners are labelled Anorexia Nervosa, Sex, Peace, Love and Tender.
2004年10月2日 星期六
Saatchi says goodbye to Hymn . . . . . and hello to her
THE unmade bed has been laid to rest, the shark has swum, and Hymn isn’t singing anymore. Charles Saatchi, the millionaire collector whose manipulation of the art market in the 1990s made the reputations and fortunes of the Young British Artists has dumped his most famous installations in favour of paintings.
Mr Saatchi has announced that he will clear his gallery of Tracey Emin’s My Bed and Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde for a new exhibition of highly-regarded painters. Hirst’s 20ft bronze reproduction of an anatomical model, Hymn, will also be dismantled.
Works that were initially shocking when they were unveiled for Sensation, Saatchi’s 1997 show at the Royal Academy, will be sent on tour next year and then will be mothballed until 2007, when they will return to the Saatchi Gallery on the South Bank.
The Art Newspaper reported that Young British Artists, who are now approaching middle age, would be replaced by internationally renowned artists including Martin Kippenberger, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, Jorg Immendorff and Hermann Nitsch. Luc Tuymans, one of Belgium’s most celebrated contemporary painters, is currently on show at Tate Modern, and Martin Kippenberger is will be exhibited shortly at the Reina Sofia in Madrid.
The five painters will replace the headline-grabbing British artists of the 1990s including Jake and Dinos Chapman, Sarah Lucas, Marc Quinn and Gavin Turk. Hirst’s pickled sheep, Away from the Flock, and Chris Ofili’s elephant dung painting, The Holy Virgin Mary, will also be cleared out.
Marc Quinn’s Self, made from nine pints of the artist’s blood, will be kept in cold storage outside of the gallery.
Mr Saatchi said that it was time for contemporary painters to be recognised. “For the last ten years only five of the 40 Turner Prize artists have been pure painters,” he said. “We think it is time for a painting survey looking at established international artists and later in the year, new young painters.”
The move represents a significant shift for the collector who usually invests in relatively unknown artists by buying their work en masse. Sensation was seen as a success, but a recent exhibition, New Blood, was mauled by art critics. Mr Saatchi will hold a second exhibition of paintings, by younger artists including Daniel Richter and Cecily Brown, later in 2005. They will be succeeded by another exhibition of paintings by “emerging” artists, whose names have not yet been announced.
The works of Sensation will be touring the country but no venues have been arranged.
The move comes after reports of cooling relations between Mr Saatchi and the YBAs. In 2003, Damien Hirst described his patron an “arrogant” and a “childish” businessman who “only recognises art with his wallet”. Hirst declined to be involved in the Saatchi Gallery when it opened the same year.
Mr Saatchi’s newfound love of painting was not greeted with universal acclaim, however. Charles Thomson, who founded a movement called Stuckism to oppose Mr Saatchi’s patronage of installation art, said that the collector was copying his idea.
“It is amazing that he dares to do it,” he said.
A large chunk of Mr Saatchi’s Britart will not be available for touring. Several high profile items, including Tracey Emin’s tent and the Chapman Brothers’ Hell, were destroyed in a the fire in the Momart art warehouse May.
2004年7月6日 星期二
Sotheby's And Hirst To Auction London Chic
When it opened in 1998, the Pharmacy epitomized London chic. Everything in this Notting Hill restaurant -- from the butterfly paintings and glass-fronted medicine cabinets to the aspirin-shaped bar stools and match boxes illustrated with surgical tools -- was designed by Damien Hirst, a leading member of London's Young British Artists. For nearly six years people from all over the world flocked to the Pharmacy to ogle the celebrity regulars like Kate Moss, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise.
In September the Pharmacy closed, a victim of its own trendiness. ''It was a slow death,'' Mr. Hirst said in a telephone interview. ''People gradually stopped going.''
But unlike most closings, this one is expected to generate money. Sotheby's announced on Monday that it planned to auction the entire contents of the Pharmacy on Oct. 19 for an expected total of more than $5.5 million.
It is surprising that virtually everything from the Pharmacy still exists. After it closed, Mr. Hirst put it all in storage. Like many in the London art world, he chose Momart, one of whose warehouses in the East End had a fire in May that destroyed millions of dollars worth of art by Mr. Hirst and other Young British Artists. The things from the Pharmacy were stored in a building separate from the fire, and nothing was harmed.
''It all could have gone up in flames,'' said Cheyenne Westphal, head of Sotheby's contemporary art department in Europe. ''When we heard about the fire we held our breath.'' At the time she and her colleagues at Sotheby's had discussed the sale with Mr. Hirst, but no contract had been signed, Ms. Westphal said.
The decision to sell at auction was not easy for the artist. ''I thought long and hard about it,'' Mr. Hirst said, ''and finally decided it was best to do it all in one big hit.''
For months, he said, dealers had been coming to him, wanting to cherry pick. He even had offers from people who offered to create a kind of restaurant-museum. ''It's not like it's only art,'' he said. ''But there are 10 butterfly paintings, so maybe people will be able to get them cheap.''
Winner of the 1995 Turner prize, Mr. Hirst, 39, is known for shocking viewers with works that include dead animals. Among his best known are rotting cows positioned to simulate copulation; sharks and sheep preserved in formaldehyde; maggots attacking a cow's head; medicine cabinets full of hundreds of bottles and boxes of drugs; paintings of colorful dots and swirls; and canvases with real butterflies on them.
For years his work has been eagerly bought by museums and collectors around the world, and many of the best paintings have brought upward of $400,000 at auction. In November a glass-front cabinet full of animal skeletons sold at auction for $1.1 million, a record for the artist at auction.
Sotheby's has purposely timed the sale to coincide with the Frieze Art Fair, which specializes in contemporary art. It plans to publish a special catalog recording the history of the Pharmacy and to recreate the feeling of the restaurant at its New Bond Street galleries in the hope of creating a feeding frenzy in the international contemporary art world.
''It will give people a chance to see the Pharmacy one last time,'' Ms. Westphal said.
