2005年1月29日 星期六

A Powerful Collector Changes Course

A work by Peter Doig from "The Triumph of Painting."
Saatchi Gallery
A work by Peter Doig from "The Triumph of Painting."

By ALAN RIDING

Published: January 29, 2005

LONDON, Jan. 25 - If collecting is itself an art, Charles Saatchi remains Britain's most talked-about contemporary artist. A wealthy adman turned art lover, he spawned the 1990's fad for irreverent young British artists and brought contemporary art into the mainstream here. As a reluctant celebrity and unabashed power broker, he has also long been the target of speculation - and grumbling - about his taste and motivation.

Little wonder, then, that when the Saatchi Gallery opened the first installment of a three-part yearlong show called "The Triumph of Painting" here this week, interest in the London art world centered less on the handful of painters initially featured than on a question: Why has Mr. Saatchi turned his back on the conceptual art of his long-cosseted Y.B.A.'s, as young British artists are known here?

Not only has he cleared their works from his labyrinthine Thames-side gallery in the old Greater London Council building, but this month he also sold the most emblematic work of the Y.B.A. movement - Damien Hirst's "Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," better known as the pickled shark - to an American buyer for what press accounts said was $13 million. (He paid $93,000 for it in 1992.)

Now, showing off his latest purchases, Mr. Saatchi has proclaimed the rebirth of painting by presenting the first of an eventual 56 artists working in canvas and oil, among them the German cult figure Martin Kippenberger, who died in 1997; the leading Belgian minimalist Luc Tuymans; and the South African-born Dutch painter Marlene Dumas.

That painting is alive and well today may not be news in, say, New York or Berlin, but in British contemporary art circles it is a view that borders on the subversive. Over the last 10 years, only 5 of 40 nominees for the headline-grabbing annual Turner Prize have been painters. And for even longer, conceptual and video artists have reigned largely unchallenged here.

As it happens, Mr. Saatchi has changed directions before. In the 1980's he built up a major collection of postwar American and European art. He then sold it at great profit and channeled his resources into a new generation of British artists like Mr. Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Tracey Emin, the Chapman brothers, Sarah Lucas and Marc Quinn.

So now he has come back to painting.

But why? Some art critics have long accused Mr. Saatchi of being more dealer than collector, less art lover than marketing genius who exhibits his collection to increase its value. This was certainly charged in 1997 when London's Royal Academy of Arts put on "Sensation," a show of Y.B.A. works owned by Mr. Saatchi, which also traveled to the Brooklyn Museum. And almost inevitably, similar suspicions are again being aired.

In an article last weekend in The Sunday Telegraph of London, Andrew Graham-Dixon conceded that Mr. Saatchi could genuinely believe painting is now central to contemporary art. "It is also possible that, like a cannily contrarian fund-manager working in the equities market, he has simply decided that painting is currently an undervalued sector - and he has bet his portfolio on the proposition that it has a big recovery upside," Mr. Graham-Dixon wrote.

Mr. Saatchi, 61, who is married to the cooking celebrity Nigella Lawson, is as famous for avoiding the press as he is skilled at promoting his shows. But in a rare interview with The Art Newspaper last month, presumably timed to draw attention to "The Triumph of Painting," he explained his approach to collecting as well as his interest in painting.

"I buy art that I like," he was quoted as saying. "I buy it to show it off in exhibitions. Then, if I feel like it, I sell it and buy more art. As I have been doing this for 30 years, I think most people in the art world get the idea by now. It doesn't mean I've changed my mind about the art that I end up selling. It just means that I don't want to hoard everything forever."



Saatchi Gallery
A work by Marlene Dumas from "The Triumph of Painting."

As for his new exhibition, Mr. Saatchi insisted that he had no "lofty" agenda. "People need to see some of the remarkable painting, produced and overlooked, in an age dominated by the attention given to video, installation and photographic art," he said. He added, "For me, and for people with good eyes who actually enjoy looking at art, nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday."

For "The Triumph of Painting," he has cast a wide net, with 6 painters in the first display, on view through June 5; 13 in the second, running through September; and 37 in the final installment, through December. All 350 or so paintings scheduled to be presented belong to Mr. Saatchi, who also directed the hanging of the first part of the exhibition.

Announcing that "we are in fact witnessing the vigorous reassertion of painting," a weighty catalog explains that the first group of painters was chosen as the most influential of their generation. Of these, only one, Peter Doig, is a Briton, although he now lives in Trinidad. The others are Europeans, with only Mr. Tuymans, who had a major show at the Tate Modern last year, already well known in Britain.

Yet the most striking difference between these artists and the Y.B.A.'s is not the medium in which they work. It is that, while the Y.B.A.'s liked to shock British tabloids with their sexual and existentialist installations, the European painters on show here are primarily engaged in social and political commentary. And in Britain, ideological art is still very much a novelty.

In the first group, Mr. Doig, 45, is the exception. His large, colorful landscapes inspired by photography are displayed first. But then the show darkens.

The painter chosen to introduce this mood is Mr. Kippenberger, a rebellious and often outrageous German artist who explored every art form, including music and writing, and whose following has grown since his death at 43 eight years ago.

In painting, as in everything he did, Mr. Kippenberger was stylistically eclectic. And Mr. Saatchi's paintings demonstrate this. They include one of the artist's many self-portraits, in this case showing him stripped to his underwear, his body fat and bloated and a balloon over his face. No less melancholic is "I Am Too Political," a painting of a hugely fat woman lying across six canvases. In other oils, his fascination with the degenerate is more disguised.

Jörg Immendorff, 59, the other German in the show, is more directly political, frequently echoing his generation's struggle with Germany's postwar legacy, with both Hitler and the swastika occasionally appearing in his crowded cartoonlike oils. Several of the paintings come from his "Café Deutschland" series. "All's Well That Ends Well," crowded with panic-stricken eagles, is described as an allegory of a divided Germany.

Mr. Tuymans, 46, whose work often addresses the Holocaust, has a painting here, "Maypole," that somehow suggests a Hitler Youth festival. "Within," with the bars of a cage cutting across a cloudy landscape, is less explicit.

By contrast, Ms. Dumas, 51, seeks out taboo subjects: "Young Boys" shows naked boys as if they are awaiting inspection; "Die Baba" depicts a sickly-looking baby with bruised lips and nose; "The Cover-Up" has a young girl lifting her dress over her head.

The oldest painter in the show is Hermann Nitsch, 66, an Austrian artist who gained fame in the 1960's through what he called "actions," in which animals were slaughtered and their blood used ritualistically to stage outdoor crucifixions. These performances provoked scandal and earned him three prison terms in Austria for blasphemy. All but one of his works shown here mirror his obsession with blood, among them several so-called splatter paintings.

