Charles Saatchi, the kingmaker of modern British art, has no clothes
Stella Vine’s untutored paintings of a junkie and the Princess of Wales are like jokes done for a children’s party. Not worth keeping. Jonathan Meese’s phony expressionist paintings are all huffing and puffing. Strong subject matter on top — knobs and knockers, skulls and crossbones, religious crosses and pretend-angry words — but weak and flabby underneath. Just describing them makes them seem far more interesting than they actually are. Which is the point. Saatchi’s show is designed specifically for media attention.
There is no positive reason to see New Blood. On the other hand it does raise the question of Saatchi himself — what is he, what has he become?
During the first few years of his previous gallery in St John’s Wood — which opened in 1985 — he stood for something good. Twenty years ago in this country contemporary art wasn’t taken seriously outside the art world. It wasn’t part of culture. It wasn’t part of modern excitement. People who thought of themselves as sophisticated sneered at it and were content not to know anything about it — they took it for granted that it was hollow. Saatchi successfully challenged that attitude.
His private gallery with its succession of magnificently staged shows demonstrated to many people the power that contemporary art possessed. They found it impressive.
At the time there was talk that he was greatly helped in this achievement by his then wife Doris Lockhart-Saatchi, whom he later divorced. It was thought that it was she who had the radar for the type of work he collected and exhibited: post-Second World War international art, mostly from the 1960s onwards, including New York-based Popsters and Minimalists such as Andy Warhol and Donald Judd, plus the heavy-hitting art of the 1980s by German and American figures such as Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer and David Salle. Doris was a sophisticated New Yorker who’d studied at Smith, while he was just an advertising guy.
But after Doris’s departure from the scene Saatchi started buying up new young British art, and it was largely because of his enthusiasm for this home-grown contemporary art that new figures such as Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin became superstars. This was a new profile for Saatchi — kingmaker.
In reality all the artists first showed their works somewhere other than his gallery. He didn’t “make” them into artists at all. They made themselves. (This is still true: all the artists in the present show already enjoy mini-reputations in the international art world.) Once they’d made their debuts in small commercial galleries or in self-help group exhibitions in temporary spaces, Saatchi swooped in and bought the work. Showcasing the art in the swanky vastness of his gallery made it exciting for the public. Paying money for it at all made it exciting for the art market.
He later sold it on for much more than it had cost him. Or if it had failed to increase in value he donated it to provincial art museums, which were pathetically happy to accept these dubious gifts.
It’s right to question the assumption that the YBAs would be nothing without him, but at the same time, because of his promotional efforts and his intelligent manipulation of the market, it turns out to be Saatchi, rather than any single artist, Hirst included, who is the single most important figure in the success of the YBAs.
But, once again, with hindsight we can see something different about that wave of British art of the late 1980s and early 1990s and the effect that both the art itself and Saatchi’s involvement with it had on the public’s perception of art in general — different, that is, from what’s going on now.
Nowadays we get the impression that contemporary art is about celebrity, media hype, fatuous shocks, asinine fake “subversion”, strained intellectualism (which anyone with the least intelligence perceives straight away to be bogus) and a chronic desire to be noticed. This last aspect is particularly depressing because it’s not that a bit of attention will prove that the work maybe has some content by which the audience has been touched, but rather that attention-seeking is the content.
Previously this kind of thing was certainly present but there was also an inner dimension to the art. The general public might be unaware of what made the newly fashionable art “art” at all, but anyone familiar with art history knew that this new art had a legitimacy based on its connection with that history. But again and again Saatchi demonstrates that he couldn’t care less about art’s inner reasons for existing. He’ll buy anything. He ’ll show anything. He’ll sell anything. His values are silly and shallow. He goes on what is already established as trendy and has a buzz of temporary success around it. Since being identified first with the rise of contemporary art as a new cultural thing in British social life in the 1980s, and second with the triumph of the YBAs in the 1990s, he has occasionally tried to create an artificial art movement (one was “New Neurotic Realism ” in 1997). But these have always failed because he doesn’t know what art is. He only cares about sensationalism and profit.
The difference between a situation of almost total crap, which Saatchi now represents, and what we had before in the late 1980s and early 1990s — an art scene that was pushy, ruthless, egotistical and interested in making a swaggering impression, but also being both clever and thoughtful as well as capable of making a fast impact — is important. It’s the difference between something worth thinking about and taking seriously, even if one has reservations, and something that is, sad to say, hateful.
Amusing and glamorous as Saatchi undoubtedly is in social life, resistant as he is to fake intellectual talk (his greatest saving grace), and up-front as he is with his all too human vulgarity, the idea of him as loveable rogue, or breath of fresh air in an uptight and snobbish scene, has grown tired. Art would be better off today if he were to back out.
- New Blood: New Young Artists, New Acquisitions runs from tomorrow until July 4 at the Saatchi Gallery, County Hall, SE1 (020-7928 8195)
DEBATE
Has Charles Saatchi had his day?
Email debate@thetimes.co.uk
ON SAATCHI
There are no hidden depths. As Frank Stella said about minimalism, what you see is what you see — Saatchi on SaatchiHe claims to love art, but his is the love that the wolf has for the lamb — the artist Sean Scully on Saatchi
Simply an expression of one man’s ownership — the artist Jake Chapman on County Hall
So, basically, Charles goes in and says, ‘I want it’; they say, ‘Have it’; they invoice him; he buys it — Damien Hirst
As sick as Hindley — Winnie Johnson, mother of one of Myra Hindley’s victims, on Marcus Harvey’s portrait in Sensation
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