''The sale will include something for everyone,'' she added. There will be paintings with estimates of over $550,000 as well as objects expected to sell for under $100. A group of 10 of the artist's much-loved butterfly paintings, each with a bright color background and each with love in the title, are estimated to fetch over $110,000. The auction will also have 11 of his well-known medicine cabinets and a molecular model sculpture with estimates each from $183,360 to $275,000.
There will be the aspirin-shaped bar stools (estimated at $920 to $1,200 for six) and glass cone-shaped hanging lamps ($5,500 to $7,300 for eight; $550 to $740 for one). A pair of martini glasses with a snake wrapped around each stem is estimated at $92 to $128 for the pair.
''The martini glasses are prototypes,'' Mr. Hirst said. ''They became too expensive to make.
The dishes, white with the restaurant's logo and signed by the artist, will be in the sale too. A set of 12 are estimated to bring $9,000 to $13,000. A set of eight glass egg cups, also with the Pharmacy logo, will go for $73 to $110. Mr. Hirst produced about 60 different designed match boxes. Some of these will be auctioned too, but Sotheby's officials said they had not priced them yet.
''Everybody these days wants branded objects,'' said Tobias Meyer, director of Sotheby's contemporary art department worldwide. ''The Pharmacy represents a moment in time when the London art world was at its peak.''
From the time it opened, the Pharmacy was as much fodder for gossip columnists as it was for restaurant critics. Inspired by a pharmacy installation the artist made in 1992 that is now in the permanent collection of Tate Modern in London, the restaurant looked so much like a drugstore that people often came in with prescriptions.
''A woman once asked me for an aspirin, and I had to say I'm sorry we have a strict no drug policy here,'' Mr. Hirst recalled.
Shortly after it opened, the restaurant ran into legal trouble when the Royal Pharmaceutical Society threatened a lawsuit saying the name was confusing for people who were looking for a real drug store. The name was temporarily changed to Army Chap, an anagram of Pharmacy.
The restaurant's ground floor had a bar full of Mr. Hirst's glass-fronted pharmaceutical cabinets. The windows were stained glass etched with pill patterns, and the staff wore uniforms designed by Prada and inspired by surgical gowns and lab coats. (None of the uniforms still exist.)
Mr. Hirst's decision to sell the contents of the Pharmacy is surprising because he is one of the few artists who collect their own work. In November he and his dealer, Jay Jopling, bought a group of about 12 seminal pieces for a reported $15 million from Charles Saatchi, the advertising magnate who is one of his biggest collectors. Mr. Hirst said that he has kept one of his molecular sculptures.
When he thinks of the Pharmacy, Mr. Hirst said, ''it makes me think of failure.'' But he is still involved in the restaurant business. He recently opened a small fish restaurant called the Quay in Devon, England. ''I will be putting art in there soon,'' he said. He also plans a restaurant in Mexico.
''When I have something to celebrate, I always celebrate with food,'' Mr. Hirst added. ''Someday I'd like to open a world class restaurant.''
2004年6月28日 星期一
The Olympics of the art world
Art Basel is the world's biggest contemporary art fair, where leading dealers compete to seduce wealthy collectors with their most expensive pieces. Anyone who is anyone was at this year's event – and so was Tom Horan
Into the vast exhibition centre in the Swiss town of Basel come thousands of people, striding forward with an iron purpose. The sun is shining and there is plenty inside that is fun and beautiful, but their faces do not betray even a hint of levity. The building is alive with intention, thick with the possibilities of beauty meeting money. They have gathered to do battle at the Olympic Games of modern artistic commerce – Art Basel, the biggest contemporary art fair in the world.
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Inside the doors, staff at a central helpdesk slip without a flicker from German to French to English, Italian, Spanish, Romansch. The fair is open to the public and attracts 50,000 visitors in five days, but the artworld elite is already equipped with its security passes, and marches past the queues for day tickets. Without a glance at the hyper-efficient Swiss signage that marks out the 270 stands, the dealers – or "gallerists", as they prefer – make their way to their temporary homes. Here, inside miniature empires rented at 427 Swiss francs (£195) per square metre, they await the arrival of Art Basel's ruling class – the buyers.
The fair may offer the chance to see an array of post-1900 artworks that would put virtually any gallery in the world to shame, but it is the intricate, courtly dance of a thousand discreet business deals that makes the event so gripping. Descending on escalators from a labyrinth of cordoned-off anterooms and hospitality bays on the upper floors, come the collectors. The antennae of the gallerists begin to quiver as they sense the arrival in their territory of a rather special kind of person. The word "rich" being considered in this milieu the height of vulgarity, they are known in the trade as "individuals of high net worth".
Although I am wearing my best – indeed, my only – suit, I sense that even the rooky dealers on the edges of the hall have me marked the second they see me as an individual of virtually no net worth. I make my way from stand to stand. For the most part the gallerists are too busy attending to the buyers to bother with people who have just come to look. In closely packed, open-sided booths that have none of the intimidatory element of walking into a commercial gallery, you are so close to the art you can smell it. You are left to examine it at your leisure – and watch the artworld at work.
I go up to the first floor, where the younger galleries are billeted. Art Basel sells itself on the quality of the work it attracts, and this is maintained through strict vetting of applicants. A gallery must have been dealing for at least three years to qualify, and then its work is assessed by the fair's seven-man committee. I decide to head for the stand of White Cube, the London gallery run by Jay Jopling. An extraordinary character, Jopling is dealer-in-chief to Damien Hirst and many of Brit Art's key figures, and son of Lord Jopling, a former minister for agriculture. Before I can get there, however, I'm stopped in my tracks by four enormous basketball players on the far side of the floor.
The stunning series of manipulated colour photographs The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is at the stand of a New York gallery called The Project. The artist, Paul Pfeiffer, has taken action shots from big games and removed the hoop, the ball and all but a single, peripheral player. In turn, this player's uniform has been stripped of numbers, names, sponsors. The lone figure stands frozen and exposed in front of 20,000 cheering spectators. The effect is eerie. "Has there been any interest in the basketball images?" I ask Jenny Liu, the gallerist. She pulls on her cigarette. "They're sold," she says, "and we're in a quiet spot. It's Siberia out here, baby."