How the public will respond to "The Triumph of Painting" has yet to be seen, although the critical response has been muted. Jackie Wullschlager wrote in The Financial Times that "not one picture here takes possession of you." Still, while Mr. Saatchi's pitch can be fairly judged only after all 56 listed artists have been seen, he already has reason to feel satisfied: for the first time in 20 years, contemporary painting is back on London's art agenda.

2005年1月26日 星期三

Charles Saatchi and his art of patronage

It is like Simon Cowell announcing that he had discovered a talented singer called Mick Jagger

Philip Hensher
Wednesday, 26 January 2005

Charles Saatchi and his gallery have decided, it seems, that painting is where it is at. Painting - you remember it, surely? One artist, with a paintbrush and a selection of colours in tubes or on a palette, acrylic, oil or, who knows, even watercolour, putting it on a canvas until he reaches the edges and it looks like something. Or not. Until recently, an artist has been someone with the phone number of a good technical workshop and the ability to persuade investors to hand over a down payment. From now on, you may recognise an artist by the burnt sienna on his cuffs.

Charles Saatchi and his gallery have decided, it seems, that painting is where it is at. Painting - you remember it, surely? One artist, with a paintbrush and a selection of colours in tubes or on a palette, acrylic, oil or, who knows, even watercolour, putting it on a canvas until he reaches the edges and it looks like something. Or not. Until recently, an artist has been someone with the phone number of a good technical workshop and the ability to persuade investors to hand over a down payment. From now on, you may recognise an artist by the burnt sienna on his cuffs.

Anyway, that is what we are to infer from the title of the new exhibition at his gallery, The Triumph of Painting: Part One, a title as screamingly pompous as a 1974 album by Yes. Painting is back! Painting is exciting! Painting is happening again! And the proof is that Charles Saatchi is buying it, and - we may conclude - is propelling some new artists into the spotlight, just as he did years ago with Damien Hirst, Ron Mueck and what's-her-face off the telly. And to launch the whole thing, there's a party so enormous, even I've been invited.

Actually, I'm not going - there's quite a smart party the same night. And though the exhibition contains some very good painters, the whole enterprise is so tiresome in its tone that it may take some effort to shove past Mr Saatchi's army of bright-nosed acolytes in their spotty tabards accosting anyone walking north of Waterloo Station and visit the exhibition at all.

It reminds me terribly of those articles in Sunday newspapers written entirely for the amusement of Private Eye. Is poetry the new rock and roll? Is Rowetta X Factor the new Kiri Te Kanawa? Is cake-icing the new comedy? Is conceptual art the new sampler-making? Is embroidery the new pornography? Is Lego the new cocaine? Is opera the new football? Is painting the new Art? One could go on all day - it isn't very hard. But the truth is that all these activities, and any one can think of, carry on energetically whether the light of metropolitan fashion happens to be falling on them or not. This is particularly the case of painting. Anyone who seriously follows art will know that not only has painting never gone away, but over the last 20 years, a lot of seriously impressive work has gained a lot of popular support.

Even limiting yourself to this country, the names of Lucian Freud, Howard Hodgkin, Bridget Riley, Patrick Caulfield, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost and dozens of others leap to mind, all doing splendid, individual work. They are grand, established names, but among younger artists Gary Hume, Jenny Savile, Chris Ofili, Glenn Brown and Fiona Rae have put together substantial reputations at a time when it was supposed that nobody was interested in painting.

All that is being claimed here, surely, is the circular argument that painting has now triumphed because it is being given pride of place in the Saatchi Gallery: conversely, it is being given pride of place there because it has triumphed. It is a peculiar claim, suggesting that triumph can only be proclaimed from the old GLC building. It looks much more peculiar when you examine the painters included in Mr Saatchi's new show, who conspicuously don't need any kind of patronage from that direction.

I laughed my head off when I saw that one of Mr Saatchi's "discoveries" was Hermann Nitsch. Nitsch has been immensely famous since the early 1970s, and very busy before then; his "Orgien Mysterien Theater" were celebrated mid-70s art scandals, with their large numbers of slaughtered animals. No doubt Herr Nitsch is politely pleased that Saatchi has bought some of his works, but it doesn't seem likely that it will make much difference to an immensely famous career. It is a bit like Simon Cowell announcing that he has discovered a talented singer called Mick Jagger.

And the others are pretty much the same. Martin Kippenberger and Jorg Immendorff are two of the most famous German artists: Peter Doig has been around and admired for years; Luc Tuymans has just had a big show at Tate Modern, so isn't remotely unfamiliar even to insular London audiences.

Let's face it: we know all about these people. The Saatchi Gallery is not even leaping on a bandwagon; it is trying to further a creaky reputation by harnessing it to some already very solid ones, and pretending that it is leading the way. Saatchi is an influential collector, but not as vital a presence in the market of reputations as he likes to think. The artists in his collection who have made a substantial reputation are the good ones, who would have done all right anyway. The ones in the present exhibition need him even less, since their reputations are solidly made, and it is absurd to pretend that the Saatchi Gallery's change of heart has any general significance whatsoever.

Journalists are used to hard-bitten editors asking the question "What's the story here?" Well, what is the story? Charles Saatchi starts to like painting? Rich man buys works by already famous artists? Beats me. It looks very much like a man selling popcorn in a cinema lobby, under the impression that since the film starts after people stop buying popcorn, it couldn't begin without him.

Sensation! It's paint on canvas

From
January 26, 2005

THE TRIUMPH OF PAINTING
Saatchi Gallery, SE1

The new Saatchi Gallery exhibition shows that reports of the death of painting were greatly exaggerated

The scorched-earth progress of conceptualism, supposedly, left the canvas a wasteland. Painting was declared dead. After all, what more could it contribute? We had seen Ad Reinhardt’s all-black works — “just the last paintings anyone could make”, he had called them. We had looked into Robert Ryman’s uninflected white squares. Surely there was nowhere to go after that.

Or was there? Nothing is ever black and white — and not least art history. The death of painting has been proclaimed repeatedly — with the advent of photography, for instance, or the rise of Duchamp — but rumours of its demise always proved premature. A miraculous resurrection was inevitably announced later.

Painting was not dead; it was just up against the wall and being shot at — and often by its own practitioners, who wanted to clear the ground so that they could reclaim it. Reinhardt might have seemed to be forecasting the end of an art form in the 1960s, but what he was actually doing was challenging it to break free from a prison of period rhetoric and find new possibilities. He was provoking the painter to change the rules of his game.

So, when painting was said to be dead in the 1980s, it was only one particular view of the medium that was passing. It was only the end of one game and the start of another. And this is the start that the latest Saatchi Gallery show now looks back to as it opens the first of a series of three shows — The Triumph of Painting — that will run over the year.

Part one, which opens today, represents the work of six painters who, while Damien Hirst was out shark fishing and Tracey Emin was lounging in bed, kept on working in a traditional medium — or at least, as in the case of the irrepressibly subversive (but prematurely deceased) Martin Kippenberger, looked for ways in which painting could still be relevant amid an oeuvre that included anything from the invention of a non-existent global subway system for which he installed fake entrances in cities the world over to the buying of a run-down petrol station in Brazil which he named after a Nazi war criminal.

But don’t expect dramatic new discoveries from this opening section of the show. Saatchi is not setting trends; he is catching up with them. These are artists who have been in the picture for at least 20 years. Their visions may have been forged in the fires of unfashionability, but now they are famous — or infamous in some cases. Their work sells for hundreds of thousands. It has been shown in major gallery spaces. Only last year Luc Tuymans was the subject of a major Tate Modern exhibition.

And don’t expect any coherent aesthetic — not even, necessarily, within the work of one artist. Kippenberger smashed the sacrosanct notion of the trademark style. He signs anything from a billboard poster that derides the enticements of advertising to a rubber-latex-skinned canvas that mocks sexual taboo. This is not a show that attempts to define a movement or shared aim. The artists come from anywhere. Marlene Dumas is South African-born and Amsterdam-based. Peter Doig was brought up in Canada but now lives in Trinidad. And their work goes everywhere. There are landscapes and figure paintings, still lifes and abstracts. There is anger and humour and politics and porn, satire and nostalgia, loveliness and ungainliness, reticence and overkill.

But what, broadly speaking, they share is the attempt to return to a traditional form (often after exploring other media) and reclaim it for a postmodern world in which fixed meanings and functions have been lost amid a swarm of competing references, implications and truths. Art-historical markers — allusions to anyone from Edouard Manet to Joseph Beuys — stick up like tide measures amid the swirling flood. They are swept away into surfaces in which reality can be based on the falsity of the photograph, in which authenticity has dissolved along with any romantic notions of artistic genius. These are savaged in paintings that are wilfully bad. Peter Doig’s lambent meditations on landscape may ease the spectator into this show, but after that prepare for the belligerently clumsy or the brutally tawdry, the brazen or the deliberately shabby.

If you hoped that the triumph of painting meant that old-fashioned craftsmanship was about to overtake new-fangled conceptualism, then think again. These painters are not backtracking on Post-Modernism’s progress. If anything they are pushing it further, testing ways in which painting can become relevant in its context. Their works should be approached in the same way as conceptual pieces. “A good artist has less time than ideas,” Kippenberger said.

Painting is dead! Long live the spectator! A critical faculty is as much a part of these works as their painterly surface. The visitor is entangled in the densely problematic vision of artists such as Dumas, whose declared aim is “to reveal not display”.

He soon finds himself tripping over his own thoughts as he struggles to make sense of meanings that are embedded as much in the medium as in his own mind.

The mistake of this show is the inclusion of works by the “Pope of Viennese Aktionism”, Hermann Nitsch, whose splatterfest abstracts are the spin-off of ludicrous performances involving buckets of blood and lashings of gore. His belief that art should break out from the canvas and incorporate the reality of visceral emotion and raw corporeal experience goes little further than Grand Guignol. And the catalogue (which includes all the images from future shows in this series) seems to presage the sort of splashy Expressionism that might make you start wishing that painting would indeed undergo a dramatic decline.

Saatchi clearly hasn’t completely abandoned his taste for publicity-hungry sensationalism. He also includes several works by the German Jörg Immendorf, whom he has been collecting for years. In these political rants, the polemics take precedence over the painting. The images tell, not show.

Perhaps this show relies too heavily on what was lying around in the stockroom — padded, to judge by a slant towards later works, by more recent purchases. There are several painters who could (and perhaps should) have been represented but aren’t. The visual puzzles of the freewheeling iconoclast Sigmar Polke, for one, would have made an informative addition. And for all the rebellious energy, the cultish flamboyance, the belligerent provocation of Kippenberger, for all his importance as the poster boy of Post-Modernism, a show of this sort should perhaps have left him out. Put into what is starting to seem like an art-historical box, his complex and prolific vision feels cramped.

But where Saatchi succeeds is in offering viewers the chance to recap or catch up with the careers of artists as pioneering as Dumas and Tuymans. These are artists whose works are as visually compelling as they are intellectually complex, who even as they discomfit also fascinate. They lure the spectator into a sort of symbiotic alliance with their work.

They do not, of course, prove that painting has definitively triumphed over other media. A good painter is as rare as a good artist of any sort. Nor does their painting spell a radical change in aesthetic outlook. They are still conceptual. But what they do show is that painting has continuing possibilities, that it can still effect that magical alchemy that has been practised since our prehistoric ancestors first turned muddy ochres into magical beasts.

They prove that painting is not dead. And it helped that some workmen were thumping away in the far-off bowels of the building. Their banging was like the pulse of some waking leviathan’s heartbeat.

BRITS AND PIECES...

1985 Charles Saatchi launches his gallery with heavyweight modern masters including Donald Judd and Andy Warhol.

1992 First of his Young British Artists shows. Perhaps the adman’s most successful brand label.

1994 Young British Artists III: “Our most voracious contemporary collector confounds all expectations . . . the hallowed business of mark-making on canvas is once again a focus for debate.” — Richard Cork in The Times.

1997 Saatchi’s masterstroke, Sensation at the Royal Academy in 1997. Paint and eggs are thrown, critics’ responses are mixed but the show boosts YBA market value and the ailing RA, with over 2,800 visitors daily.

1999 New Neurotic Realism, an attempt to move away from Brit Art, ends in critical disaster. In 2003, Saatchi moves his Brit Art greatest hits collection to County Hall.

2004 The fire at Momart storage hits the media mogul hardest. Tabloids cry divine justice, critics rally around the loss of the art, despairing at public philistinism.

Also 2004. . . Saatchi’s contentious status as art patron is highlighted when he claimed that Nicholas Serota had refused to accept his collection for the Tate. Serota said that Saatchi never made an offer, countering that for years Saatchi had refused to aid the Tate with purchasing key British artworks.


2005年1月25日 星期二

The triumph of painting? That's a pretty rich claim

You should be suspicious of Charles Saatchi's grandiose claims, especially since some artists in his new show are worthless. But the boldness of his vision deserves high praise, says Tom Lubbock

Tuesday, 25 January 2005

Art, like anything, lives on legends. The stories are told and retold and eventually turn into history. Of course you can believe them if you want to. It often makes things simpler. But not believing them can be fun too.