From the corner of my eye I catch sight of dismembered body parts hanging from a tree, being eaten by maggots and snails. It's the Chapman brothers' Sex II, for sale at White Cube. Of basketball-playing proportions himself, Jopling in full dealer mode is a compelling sight. He towers over a pair of fortysomething American women, whose haircuts alone have cost them the price of a Chapman brothers sketch. His signature heavy black glasses stand out like a logo for all of Brit Art, drawing crowds of people into the stand. Jopling reaches out a long arm and wraps it round the shoulders of his clients, enfolding them in a decade and a half of London art grooviness. It's irresistible.
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Now he and the two Americans have me wedged in against the rotting flesh of Sex II. "Are you coming to the Bulgari dinner tomorrow night, Jay?" one asks him. "Dinners schminners," he says. "I can't be bothered." I decide that now is the moment to catch his eye and get a word with him, but his command of the room is imperious, and I am blotted out in favour of someone with more noughts in their current account. I decide to take a break and regroup. Being so close to so much contemporary art is having an odd effect. The intensity of all that human expression is unsettling. I slip away upstairs to the Collectors Lounge.
Basel is a drug town, the centre of the pharmaceutical industry, a global business second only to the arms trade in terms of profitability. It's home to many superb art galleries, built on its astronomical wealth. Up in the Collectors Lounge, the financial hierarchies that make up the town are starkly set out. At one end, the luxury jeweller Bulgari has its enclosure, for those with an eye for a luxury jewel. But pride of place goes to Art Basel's other sponsor, Swiss bank UBS. Its VIP enclosure is so exclusive that you can't even see into it. It's ringed off in a circle of ruched curtain that stops just short of the floor, like the one that hides the wizard in The Wizard of Oz.
As they are at the stands on the floors below, most people are smoking. A group of Catalans in their mid-fifties sits down at my table. They talk in dollars, euros and Swiss francs, pet their mobiles, sip at flutes of champagne. They're wondering whether to go to the "Conversations" tonight, the first of a series of discussion panels about burning issues in the art world. They nod at Sam Keller as he breezes through the room, his shaven head glinting.
Keller is the organiser of Art Basel, a dynamic and preternaturally charming Swiss of 37. People love Keller. He has a smile that says success. In a magazine interview available throughout the lounge he describes the qualities required to do his job: "To serve, to listen, to calculate, to moderate, to motivate, to communicate, to analyse, to criticise, to organise, to change, to set goals, to risk, and to take yourself not too serious."
I head down to the ground floor, where the biggest operators are sited, to ask a long-established British gallerist, David Juda, about what makes Art Basel special. Juda's gallery Annely Juda is one of only five that have shown at every fair in the event's 35-year history. He's on the Basel committee. "You can go to a fair like Arco in Madrid," he says, "and find twice as many people, but it's a bit like going to the Ideal Home Exhibition. Boyfriends and girlfriends wandering around and you're not sure if they're really looking at what's in front of them. At Basel people stare intently and they're very serious. This year is a big selling year. You can feel the buzz of people buying. You can tell, because you can see dealers smiling."
Jopling is certainly smiling. He's winding up a chat with another little knot of Brit Art buyers. Sex II is sold, for £450,000. This is his skill, to ease the qualms of buyers, to reassure them that their money is well spent on Jake and Dinos Chapman's astonishing 5ft painted brass vision of putrefaction. I step up to Jopling. "Could I have a few words, Jay?" I'm 6ft 2in, but he looms over me like a great larch. "What's this?" he says, staring at my notes. "'Dinners schminners'? You've been writing down my conversations." Disaster. I say maybe I should come back tomorrow. He tosses my business card into a thick notebook that contains 500 others.
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I feel dazed. It will soon be time for the "Conversation" and I need to go and change. This intense concentration of art makes huge demands on the imagination, drains your last drop of empathy, exerts an unnerving power. Some of it is breathtaking. The proximity you get to the works – Miró, Picasso, Dalí, Duchamp, Hockney, Warhol, Koons, Hirst – is quite unlike a museum exhibition. All distance is removed; history comes alive; you can feel the ghosts of the makers hovering around them. And beneath it all the incessant whisper: "Anything you see can be yours."
The "Conversations" panel is made up of international museum directors, and starry names. There's the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, whose enormous sun installation The Weather Project caught the public imagination at Tate Modern last year. Next to him sits the British architect Zaha Hadid, whose innovative projects are lauded rather more frequently than they are built. Hadid keeps turning away from her mic to point at accompanying slides, so all we hear are single phrases: "urban context", "spatial experiences", "aggregates", "typography". None the less, everyone cheers. Eliasson says something about chalk, and then: "How do you present presentation?" No one seems to know.
Then a row starts between an inflammatory German museum boss who has been smoking roll-ups and the chief curator of the Guggenheim in New York. Just as things are getting personal, the lights come up and it's time for a dinner of Louis Quatorzian opulence. The guest speakers throw slightly nervous glances around the room as the high-net-worthers buttonhole them. During the perfunctory disco, I make a run for it.
I take a taxi to the Kunsthalle, which I've heard is the destination after a hard day's culture commerce. You've got to meet Frank Cohen, someone says in the packed open-air courtyard, he's a heavyweight British buyer, fantastic collection – made millions out of wallpaper. The style magazine, I ask? No, the stuff you put on the bathroom wall. He's from Cheshire – had a chain of DIY shops in the North.
Cohen is the soul of affability, full of bonhomie and dry Mancunian one-liners, and hugely enthusiastic about art. He lost some of his collection of a thousand-plus pieces in the recent London warehouse fire. "There's an art fair every week of the bloody year," he says above the din, tugging on a bottle of beer. "And there's only so many modern artists churning out stuff to fill 'em. But Basel's the one. It's where all the dealers bring out the good stuff they've been keepin' back." I ask him what makes him spend his money on contemporary art. "I love it. It's the thing – it's got a sense of what's going on, right now, today, in the world. It's bloody modernity, i'n't it?"
At the end of the night, as Jopling and the international young gallerists let it all hang out at Le Plaza, a basement disco beneath the Swissotel, I think back to a fleeting moment I witnessed earlier in the day. I was passing a tiny private sideroom at the stand of New York giants Gagosian, the premier traders in the modern art game. I caught a glimpse of an old man, finalising his purchase of a deep blue Andy Warhol painting, frosted in a diamond glitter. The Warhol was so dazzling, so iridescent, that it seemed to pulse with life. Looking at the Warhol, the old man too looked alive, animated. This was what all those rich people were here for. They betrayed it in their eyes: they knew that cold, arid money was worth nothing in the end. They were here to strike one last deal, and trade it in for vials of pure human spirit – the finest works of art in the world.
2004年6月22日 星期二
The new Mr Big of modern art?
Tuesday, 22 June 2004
He is the Charles Saatchi of the North, the self-made millionaire credited with the most important private contemporary art collection in Britain after the advertising guru himself.
He is the Charles Saatchi of the North, the self-made millionaire credited with the most important private contemporary art collection in Britain after the advertising guru himself.
Tomorrow, Frank Cohen is inviting curious Londoners to see highlights of a collection that until now only his friends and a few art-lovers in Manchester have had the opportunity to view. In the splendour of a Grade I-listed Georgian townhouse, nearly 30 works by artists including the Chapman brothers and Luc Tuymans, the highly influential Belgian who is the subject of a summer show at Tate Modern, are going on show. There is a video installation by Matt Collishaw, Tracey Emin's ex-boyfriend, and sculptures by Paul McCarthy, the artist who had two giant inflatables bobbing around outside the Tate Modern last year.
"It's an incredibly fine collection," said Anthony McNerney, a specialist in post-war and contemporary art at Christie's who agreed to help Mr Cohen hang the show. "He's very knowledgeable and extremely well-read about contemporary art. He knows a lot of the dealers and listens to them, and he knows a great number of artists and talks to them. He's a consummate collector."
Frank Cohen, 60, lives in an affluent part of Cheshire with an Emin, a Grayson Perry pot and a Lowry among others, but only one piece from his home - a McCarthy - has made it to London. Most of his 1,000-strong collection, which is stored in the Midlands, is unsuitable for the ornate grandeur of the Georgian house that has been lent for the occasion by the bank, EFG.
But Mr Cohen is eager to know what the critics will make of this first glimpse of his private passion, art accumulated over 30 years and funded with the proceeds of a DIY/home improvement business he built from scratch and sold in 1997.
"I want to know what they will write about me. I'd like to know what the critics say," he said yesterday, as he swirled around the building, answering his mobile phone between making improvements to the hang.
He started young, collecting cigarette cards and coins, before moving into art three decades ago, starting with modern British painters and sculptors such as L S Lowry, Stanley Spencer, Barbara Hepworth and Eduardo Paolozzi.
"Then that period left me because the artists were dying and the dealers were dead and the contemporary art world took over from there," he said.
He has, in fact, displayed a few of his contemporary works before, to benefit a friend who runs a small gallery in Manchester. But, he noted, no critics deigned to take a look at that.
"When you live in Manchester, no one knows you exist," he said. "They're quite a close-knit community down here. I could have 50,000 pieces in my collection, but I'd still only be a collector."
Now he feels like a film star but he claims he does not care whether the critics like what they see or not. "I couldn't care less," he said. "I do what I do. I'm not the kind of person who's going to cry my eyes out if they say they don't like it."
The interest is immense with a cavalcade of international journalists passing through the not-quite complete show yesterday for a preview.
Mr Cohen's display is part of a giant initiative called Art Fortnight, in which the capital's auction houses and private and public art galleries are co-operating to promote London's pre-eminence in the art market.
He is taking part after being invited by the writer and Art Fortnight organiser, Meredith Etherington-Smith. It is, he adds, "a great opportunity". It is also, perhaps, a taster of the much bigger permanent gallery he intends to open in the heart of Manchester next year, a tantalising advertisement worthy of Charles Saatchi.
But Saatchi is the one subject Frank Cohen will not discuss. They are virtually the same age and both built a business empire instead of pursuing higher education. Like Saatchi, Cohen is a perfectionist, moving sculptures to left and right for maximum impact, railing at the chandeliers spoiling the view of a colourful Frank Ackerman. Where they differ is in Frank Cohen's chattiness. He is as voluble as Saatchi is reticent about his art. Mr Cohen makes clear he believes there is nothing to be gained by discussing Saatchi - even though the more famous collector has already popped in to take a look.
Critics will finally be able to compare their two collections properly when Frank Cohen opens his Manchester gallery. It will cover 25,000 sq ft in the heart of the city and will have space for up to 200 paintings and sculptures, enabling a proper display of contemporary Germans, such as Andrea Slominski and Tobias Rehberger, young Brits including this year's Turner prize nominee Yinka Shonibare, and Americans, such as his current favourite, Richard Prince.
McNerney said: "He's always spotting artists and championing young artists so there are some unsung heroes of contemporary art in his collection that will probably be the most exciting things to see."
Yet Mr Cohen has just one assistant and one conservator to help him with his collecting. His art is "pretty much" what he does these days, apart from the odd property deal.
He is proud of what he has. Looking around the exhibition yesterday, he almost bounced with excitement. "It looks good, doesn't it?" he said.
The Frank Cohen collection is on show with the Neil Kaplan collection of Rembrandt etchings at 3 Grafton Street, W1, on weekdays from tomorrow until 2 July.
2004年6月15日 星期二
I made more money as a stripper...
Stella Vine was working as a £1,000-a-week soho stripper when she took up painting four years ago, and she remained unknown until Charles Saatchi paid £600 for her dripping-blood portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales. but far from playing the great Brit-art game she is a genuinely tortured artist
In short — or so, at least, I assumed — things had gone brilliantly to plan: thanks to the reflexes of the art-media complex, a nobody who had not lifted a paintbrush until four years ago had become, overnight, a sensation. In this game no one gets hurt, although a few art buyers may get stung.