Art, like anything, lives on legends. The stories are told and retold and eventually turn into history. Of course you can believe them if you want to. It often makes things simpler. But not believing them can be fun too.

So how about this one? In the middle of last year it was widely reported that there were going to be some changes in the art world. The 1990s had seen the triumph of Britart. An art of rude, bright toys had made the running. The poor old art of painting was nowhere to be seen. It was certainly not the kind of thing to be found in that most fashionable art venue, the Saatchi Gallery, power base of Britart. And the news was that Charles Saatchi - setting the trend as ever - had changed his mind.

In 2005, the celebrated Iraqi/British collector would be reviving the cause of painting. He would be bringing a new batch of painters to the world's attention with a series of exhibitions called The Triumph of Painting. Part One opens tomorrow. Its title makes a clear bid for legend. It sounds like a chapter in a history book already. So, to start with, let's put the record straight. All the above story is untrue.

Whenever you hear about a revival of painting you should be suspicious. Modern painting is rather like modern religion. It is continually being declared dead and then suddenly it's reviving. Painting today is pretty well kept going by the question of its disputed mortality. Every few years, another twitch. But are these twitches signs of life? Or are they terminal spasms, or post-mortem effects, or even the symptoms of a strange, "undead", zombie half-life?

That's the big, ongoing, unanswerable question. (Personally I incline to the last option.)

And just at the moment painting is a highly fashionable art form. It's having a bout of serious twitches. In the past few years I can think of several major exhibitions that have identified a new spirit in painting (About Painting in Oxford, Examining Pictures at the Whitechapel Gallery, Hybrids in Tate Liverpool), and there have been many other smaller ones.

Or go round the trendy commercial galleries in London. Painting is currently so fashionable, it's on the verge of being unfashionable again.

What's more, the Saatchi Gallery itself - at both its former address in north London and its present address on the South Bank - has shown plenty of contemporary painting. And then, of the six painters showing in the Triumph of Painting: Part One, five are perfectly established names, widely shown elsewhere. One, Luc Tuymans, had a retrospective at Tate Modern last year.

As for the other half of the story, the alleged death of Britart, well, that's another bit of news that's been touted many times over the past 10 years. Does this mean the end of Britart?, someone urgently asks at the Turner Prize each year.

Depends what you mean, obviously. If Britart means an energetic bunch of work produced around the beginning of the 1990s, then obviously that has had its moment. But if you mean: will artists stop using found and fabricated objects and installations and video and all that stuff, and pick up their paintbrushes, then no they won't, not all of them.

To get a bit of perspective on the whole issue, consider this statistic. The 1997 Saatchi exhibition at the Royal Academy, Sensation, is generally taken as a kind of official monument to the Britart movement. In that show, more than a third of the artists were painters. Two-fifths. Confused? You must have been trying to believe the legends.

There is some real news here for the gallery-goer. The whole Saatchi Gallery is now given over to painting. This means that the centrepiece of its previous exhibitions, the crowd-pulling icons of Britart, the bed, the shark, the tent, the dead dad, the frozen blood head, the giant anatomical model, all these toys have been put away. (Damien Hirst's shark has been sold to America. Rachel Whiteread's plaster-cast room has left the collection too. Tracey Emin's tent - and it's still not clear how much else - was burnt in last year's warehouse fire.)

Since it moved to the old County Hall building two years ago, the Saatchi Gallery has been partly operating as a mausoleum to that eye-catching moment in British art. This role, presumably, it won't be playing any more.

If what you mean by the end of Britart is a waning of interest in Britart, I suppose not having its star-works in the same collection may well make a difference.

Meanwhile, throughout this year, all the ugly, wood-panelled, municipal spaces of the building are occupied by paintings. In fact the woodwork is a bit less visible than it was before. There's more white-walling, covering it over. (It was not so long ago that Saatchi was declaring the end of the white-walled contemporary art gallery. But that legend never quite took off.)

Each painting is given a good deal of space, sometimes a whole room to itself. The paintings are generally on the large side.

But are they any good? That's the real question of course. After all the soundings about painting generally, or Britart generally, it's always going to come down to something more specific.

You find yourself standing in front of a particular work by a particular artist. Will you be staying, or will you be moving rapidly on?

The six painters in the exhibition are the Austrian Hermann Nitsch, the Germans Jörg Immendorff and Martin Kippenberger, the South African-Dutch Marlene Dumas, the Belgian Luc Tuymans and the Canadian-Briton Peter Doig.

It's a funny kind of group show. The paintings don't really go together. In fact you might say they were extremely ill-assorted. And some of them are really pretty worthless.

Hermann Nitsch (born 1938), the Viennese Actionist, famous for his gory ritualistic performances, involving blood, nudity and dead animals, has produced (as a kind of by-product) a series of splatter paintings, canvasses drenched in violent washes and dribbles of red and brown paint, suggesting blood-letting. It looks like it means murder, but it turns out rather decorative, a succession of pretty messes, not paintings really, but you could put them on the wall and they'd settle down into a lively background.

Jörg Immendorff (born 1945) is another one for the scrapheap. He does these enormous, preposterously lurid and busy figurative paintings with neon colour-schemes. They look like much-magnified versions of the kind of illustration that would accompany a magazine article about mental illness.

The work of Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) passes for humorous subversiveness in some parts of the art world. His paintings are immensely incompetent parodies of various different painting styles. His work is sustained by a jokey cult of personality, and I don't feel the pictures are even meant to be worth looking at. They're just a kind of adjunct to the act.

With Marlene Dumas (born 1953), things try to be more interesting. In these images of isolated human figures and faces, the painter is clearly up to something, after some sort of sensation, something painful, vulnerable, each paint mark feeling a little like a wound. And she gets it sometimes. The way she draws though, and you can't ignore it, is very slick and inert.

Luc Tuymans (born 1958) works a similar vein. Close-ups of barely emerging images, with the paint pale, weak, withdrawn, off-hand, half-hearted, they have - at their best - a captivating feebleness. One picture here has that. The down side, of course, is sheer feebleness (as in the vast still-life).

Peter Doig (born 1959) is the one solidly good painter here. His scenes are landscapes, woody or snowy, always partly obscured by the paint that pictures them. The paint is very dense and various and gorgeous, constantly changing tack, going thick and thin, weaving, blobbing, spraying. The colour world is extreme. The picture is an intense field of activity where every gesture is worth following.

Bizarre mix - but it's just what one person likes, isn't it. The Triumph of Painting? It makes the legendary title look silly, having such a flagrantly miscellaneous, capricious and uneven collection of work. But that's also what makes the show good. The Saatchi Gallery is a private gallery with more space and resources than many publicly funded galleries, but as a private gallery it's able to do the kind of bold, single-minded gesture that a Tate - with its duty to be representative and serious - can't do.