But the game remains a game only if you know what you are doing and, now that I meet her, I am not at all sure that Vine does.
The first clue that Saatchi’s Midas touch has not turned Stella’s life to gold is her residence, a converted butcher’s shop in a Bohemianised but still working-class street in East London. I say “converted” but I hesitate to say exactly what she has converted it into. Her front door, ajar so that a street seller can keep his stock inside, opens into a scuffed exhibition space, empty today but for a graffiti-covered gas cooker. An oubliette peers down into the dark dungeon quarters of Vine’s 18-year-old son, Jamie. Upstairs festers a beyond-squalid kitchen and farther upstairs — except that this flight has fallen down and been replaced by a ladder — is Vine’s bedroom. On the first floor, where we talk, is her studio: white-painted floorboards, an old mattress, an old cat on the old mattress, a Mac laptop and a chair. This is not cheerful artistic anarchy; it is emotional chaos.
Vine, 35, fair, rustic-skinned, of middle height, buxom in her Tommy T-shirt (overweight, she thinks, were she to return to stripping) joins the cat on the mat. I sit on the chair. She speaks in a regionally indefinite middle-class accent, her introspective confessional featuring sudden bursts of articulacy, learning, anger and distress. I’d guess this vessel of creativity was holed and sinking were the walls of the room not covered with confident paintings from her new show, Prozac and Private Views: a large wood circle containing Catherine Deneuve and smaller rectangles featuring a fleshy Geri Halliwell, Vine’s glamorous Aunt Ella, Denis and Margaret Thatcher, the bolshie Kitten from the latest series of Big Brother and a weeping Ted Hughes. The ailing cooker downstairs is another exhibit, the writing covering it from Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Courting controversy again, I say. Expect letters from the Plath-Hughes estate.
“Yeah, gas cooker. And Sylvia. Yeah,” Vine says, as if for the first time joining the dots of the poet’s suicide. “I don’t know what it is. I have a dark passionate sense of humour, I suppose, but at the same time I could just as easily cry over it as I could sort of be cheeky with it. I suppose I’m quite teenager about it and a bit stubborn.”
Vine thinks herself as much a teenager as her son. She most certainly has an adolescent’s capacity to appropriate the feelings of people with whom she identifies and incapacity to empathise with anyone else. The Whitear controversy is a case in point. Rachel was found dead, clutching a syringe, in her bed-sit in Devon four years ago. Although Vine has not had drug problems herself, Rachel’s image as used in an anti-drugs campaign made a profound impression on her. She had never imagined the resulting painting would be exhibited, let alone the day after police had exhumed Whitear’s body. Yet I discover that she still finds it impossible to grasp the offence that this grisly coincidence caused.
“I think if I met her parents we’d probably get on fine because they’d see that I’m actually quite similar to their daughter really, an artistic destructive person, very simple. She wrote dark poetry about heroin and other things and she was into Nirvana. When you see Rachel on the internet — her eyes, I mean I just think they’re almost my eyes.” Her voice catches as if she will cry. She was prescribed Prozac after her mother’s sudden death from a brain tumour last August. Off it now, and resisting going back on, she frequently sounds self-destructive.
“I always feel very close to the edge of just going. I know a lot of people say that and don’t mean it. But apart from my son . . . ” Her voice goes again . . . “there is nothing at all, really. I always admire the decision that people make in just deciding to end it, even though it’s kind of cruel when you have children and that could ruin their life. But I’m not sure that if you’re a very unhappy person you make an enormous difference by staying, really.”
Doomed females are her subject — Plath, Diana, Whitear — but as she tells me her life story its real stars emerge as the missing, abusive or exploitative males who make victims of women. She was born Melissa Robson in Alnwick, Northumberland, in 1969. When she was 3, her father had an affair with the lodger and left home, becoming an unreliable and infrequent figure in her life: not unlikeable but “difficult”, “grumpy” and “miserable”. Oddly, she got on better with his girlfriend, Astrid Jordan — so well that she later changed her surname to Jordan (by my count Vine has got through four names in her short life; even her gallery here trades under a pseudonym, Rosy Wilde).
For a while Stella, her mother Ellenor and older brother Alastair got on well enough in the castle town. When Stella was 7, however, her mother met and married an RAF officer and the family moved to Norwich, where another daughter was born. Stella hated her strict new stepfather, a miser who drew lines on milk bottles to check how much had been drunk when he wasn’t looking. Relations reached a crisis when Ellenor’s longstanding Crohn’s disease developed into bowel cancer. Feeling that she was being blamed by her stepfather for the illness, Stella asked a friend’s mother to foster her. Social services became involved, and acquiesced in her wish to abandon school, and she moved to a bed-sit. There, still under age, she was seduced by the building’s caretaker, ten years her senior.
At the age of 17 she gave birth to Jamie. By now his father was displaying a violent temper and when she moved out into single-parent housing in Norfolk he broke into her flat. So she left for London with Jamie, took a bed-sit in Tooting and enrolled in drama school, finding work on the fringe of fringe theatre and even auditioning for Mike Leigh. She fell in love with a fellow student and lived with him for four years before leaving him for someone else. The new relationship collapsed. Alone again, her acting career going nowhere, aged 26, she began working in strip joints, including the Windmill in Piccadilly.
During the day she was educating Jamie, whom she had removed from school because of bullying. To vary his lessons, in 2000 she took him to painting classes at Hampstead School of Art. It was she, however, who discovered her vocation. Unfortunately, something called Stuckism soon afterwards discovered her.
Formed in 1999 as a backlash to conceptual Brit Art, Stuckism takes its name from an insult tossed at one of its founders, Billy Childish, by his ex-girlfriend Tracey Emin, who said his paintings were “stuck, stuck, stuck”. It champions figurative painting but has its own strict rules. Vine now regards Stuckism as a misogynistic cult but she was impressed enough at the time by the hypnotic charms of its other founder, 48-year-old Charles Thomson. After a two-month romance, they married in New York in August 2001.
“I felt I would never ever amount to anything without him. That’s what he told me,” she says in explanation. The marriage was not a success. Actually, save for a brief reconciliation in London, it ended after a single day in a violent row at their hotel. Vine finally obtained her divorce in October last year. Any relief she felt, however, was short-lived. When the news of Saatchi’s championing of her made headlines this spring, the Stuckists vigorously set about claiming Vine for one of their own. Even now the home page of the interestingly obsessive Stuckist website features carries a huge headline, “THE STUCKIST STELLA VINE”, a tag that she furiously resents and regards as a form of harassment.
I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler for her simply to acknowledge that they had a minor role and move on. I couldn’t have said anything worse. “‘Just admit it, yeah? ‘How could you possibly have taught yourself to paint? You’re just a blonde stripper’. Regardless of the fact that I’ve lived on my own since I was 13 and not been to school and brought a son up who’s now 18 and run theatre companies and bought a butcher’s shop, learnt guitar by myself, taught myself to sing, all this sort of stuff. Regardless of all that, of course, this dynamic man must have taught me to paint.
“I have said in my blogs and in interviews, the people who have inspired me, you know: Sophie Von Hellerman, Anna Bjerger, Paul Housley, Karen Kilimnik, Elizabeth Peyton. Three or four of those are London artists, younger than me, two of those are big, iconic American painters. I don’t have a problem being generous with who inspires me. If someone inspires me, hats off to them. I’ll sell their work for them. I don’t have a problem with that. But I do have a very, very big problem with someone who saw me coming and exploited me as a mascot.”
I say the Stuckists sound like a playground gang. This upsets her even more. “He’s full of shit and, basically, every time people ask me about this f***ing man, it’s impossible to get my point of view across. You’ve got the school playground and you’ve got some very clever bullies and everyone else goes, ‘Just ignore them’. And then this kid ends up hanging himself.”
I suggest that we change the subject.
In the past few months, she tells me, she has been having an affair. It has ended unhappily. She reckons her lover had not realised what an “aggressive and desperate a person” she was.
I say I am so sorry that success has not made her happier. “No, it doesn’t mean anything, does it? People occasionally ask for your autograph or say, ‘I saw you in the paper’, but that doesn’t mean anything at all.”
So what has Saatchi’s patronage brought? Money? Well, as a stripper she could earn £1,000 a week. Saatchi bought the two original paintings for £600 each. Do, as they say, the maths. But there is no going back to the clubs now because she would live in fear of a punter with a camera-phone selling a picture to a tabloid.
Rich, she is not. On the night of the Saatchi opening she arrived late because she was waiting for the café next door to open so she could borrow £10 for the fare.
Fame, meanwhile, has made her nervous and self-conscious about her art. The dripping blood — originally an accident of the thin paint she uses — has become a trademark in a way that she never intended. Nor has she become accepted into the YBA/Jay Jopling/Charles Saatchi set. When Charles and Nigella came to inspect her work, she hid upstairs, starstruck. She still has not met them.
“It’s understandable, isn’t it?” she asks. “You get that much attention, it’s bound to affect you a lot and you get really confused and lost.”
She says she feels very alone, wonders if she should take a night class in the hope of meeting someone. Maybe she should. There are some good men out there and she yet may spot one, for, despite everything, she is not a man-hater, rather the reverse. Indeed, when she was stripping she was generous and talkative with even “the real psychos”. Her indulgence towards dependent men — Jamie included — may be, as she says, slightly “warped”, but to ban all men from her life would surely be worse.
There’s other more positive news, I think, and it is revealing itself in her art: she is moving away from painting women exclusively as victims. Two-fingering Kitten, a tarty Deneuve, dignified Thatcher, even fat and happy Ginger Spice, these are positive images. And although Vine is still heavily grieving her mother, they are all living people. No, the last thing she should do now is give up and run off to Spain.
Perhaps, I suggest, I have seen her on a bad day. “Yeah, tomorrow I’ll be high as a kite, probably, really cocky and confident. ‘I’m putting a show on here. I’m the best thing since sliced bread’. I mean too extreme really, really irritating. No, don’t worry about me.”
And so I’ll try not to, but I do wonder if her succès de scandale does not point to another legacy of Brit Art. Thanks to its brutal flippancy, we now automatically imagine artists to be cynical sales persons.
Once upon a time I would not have been surprised to discover a suffering artist.
Prozac and Private Views is at Transition, 110a Lauriston Road, London E9, until July 4.
2004年6月10日 星期四
The artist made by Charles Saatchi sets out on her own with a £7,000 cast of celebrities
Thursday, 10 June 2004
The artist who was plucked from obscurity by Charles Saatchi when he bought her kitsch painting of Princess Diana will today unveil Margaret and Denis Thatcher as her new celebrity subjects in her first solo show.
The artist who was plucked from obscurity by Charles Saatchi when he bought her kitsch painting of Princess Diana will today unveil Margaret and Denis Thatcher as her new celebrity subjects in her first solo show.
Stella Vine, a former stripper, painted what she sees as a romantic portrait out of deep respect for the former Conservative leader. She said yesterday: "That's a very non-artist's thing to say because she's supposed to be so evil. But I bought my council house and it changed my life beyond belief. I think she was an extraordinary woman."
The also includes distinctive paintings of the former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, the model Jordan and the broadcaster Joan Bakewell, who is bizarrely featured with the dead German artist Joseph Beuys. Other works feature the actress Catherine Deneuve and the singers Courtney Love and PJ Harvey, all in Vine's bold brushwork.
Several had already been sold before the opening last night, some to collectors overseas, for sums of up to £7,000, eight times higher than her prices only four months ago. It is thought Mr Saatchi may buy the painting of the Thatchers.
Vine, a 35-year-old single mother, had been struggling to support her art by working as a stripper before her striking portrait of Diana with blood dripping from her lips was bought by Mr Saatchi and featured in the latest show at his gallery at County Hall, London. A second storm of publicity engulfed her when she showed a painting of the schoolgirl Rachel Whitear, who died of a heroin overdose.
After suffering from a serious depression, which only began to lift after a pilgrimage to Lourdes, Vine has emerged with the set of new works, which will open to the public at the Transition Gallery in Lauriston Road, east London, today.