No self-respecting public gallery could put on a show like this, with no theme, no intellectual agenda, and a very rum load of stuff. But I wish curating went this way more often, out on a limb, not worrying about mockery, exposing the curator's taste nakedly to the world. It would take confidence, naturally. And I suppose nobody can ever feel quite as confident as a very, very rich man.

The Triumph of Painting: Part One - The Saatchi Gallery, County Hall, South Bank, London SE1; 26 January to 5 June. Open every day. Admission £9, with concessions.

The alleged triumph of painting

Tuesday, 25 January 2005

Charles Saatchi has brought us a new sensation. The godfather of modern British art has declared that formaldehyde sheep and unmade beds are passé. After years of neglect, "painting" is back in vogue. An exhibition called The Triumph of Painting, featuring the work of six artists, will open at Saatchi's County Hall Gallery tomorrow. Pieces by Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, works that defined a generation in British art, are being sold off or put into storage. The Medici of modern art has spoken - or so we are asked to believe.

Charles Saatchi has brought us a new sensation. The godfather of modern British art has declared that formaldehyde sheep and unmade beds are passé. After years of neglect, "painting" is back in vogue. An exhibition called The Triumph of Painting, featuring the work of six artists, will open at Saatchi's County Hall Gallery tomorrow. Pieces by Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, works that defined a generation in British art, are being sold off or put into storage. The Medici of modern art has spoken - or so we are asked to believe.

The truth is that painting never really lost any of its popularity, despite the ubiquity of sculpture and video installations in recent years. The enduring appeal of Lucian Freud, one of Britain's greatest living artists, is testament to that. So, too, is the popularity of the National Gallery's regular blockbuster exhibitions. Despite Mr Saatchi's formidable capacity to publicise his artists, we should be wary of accepting at face value the belief that this rather enigmatic figure somehow exerts control of the national taste in art.

But Mr Saatchi's influence should not be underestimated. As a result of his change of direction, British painters may find that dealers are more inclined to look favourably on their work in the wake of this new exhibition.

There are some in the art world who claim that Mr Saatchi is an entirely destructive force. They point to his tendency to collect an artist's work over many years and then sell it on, ruthlessly, in bulk and at inflated prices. This can have a damaging effect on an artist's career. Indeed, Mr Saatchi has been accused, more than once, of operating rather like one of Mr Hirst's famous sharks.

Yet to argue that Mr Saatchi has been a wholly malign influence on British art is unfair. He has bought and exhibited the work of British artists for more than 15 years, taking a keen interest in their development - and several are now figures of international importance. He deserves credit also for stimulating the public's interest in modern art and crafts, which has burgeoned since the early 1990s. That, in time, may well be recognised as the true "sensation" in the history of modern British art.

2005年1月17日 星期一

In the swim

Monday, 17 January 2005

And so farewell to Damien Hirst's shark, the 14-foot creature of the deep suspended in formaldehyde that introduced us to Britart. It was presumptuous to hope that its rightful last resting place would be the Tate Modern - a gallery that in scale and style somehow suited it. But we regret its departure. Charles Saatchi has made a pretty penny on his outlay. The consolation for the rest of us is that the shark has not been lost to the nation so much as translated into the global dimension. It is off to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Britart's proud ambassador to the big wide world. (PS. Please can we keep the sheep?)

And so farewell to Damien Hirst's shark, the 14-foot creature of the deep suspended in formaldehyde that introduced us to Britart. It was presumptuous to hope that its rightful last resting place would be the Tate Modern - a gallery that in scale and style somehow suited it. But we regret its departure. Charles Saatchi has made a pretty penny on his outlay. The consolation for the rest of us is that the shark has not been lost to the nation so much as translated into the global dimension. It is off to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Britart's proud ambassador to the big wide world. (PS. Please can we keep the sheep?)

What has become of the masterpieces of Britart?

Charles Saatchi is selling Damien Hirst's shark to an American collector for £7m. Chris Bunting and James Burleigh examine the fate of the works that defined the aesthetic of a movement

Monday, 17 January 2005

DAMIEN HIRST: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: Created: 1991

DAMIEN HIRST: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: Created: 1991

Present owner: Unknown New York collector

Where displayed: Expected to leave its home in the Saatchi Gallery, London, for the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Value: £6m to £7m

Damien Hirst's "pickled shark" launched the Britart movement. Hirst came to the notice of the art world in 1988 when he conceived and curated the Freeze exhibition in the Port of London Authority building but he became a tabloid celebrity in 1992 for his shocking preservation of a tiger shark in formaldehyde.

Charles Saatchi commissioned the work for £50,000. Its sale for between £6m and £7m to an unnamed American collector at the weekend brought speculation that Mr Saatchi might be abandoning his patronage of Britart. Charles Thompson, co-founder of the Stuckist art group and an opponent of Britart, said: "He is denying he is dumping it but how can the Saatchi Gallery exhibit Britart when the main exhibit is no longer there? It is like a court without a monarch, people will be asking, 'Where is the shark'?" Mr Thompson said: "Saatchi, because of the power he wields, can make something relatively worthless into something worth a huge amount.

It is the not-so-blind leading the blind. When it reaches the top of the market he can sell at a huge profit. It is a self-fulfilling, money-making scheme." Matthew Collings, author of a history of the London art scene, said the shark price tag was unlikely to mean a boom in Britart prices. "At present, Saatchi says he is interested in painting. The idea is that there is a big return to painting and it is a good time to get out of Hirst."

SARAH LUCAS: Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab: Created 1992

Present owner Charles Saatchi

Sarah Lucas studied art at Goldsmiths College and co-ran an art gallery, The Shop, in 1992 with fellow artist Tracey Emin. The same year, she displayed her most famous work, Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, the food nailed to a wooden table but symbolically a female nude. Charles Saatchi bought it for an unknown sum. Her work includes Au Naturel and Penis Nailed to a Board.

CORNELIA PARKER: Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View: When made: 1991

Current owner: The Tate collection

Where displayed: Tate Modern, London

Cornelia Parker convinced the Army to blow up a garden shed filled with domestic objects and then collected the debris. Fragments of the shed and its contents were then suspended, as if in mid-explosion, in the shape of a cube.

MARCUS HARVEY: Myra: When made 1995

Current owner Charles Saatchi

Where displayed Saatchi Gallery, County Hall, London

Marcus Harvey contributed an 11ft by 9ft portrait of the Moors murderer Myra Hindley to the aptly named "Sensation" exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997. The work recreated in paint the famous picture of Hindley from the time of her trial but, on close inspection, appeared to be made up of a collage of children's hand-prints. Winnie Johnson, the mother of Keith Bennett, one of Hindley's victims, said she was "disgusted". Even Hindley condemned the work.