"It's been a real nightmare. I've been really down and I had a little breakdown," Vine admitted yesterday as she steeled her nerves for the critics' response. She said she had no dealer and no experience in handling the surge of interest in her work, which had left her "worried sick".
In contrast with the apparently boundless confidence of a Tracey Emin or Sarah Lucas, Vine said yesterday she found it difficult to have faith in her work. "I'm so unconfident and my self-esteem is naturally low. You need the art world's advice to help you manage all this crazy stuff," she said.
"I think no one will like this stuff and then on a cockier day I think I'm making great work. I'm really proud of the Catherine Deneuve painting which I finished about four days ago. Without that, I would be feeling very, very worried about the show.
"I've really got to stop knocking myself and giving myself a hard time. I was this really down stripper who was struggling but could cope, then something wonderful and lovely happened. This was what I had dreamed of, to be recognised for doing something creative. But I was really lost and confused by the response."
2004年6月4日 星期五
Modern art warehouse was burgled before fire
Friday, 4 June 2004
A warehouse that burned to the ground in east London, destroying priceless works of modern art, was burgled shortly before the blaze broke out, police said yesterday.
A warehouse that burned to the ground in east London, destroying priceless works of modern art, was burgled shortly before the blaze broke out, police said yesterday.
One of the smaller units at the complex, which included the specialist art storage company Momart, was raided some time before the blaze took hold at 3.40am on 24 May.
The unit, thought to have contained watches, computers and mobile phones, was broken into and has been pinpointed as the seat of the fire. Although the burgled unit did not contain the prized pieces of art, it was part of the overall complex in Leyton razed by the fire.
About 100 "irreplaceable" works belonging to collector Charles Saatchi including pieces by Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Chris Ofili and Jake and Dinos Chapman were reduced to ashes. It took several days for the fire to be completely extinguished and police could not investigate the scene until it was deemed safe on 29 May.
A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said: "It is now believed that the fire began in a particular unit. The warehouse had 34 units in total - two main ones and 32 smaller ones.
"One of the smaller units where the fire actually began appears to have suffered a burglary but it is yet to be established if the fire was deliberately started."
The spokeswoman said that arson remained an option as to the cause of the fire and police are continuing to investigate - working closely with forensic teams at the site.
2004年5月30日 星期日
Focus: Out of the ashes - the new stars of Britart
Sunday, 30 May 2004
Laugh if you want. Lots of people have, in the wake of the fire that destroyed some of Britart's most famous works last week. Tracey Emin's tent and Chris Ofili's art made with excrement are easy targets. The giggling classes were typified by the audience and panel on Radio 4's Any Questions last night. One guest even joked about his artistic evaluation being "vindicated" by the flames. But then the host, Jonathan Dimbleby, quietly pointed out that the destruction of 50 paintings by the abstract artist Patrick Heron was actually a huge and serious loss to British art. The giggling stopped.
Laugh if you want. Lots of people have, in the wake of the fire that destroyed some of Britart's most famous works last week. Tracey Emin's tent and Chris Ofili's art made with excrement are easy targets. The giggling classes were typified by the audience and panel on Radio 4's Any Questions last night. One guest even joked about his artistic evaluation being "vindicated" by the flames. But then the host, Jonathan Dimbleby, quietly pointed out that the destruction of 50 paintings by the abstract artist Patrick Heron was actually a huge and serious loss to British art. The giggling stopped.
Dealers and collectors are taking the fire very seriously, as you would expect. As full details of exactly what was burned at the Momart warehouse in east London continue to emerge, many are asking how on earth such a thing could have been allowed to happen. The author and collector Shirley Conran and the painter Gillian Ayres, for example, have hired a lawyer to investigate a possible claim of negligence against Momart after paintings worth around £1m were lost. Eight of them were owned by Ayres and 12 by Conran "covering pretty much everything Gillian did for 10 years between the 1980s and 1990s", according to Razi Mireskandari of the lawyers Simons Muirhead and Burton. "It's not just the money, because people are insured. But something very close to her heart has gone. It's irreplaceable, so we'll be saying to Momart, 'please give us an explanation and what if anything could have been done to prevent it'. It's very early days and we must await the result of the fire brigade's investigation, but a storage facility like this should be no different from a museum. There seems to have been no security staff. You'd expect there to be some sort of advance system. Installation facilities that store very valuable material usually have a system of fireproof shutters."
By Thursday afternoon, Momart said it had given all its clients full lists of what was lost, but as the Crafts Council (which lost 21 pieces from its 1,300-piece permanent collection) points out: "They're lists of what Momart believes has gone." "We can't get on to the site," explained Momart spokeswoman Caroline Feltham. "It's all cordoned off." For the same reason "though we're hopeful something may be saved we need to take a look and we can't do that. Our insurers are satisfied we took the necessary steps to ensure the safekeeping of art works in our possession and we stand by that".
Momart is known as a specialist in handling, moving and storing contemporary art, with clients including the two Tate galleries, the National Gallery and Buckingham Palace. The razed warehouse was one of three Momart facilities in London. Besides having their own, limited liability insurance, such major storage companies will usually offer to arrange insurance for collectors' works, but most collectors have their works insured privately. The managing director of Momart, Eugene Boyle, described his firm as "deeply saddened", but stressed that "the fire, and the loss of any possessions, is an issue for our clients and their insurers. It would be wholly inappropriate for Momart to discuss such details in the media".
Clare Pardy of AXA Art insurers said: "If you're a collector and come to us, you agree with us a value upfront and the policy is written on that basis." Thereafter that value, while it can be increased by agreement or on renewal like ordinary insurance, is sacrosanct. "The agreed value is the agreed value and that's what we pay," Other insurers offer market value policies which means "at the time of the loss we have to establish what the market value is", says Robert Read of the leading art insurance company Hiscox. "We normally rely on experts to help us do that - Sotheby's, Christie's, prominent dealers and so on."
His own "guesstimate" of how much insurance money may be paid out is around £50m. Others says it could be twice as much. Attitudes to the loss vary just as wildly - Tracey Emin's comment that she was more concerned about the deaths in Iraq and the Dominican Republic may become as famous as her tent - but one question rings out loud and clear over the sirens. What happens now for British art? The Independent on Sunday's art critic Charles Darwent says history will "mark this as the moment when Britart ceased". So what comes next? The collectors will carry on buying, but will they do so with the enthusiasm of people who have just cleared out their attic and been given more cash to spend? And will they invest their insurance money in exciting new artists, revitalising a market that was becoming jaded?
Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, chairman of the Arts Council, would not put it as crassly as that, but he says: "Contemporary art is tidal and there is a strong tide against the 1990s Britart style." The landscape of the art world had begun to change before the fire, he says. To landscape, as it happens, and portraiture and abstraction. Painting, though it had never gone away, has began to make a bit of comeback. "For some time young artists have been trying to find a new idiom," says Sir Christopher. "In particular there's a new concentration on painting."
Sam Chatterton Dickson, a director of the Flowers East gallery, says: "There is a national instinct to enjoy newness. When people seem to be trotting out the same stuff they lose interest. In the same way that the tabloids turn on celebrities, people in the art world wait like vultures to signal the death of a movement."
Next month, Art Review magazine is to publish its list of the 25 best young British artists. Three of these, Daniel Sinsel, Varda Caivano and Pearl Shiung (none of whom, it turns out, was born in Britain), complete their MAs only this year, yet they already have had solo shows in prestigious galleries. Charlotte Edwards, deputy editor of Art Review, says: "Collectors are going into BA shows and picking up artists younger and younger in search of the next best thing. At this year's degree shows I saw barely any installations, barely any photography, barely any film. There's a revival of the traditions of landscape, portrait and wonderful abstract painting."
This crop of young painters is less autobiographical, or egocentric, than the most celebrated members of Britart. The gallery owner Alison Jacques, who worked as a curator with a number of Young British Artists, as the leading lights of Britart were also called, says the work she now shows is "more objective, less about the personality of the artist".
One of the major advantages contemporary British artists have - arguably a legacy of the YBAs - is that Britain, and London in particular, is seen by the art world as very sexy. Stuart Evans, former chair of the Patrons of New Art at the Tate and the curator of the art collection of lawyers Simmons & Simmons, says: "The scene here is very rich. There are very good artists, lots of younger artists and more and more come here in part because of that. If we've been the new Paris, it's been like that since the 1990s." Alison Jacques concurs. "British art is in good shape. It's the European centre for contemporary art. People love to come and work here. There's a buzz about the place."
Charlotte Edwards adds: "British art schools are producing generation after generation of technically skilled, talented artists. There is everything to be hopeful about."
'Terrible loss? YBAs made only a few star pieces'
By Ossian Ward
So does this blaze constitute a disaster for the Young British Artists that ruled the art world during the 1990s, or is it a value-enhancing stroke of luck for a bygone movement? By some estimates, the Momart warehouses in Leyton may have held the greatest concentration of British contemporary art from the past decade anywhere in the world. Although the YBA phenomenon produced only a handful of star pieces, the fire is unlikely to send their prices rocketing any higher because only a small portion was lost; just 100 of Charles Saatchi's 7,000-strong collection, in addition to works by Damien Hirst from his personal stockpile.
Jake and Dinos Chapman'swar sculpture was chief among a small number of important works destroyed. Saatchi commissioned the artists to make Hell for £50,000, but the installation would have been worth maybe 10 times that amount. The gruesomely detailed toy soldier diorama was the Chapman brothers' greatest work in terms of visual impact and scale. Displeased with the installation of Hell in its last outing at Saatchi's County Hall gallery in London and ambiguous about the loss ("It's only a work of art"), the Chapmans will surely miss their magnum opus in any retrospective. However, as their nomination for last year's Turner Prize proved, they are at the height of their powers and will surely make many more masterpieces.
Damien Hirst has been less sanguine but it is unclear whether any of his major pieces were destroyed. His giant £1.5m bronze Charity survived the fire, but many of his spin and butterfly paintings, worth between £85,000 and £250,000 each, perished. It will make little difference to Hirst's market value as almost all of his work is produced in editions and series. If works from his early career have been lost, they will be even harder to replace than they have been to conserve (think tanks of formaldehyde and rotting carcasses) and so the value of his scarce early-Nineties period artworks could increase.
Tracey Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963-1995 gained iconic status during the YBA frenzy of 1997 when the Sensation exhibition opened at the Royal Academy. Lost alongside her version of a Margate beach hut, the embroidered tent will be missed, perhaps more so by the artist, pictured, than anyone else.
This year many of the so-called YBAs are turning 40. Perhaps some of them need to draw a line under their previous work in order to progress. On the other hand, Saatchi has a museum to fill and will no doubt regret selling 130 lesser works of YBA art and donating 100 to the Arts Council in 1999.
Ossian Ward was formerly editor of 'Art Review'
THE BEST OF THE NEW BREED
Untitled by Pearl C Hsiung
Postgraduate student at Goldsmiths College who won a prize promoting cultural exchange with China. Painter and photographer to be shown in this year's Royal Academy summer show
Untitled by Varda Caivano
Born in Buenos Aires in 1971, Caivano will graduate this summer from the painting course at the Royal College of Art. Work can currently be seen for free at the college's annual student show.
Untitled (Couple) by Daniel Sinsel
Born in Munich 27 years ago, Sinsel is another about to graduate from the painting course at the Royal College of Art in Kensington. His work is included in the college's annual student show
HOW TO SPEND THAT INSURANCE MONEY
Doris Saatchi, private collector: 'Look again at the great art of the past. I would spend it on the minimalist masters, particularly Angus Martin and Robert Ryman.'
Sir Christopher Frayling, Arts Council chairman: 'Give scholarships to lots of students so the next generation can be as successful as the YBAs.'
Sam Chatterton Dixon, director of Flowers East gallery: 'Buy paintings by Trevor Hutton and Stephen Chambers. With the rest I'd buy a Vuillard.'