JAKE AND DINOS CHAPMAN: Tragic anatomies: When made 1996

Current owner Charles Saatchi

Where displayed On tour

For a solo exhibition at the ICA in London in 1996, Jake and Dinos Chapman used mutant child mannequins, naked except for Nike trainers and with genitalia sprouting from their faces, in their "Garden of Eden" tableaux. Saatchi bought their perverse playground for the Royal Academy's Sensation exhibition in 1997.

RACHEL WHITEREAD: House: When made: 1993

When destroyed: 1993

In 1993, Rachel Whiteread won the £20,000 Turner Prize for House, a concrete cast of the interior of a terraced home in the East End of London. She was also awarded £40,000 by the art/music collective K Foundation on the same night for being the worst artist of the year. Whiteread took eight weeks to produce the sculpture using 70 tons of concrete to fill the property. Production costs were estimated at £50,000. On the night Whiteread won the Turner Prize, she was told that Bow Council intended to knock down her artwork and build a children's playground. The council's leader, Eric Flounder, called the sculpture "utter rubbish".

MARC QUINN: Title Self

When made 1991

Current owner Charles Saatchi

Where displayed On tour

Quinn is best known for Self, in which he cast his head in nine pints of his own blood - the total amount of plasma in an average man's body. The blood was removed over five months. The piece was bought by Charles Saatchi in 1991 for a rumoured £13,000. It is said that the artist remoulds the piece every five years.

TRACEY EMIN: Everyone That I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995: Created: 1995

Current owner: Burned in Momart fire

The work was destroyed in last year's Momart warehouse fire, after which a specialist valued it at over £1m. The tent, embroidered with the names of everyone Emin had slept with, prompted derision from many quarters when first shown in 1995. Emin was criticised for philistinism and exhibitionism. After the fire, a newspaper claimed to have recreated the tent for £39.99. Emin condemned them for philistinism.

2005年1月16日 星期日

Hirst's shark is sold to America

From
January 16, 2005

DAMIEN HIRST’s pickled shark, widely regarded as the most iconic work of British art of the past 15 years, has been sold to an American collector for nearly £7m and will be lost to Britain.

The work, created in 1991, has been sold by Charles Saatchi, leading patron of the Britart movement. It is now expected to be donated by its buyer to the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York.

The sale is a major blow to Tate Modern, run by Saatchi’s long-term rival Sir Nicholas Serota. The Tate had hoped one day to own the shark, but was shut out of the deal.

The price also brings Saatchi a huge return on the £50,000 he paid Hirst in 1991 for the work, officially known as The Physical Impossibility of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living. Hirst himself paid about £6,000 for the dead tiger shark and the cost of shipping it from Australia.

At Moma, which reopened in November after a £470m refurbishment, it will join other landmark works such as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Cézanne’s The Bather and Matisse’s Dance. Moma already owns about 30 paintings and other works by Hirst, but they are comparatively minor.

The departure of the shark, which was placed in formaldehyde in a tank to help its preservation, is a big loss to Britain. It is understood that Serota, the Tate’s director, had hoped to buy or even be donated the work and that there were discussions about this some years ago. While Serota would not comment on the departure of the shark this weekend, he is believed to be disappointed not just for his gallery’s sake but for Britain.

However, it appears there is nothing that can be done to prevent the shark going to America. The government’s powers do not allow it to stop the export of a work that is not more than 50 years old.

Nor could the Tate or any other gallery appeal to the lottery to save it because the shark’s sale is a commercial deal, brokered on behalf of Saatchi by Larry Gagosian, a prominent American dealer and gallery owner. The ultimate buyer has not yet been disclosed.

Hirst, who has good relations with the Tate, would have been happy if the shark had gone to the gallery, which already owns several of his works, notably Pharmacy.

Last autumn, Hirst was one of a dozen leading British artists who promised to give a piece to the Tate, which is increasingly reliant on donations as it hardly has any money of its own for purchases.

However, Saatchi has strained relations with the gallery and with Serota in particular. In late November, there was a big disagreement between the two when Saatchi claimed he had offered the Tate his collection of works by the so-called Young British Artists (YBAs), such as Hirst, Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers.

Serota denied the main thrust of Saatchi’s version of events, adding that there had simply been a suggestion in 2003 from Saatchi that his works might be loaned for display in an undeveloped area, known as the tank space, beside Tate Modern.

In the same article in The Art Newspaper, Saatchi said the Tate’s curators “lacked ambition and adventure” and that the gallery was “sadly disengaged from the young British art community”. He added that he was “now happy not to have to visit the Tate to look at my art”.

Saatchi spotted Hirst’s talent when the artist was just out of art college. His shark was the most famous of a string of controversial works by YBAs in the 1990s, including Emin’s unmade bed.

Saatchi singled out Hirst in his Art Newspaper article by arguing that the 39-year-old was the only living British artist who, in a decade’s time, would be considered by critics to have stood the test of time.

Even so, Saatchi has already sold several of his Hirsts. In autumn 2003, the artist himself bought back about 12 of his works. Hirst had earlier expressed disappointment about the display of his art in Saatchi’s new gallery in County Hall on the South Bank.

Saatchi kept some Hirsts, such as the shark, a spotted Mini car and Hymn, a bronze sculpture of a man, which was based on a £14.99 toy.

Even those who might have been expected to say good riddance were sad at the shark’s loss to America. David Lee, editor of The Jackdaw, a magazine that takes a sceptical view of much modern British art, said: “The shark ought to be in the Tate. Whether you like it or not, it’s the leitmotif work from the 1990s. I’m surprised Saatchi didn’t offer it to the Tate, say at a knock-down price.

“Saatchi owes Britain and the Tate something. It was the Tate’s Turner Prize and its promotion of the young British artists which helped Saatchi.”

Some believe Saatchi may have seen that conceptual art is on the wane. The shark’s appearance at Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997 symbolised the triumph of Britart’s “shock” tactics. Now, with the YBAs approaching middle age, the fish’s sale may mark their movement’s demise.


2005年1月9日 星期日

Is it art or artifice?

From
January 9, 2005

IT'S ART

by A A Gill

Why call it The Triumph of Painting? Charles Saatchi and I are sitting in the half-hung Saatchi gallery, looking at the newly minted catalogue for his mammoth show. Actually, it's for three separate but connected exhibitions of contemporary painting that will run throughout this year. "Don't you think it's a good title?" Yes, but triumph over what? "Adversity. It's better than calling it Rescuing Painting from the Dead. A bit more positive."

Painting has been the corpse fought over by the fashionably modern and the unapologetically traditional. Canvas is the foxhunting of culture, raising splenetic fury on both sides. It has become a totem of much more than itself. It's about who owns the direction and content and the look of our times. People who begin personal aesthetic statements with, "I may not know much about art, but I know what I like," see painting as their passport to the visual arts. Without paint in frames, they're barred entry, refugees in their own culture, a culture that has always been accessible to them but has now been stolen in a coup by an oligarchy of intellectually elite con men. The intellectual elite smugly believes much the same thing, but from the other side. Painting is a defunct medium that has just too much kitsch, summer-show, amateur baggage to be contemporarily viable, and it detracts from new media. "Painting has been out of favour with international curators for some time," says Saatchi. "They've been obsessively peddling video, photography and installation art. Their eyes dull over when they see painting. It's categorised as bourgeois. They're fashion victims, beyond help."

Doesn't this rather raise questions about what you've been doing for the past decade with all those fashionable installations and photographs? "If you look back at my exhibitions, they're at least 50% painting. Even Sensation had a lot of paintings in it." (Its most notorious image was the painting of Myra Hindley.) For the past five years, he has been acquiring pictures at a gluttonous rate. If nothing else, this trilogy of exhibitions (see page 31) is a banquet of cultural acquisitiveness. They are linked and need to be seen in order. The first show features the main influences on the younger artists in the following two. I should admit here that Charles Saatchi is a friend and I've been out with him on the art pull. It really is like going on a crawl in search of totty. The taxi's left ticking over outside as we dodge into tiny studios, converted garages, dripping warehouses and squats. Saatchi shimmies in with his characteristically Chaplinesque mien, races round the walls, sizing up the nubility without appearing to stare, and then he's off.

I get to a picture in the catalogue that we saw together in a room above a pub. I didn't like it. I still don't like it. Actually, Saatchi didn't like it. "Didn't I?" he laughs. "That's odd. I bought it that night." The process of acquiring things is convoluted and contradictory. "I often begin by hating something. But it will stay in my head, get fixed to the back of the retina, so then I've got to have it. Though sometimes I talk myself out of work that I really wish I'd bought. I change my mind all the time." It's this flexibility and openness that makes the Saatchi collection so broad, varied and exciting. Or, alternatively, if you're an anal art curator — and which curator isn't? — infuriatingly dilettantish, unfocused and greedy. Saatchi won't be hemmed in to an "ism" or school or medium for the sake of a neat index. "I've done that. I looked only at minimalism until everything that wasn't white-on-white or a grid was hideously sentimental and messy."

The Triumph of Painting is unlikely to please either the "I know what I like" traditionalists or the art-world spivs. It's a collection of artists, few of whom are publicly well known here. Their work is personal, aggressive and neurotic. It isn't what the pro-painters mean by painting, although much of it is very painterly and quite beautiful. "This first show," says Saatchi, "is for the artists I most often see admired and ripped off when I go round art schools."

The most notoriously "of the moment" is the prematurely deceased Martin Kippenberger, an artist admired by the young, not least because he refused to have a style or a defining look. Every image could be by someone else. This is, quite simply, the most subversive thing you can do to the art world. If a Kippenberger doesn't look like a Kippenberger, how do we know it's a Kippenberger? The recognition of branding and slow, organic style change is the gold standard of art connoisseurship. He's a bit of a hero.

Luc Tuymans paints strange, washed-out images of things that might be something, but then might be nothing. Like riffs from forgotten tunes, they stay in your head and burrow. Marlene Dumas is a South African who lives in the Netherlands and paints pictures of children that are so silently, unobtrusively distressing, it's difficult to be in a room with them. And who's Hermann Nitsch? "Oh, I used to see this stuff in obscure magazines. They were weird performances that always seemed to involve carcasses and blood and guts, and some poor sod being crucified. Very German. I forgot about them, and then I saw these fantastic pictures and they were by Nitsch."

None of the artists here comes from a self-defined school or a federation. They wouldn't necessarily identify each other as fellow travellers. But Charles Saatchi has collated them into a coherent and comprehensive statement, not just about painting, but about what painting is for and what it should say. There is a common theme of alienation, of politics, anger, an interest in the fetish of religion and cultural symbols. There are images of nihilism and voyeurism, frames taken from films and photography.

Peter Doig, perhaps the most widely known artist here, paints scenes from movies, piggybacking on the sense that something is about to happen. The video and the photograph, which were supposed to have killed painting, have actually freed it from the drudgery of recording likeness, and given it a new freedom and a new vernacular to explore its abiding interest in existentialism.

Seeing as the conceptual art of the past 100 years has been mostly about found and borrowed objects, couldn't you see the collector as an artist, arranging pictures to make an installation or collage? Saatchi isn't having any of that. "No, I just really want to see these paintings all hanging in a gallery." Okay, but are you a choreographer or a producer? "Oh, f*** knows. I'm Bernard Delfont." Did the fire at Momart (in May 2004) have anything to do with this change and the move away from the Young British Artists? (Saatchi lost a huge amount of work, including the Chapman brothers' Hell, and Tracey Emin's tent.) "Oh yes, I think it drew a line. It was so awful. Such an appalling loss. I'd been buying paintings before then, but it made me want to do this show, start something new."

The argument about painting is really an irrelevance. It's not about artists being able to draw like Raphael or not. Loads of people can draw like Raphael, and they're all doing portraits in the street. This is really a tug of war about who chooses the direction of contemporary art, and that's as much about a market and retail as aesthetics. Painting never went away. It's just easier to own than a circle of twigs and rocks. "What I like about these pictures," says Saatchi, "is that they're paintings with amnesia." A lot of them could be what used to be called "outsider art": pictures that have spent so long with their noses pressed up against a gallery window, they've grown radical and dangerous. For many collectors, owning art is an intensely private, solitary pleasure — just you, the Monet and a pint of baby oil. But for Charles Saatchi it's very public. He puts on shows.

Do you see the dichotomy in that, being a severely private, even secretive man? He laughs. "Yes, yes, you're right." So? "So what can I say? You know lots of people could take these paintings and other paintings and put on a coherent show that said something completely different, pointed in another direction." But they don't. "No, they don't. It's a pity." And you promise you didn't choose them because all their names look like anagrams from a game of Scrabble? "No." And have all of these Germans got anything to do with you being Jewish or an Iraqi? "No, but it would be an interesting way of advertising it."

IS IT?

by Waldemar Januszczak

Charles Saatchi, I've noticed, changes his taste in art when he changes wives. His first wife, Doris, introduced him to minimalism and championed the new conceptual art that was blossoming in the US and London in the 1980s. His next wife, Kay Hartenstein, was around in the 1990s when Saatchi made a song and dance about a new movement he claimed to have discovered in London's East End, which he christened, awfully, "new neurotic realism". It turned out to be a complete dud.

Saatchi's present phase is, of course, his Nigella epoch. As we know, Nigella Lawson is a goddess: curvaceous, vivacious, loquacious and juicy. Unfortunately, so are the paintings that Saatchi's been busily acquiring. He's been to Germany. He's been to Denmark. And everywhere he's gone he's discovered painters who throw their ingredients about like pizza chefs.

Is there really a wild new movement in painting out there? Has Saatchi really fingered it? Or should we be wary of swallowing this guff from a man who proved himself to be the greatest adman in art several wives ago? After decades of experience of the art world's hustles and delusions, I have devised a simple, fail-safe test for all new movements. If the artists in the so-called new movement know each other, and come from more or less the same place, the chances are it is the real thing. But if they don't, and are only being lumped together because some collector or dealer or curator says they should be, then it isn't an ism. It's an uct. As in "construct". Isms are good. Ucts are bad.

Turning to the gaggle of artists that Saatchi is unveiling for us this season, we can see that they come from everywhere except the same place. Martin Kippenberger, who was German, is dead; the Canadian Peter Doig, is living in Trinidad; Marlene Dumas is from South Africa; Luc Tuymans is Belgian; Hermann Nitsch is an ancient Austrian; and Jorg Immendorff is also German, but alive. Not only are these artists not from the same place, they are not even from the same era. Nitsch first appeared in the 1970s as an infamous action painter who worked with his own blood. Immendorff was one of the original artists that Saatchi began collecting more than 20 years ago when he appeared in a famous show at the Royal Academy called A New Spirit in Painting.

Most of the artists in Saatchi's show are already well known in the art world. Tuymans has just had a huge exhibition at Tate Modern. Dumas is constantly setting new auction records. Doig's things have been going for hundreds of thousands since the mid-1990s. So for this display, Saatchi, who is usually a trendsetter, has become a trend follower. And that is new.

The one area where there does seem to be the semblance of a shared urge is among the younger German painters. Saatchi has always had a taste for lashings of sex and gore; so have young German painters. The rantings of Meese and Oehlen, of Richter and Schutz, have the air about them of an id let off the leash. Saatchi has often enjoyed this in others. In his Nigella years, it seems actually to have happened to him as well. She's rewound him to his toddler stage, and got him playing with his poo again. What primordial primitivism. What a woman.

THE ART DEALER'S VERDICT: Victoria Miro

Has painting triumphed? I would answer it has never gone away. Even in the early years of the YBAs and the growing public awareness of conceptual art, Polke, Richter, Kiefer and Baselitz were important figures, though the rise of new media was making some regard painting as old-fashioned. I found myself affected by that mood, showed mostly minimal and conceptual art, and was made to feel a traitor to the cause when I showed painting.


Having trained as a painter, I was still actively searching for a new direction in it. But I showed little until I saw the work of Peter Doig in the early 1990s. The significant painters of the 1980s had strongly defined styles and often dealt with big issues. Peter's work, though, was lyrical and moody, evidently influenced by film, photography, art history and artists like Sigmar Polke — timeless but contemporary. Peter's painterly values, the very surfaces of his canvases and his subject matter were to be hugely influential on a younger generation including Daniel Richter, Tal R and Chantal Joffe.

This exhibition looks interesting and it is certainly an international show, but from a London perspective. I think Charles is heavily influenced by what is exhibited in London, and he is receptive to artists shown locally. However, he does appear to have missed out painters who are referencing non-western cultures — Chris Ofili, for example, and Raquib Shaw — and that is surprising, considering what's happening here.

I believe painting has emerged vibrant and strong from its outmoded status. It is taking its rightful place alongside photography, sculpture, video and installation art.

Victoria Miro is one of London's leading art dealers.

THE CURATOR'S VERDICT: Robert Storr

It is long past the time when anyone could speak of Charles Saatchi as a collector. Judgments on art collections worthy of the name are based on the discernment with which artists and works are selected, and the aesthetic and historic value they retain or acquire with the years. They are the combined creation of aesthetic sensibility, historic intuition and stubborn commitment. It is not for nothing that we talk of "building" collections, or of the "holdings" of the Courtauld in London or the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

By contrast, Saatchi buys in bulk, and flips large portions of what he amasses in the short term. In sum, he is a speculator — though a very gifted one. Had he been generous as a patron of institutions — he seems to have missed his chance with Tate Modern, for example — or founded one of his own that had any aesthetic integrity and stability, his collection circa 1984 or 1994 could have formed the core of a grand contemporary museum in Britain or elsewhere. Alas, that has not happened and, it appears, will not happen. From Philip Guston to Rachel Whiteread, much of the best of what he once had has been sold in order to keep playing the game. The only remaining issue is whether, as a market handicapper, Saatchi's bets on new artists have been well placed.

Judging from the list of those included in The Triumph of Painting, the answer is that he has been hedging more than usual. That is a sign that he himself is no longer sure of what's really going on. Placing the "old masters" Alex Katz and Martin Kippenberger and established younger "stars" like Luc Tuymans alongside exemplars of the "young and the restless" such as Franz Ackermann, and the lesser-knowns Dana Schutz and Dexter Dalwood makes the whole exercise look like a casting call for a drawing-room comedy of manners — or rather a White Cube comedy of mannerisms. Moreover, the fact that so many of the better artists in the group are represented by weak works makes the project resemble a low-budget showcase movie for a failing studio that has cashed in on the expiring contracts of its older actors in order to launch cheaper new talents.

Perhaps the most glaring indicator of how out of touch Saatchi may be is the desperately heroic title of the show itself. For all its flaws, the New Spirit of Painting show in 1981 did announce a resurgence of work in the medium after a decade of video, performance and installation art. No longer at the edges of the art system, those modes are now ensconced at its core, and are busily developing their own academies and traditions. Painting will never "triumph" over them as Saatchi's polemical conceit suggests. Nor will painting be "vanquished" by them as avant-gardists sometimes still claim. Yet good painting, like good modern art of any kind, must do more than generate clever pictures, individual careers or the next season's look: it must critically address the fundamental problems and conditions of image-making in its specific time. Very little of this work even attempts this. That is why this exhibition can't possibly predict the future. But, while confusing the public about modern painting, it may guide art investors like Saatchi who sell almost as fast as they buy.

Formerly senior curator of painting and sculpture at Moma, Robert Storr is now Rosalie Solow professor of modern art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.