Art:: New Blood

From The Sunday Times

March 21, 2004

It’s ignorant, yobbish, cack-handed and tasteless. The Saatchi’s New Blood is ego run mad. Waldemar Januszczak calls for a transfusion — pronto

It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to report that Charles Saatchi has lost it, big time. I admire the man. I respect what he has done. But his new show is an aesthetic Titanic, a momentous capsizing of taste, filled with some of the most graceless, puerile and pig-ignorant art I have seen for years. Something has gone horribly wrong here.Saatchi is one of the few individuals in this country’s aesthetic history to have successfully changed British taste. It’s that simple. Without him, without his money, without his insouciance about spending that money, there would be no Brit Art — and whether you like all, or some, or no Brit Art, it remains undeniable that it was, in its pomp, the most exciting art movement in the world, and Britain had never had one of those before.

But bankrolling this brief cultural pre-eminence is the lesser of Saatchi’s two crucial achievements. The more significant of them was to change the relationship between contemporary art and the British people. Before Saatchi came along, most inhabitants of this sceptr’d isle had zero interest in contemporary art. I know. I was there. Now they do. Not always for the right reasons. Not always positively. But the interest has, unmistakably, been awakened. There would be no Tate Modern without Saatchi, of that I am certain. So his place in our cultural history is secure.

Yet knowing all this does nothing to alleviate the pain inflicted on my sensibilities by his latest offering, which is, for most of its length, nasty, trite, ignorant, yobbish, hasty, cack-handed and perhaps even evil. This is a show packed with unusual quantities of bad art. And that’s grim enough. Even more distressing are the questions being asked here of Saatchi’s core taste: his default aesthetics. I don’t believe he has ever been as honest about what really tugs his rope as he is being here. From beginning to end, this is entirely an “I like” show, as in “I like this” and “I like that”. The results made me cringe and gasp. If ever a man needed to go back to college and get himself an art education, it is Charles Saatchi here and now. We have the sight before us of an id that has grown unpleasantly and tragically out of control.

Saatchi’s new show is called New Blood. Of course it is. “New” is his preferred aesthetic prefix. The last new movement he claimed to have discovered, back in the mid-1990s, was called new neurotic realism, three portentous words taking the place of a quotidian one: crap. By calling his new show New Blood, Saatchi is signalling nothing except newness, a valueless commodity when unattached to any decent aesthetic content. New Blood is a vampire’s title, and all we see here is a tired count of art going through the motions, scouring the international art horizon for fresh haemoglobin, not finding any, but buying all this junk anyway.

Most of the show consists of unfamiliar work by unfamiliar artists Saatchi has discovered on his notorious viking raids around the art circuit. I once went on one of these with him while writing an article about him, and I can confirm that his modus operandi is to get into a taxi, armed with a pile of gallery bumf, and to visit everywhere, and I mean everywhere, on his list, his acquisitive eye constantly cocked, on the lookout for work that stands out. This he does weekend after weekend. It’s a process that ensures he sees more new art than any other living Briton. That’s the upside.

The downside is that the kind of work that catches his eye is the kind with instant, superficial impact. Fast art. Big Macs. Like the giant contraption for spinning useless rope that Conrad Shawcross has contributed, a creaky wooden monster called The Nervous System, which groans round in clunky orbits like a model of the planetary system made from old chairs. A deluded caption claims that The Nervous System is “mesmerising in its simplistic complexity”, when all it actually is is a failed punt at that familiar, battered, Heath-Robinson-contraption charm that Saatchi has an old-fashioned fondness for. Brian Griffiths, whose work I last remember encountering when he was a new neurotic realist in one of Saatchi’s earlier gatherings, has been recycled, and gives us a higgledy-piggledy gypsy caravan of the kind that the baddies might be riding in in a Mad Max movie, assembled from bits of furniture bought in Peckham.

Saatchi clearly appreciates these kinds of feral DIY skills. And seems blind to their kitschness. One day, he’s going to want to buy one of those front gardens sculpted entirely out of seashells that retired postmen devote their lives to in places like Bournemouth. It seems to be the very amateurishness of such creations that Saatchi enjoys. There are some collages here by a real-life Mexican tattooist called Dr Lakra, who takes pages from old Mexican magazines and adds toe-to-head tattoos to the people in them, in Biro.

If the battered contraption is the first of the core elements of Saatchi’s default taste, and a B-movie fondness for post-holocaust nuclear chic is the second, the third is a horrendous appetite for bad painting. By bad painting, I do not mean talentless painting — although there’s lots of that — but, rather, painting that is deliberately crude and slapdash and childish because it confuses crudity, slapdashness and childishness with freedom of expression. “Look at me,” it shouts, “I’m liberated.” “No, thanks,” I shout back. “Get some education.”

The show clearly has ambitions to promote this slap-happy nightclub painting as the latest thing. It seems that Saatchi has been touring northern Europe in the search for wild new northern ids to collect, and the results constitute the single most regrettable contribution to New Blood. The stupidly named Tal R, from Denmark, gives us lots of multicoloured cutout guitars in a picture called Melody, which, I read, “is like a giant Picasso drug trip”. Wow. But Tal R, useless as he is, really is a Picasso when compared with the spectacularly awful Jonathan Meese, a Berlin painter into whose anus someone appears to have inserted a red-hot poker. Meese paints whatever comes into his mind while in a state of certifiable frenzy. Never before have I seen quite as little thought put into a painting. Apparently, Meese is giving us “a pop-apocalypse with the aesthetic and energy of the real thing”. But I missed that. All I could see was a depressing absence of care, inventiveness, talent, composure or consideration.

This would not be a Saatchi show if its opening were not accompanied by a noisy media storm, but, strangely enough, the artist causing the rumpus this time is one of the few decent contributors to this disaster. Stella Vine is a stripper- turned-painter whose impeccable amateurish credentials fulfil all the above Saatchi selection criteria: her work looks as if it has been painted on the kitchen table, between strips. But the now notorious image of Princess Di talking to her butler is a pretty thing, sensuously coloured and sweet, while her portrait of the sad heroin victim Rachel Whitear — which may or may not be in the show by the time you read this, so virulent has been the outrage stirred up about it by the press — is cartoonishly empathetic. “Poor Rachel,” it seems to say. What on earth is wrong with that? It wasn’t Vine who put the image of Rachel Whitear into the public domain.

There is no doubt, however, that the fourth of Saatchi’s core taste values is a love of scatology and offensiveness. Some will dislike Liz Neal’s dress for Elizabeth I, Gloriana Banana, assembled from home-made smutty canvases. And I admit it’s silly. But it wasn’t nearly as bad, or as cheap, or as sordid, as Neal’s “chandelier”, made of wire covered in drops of pale-white silicone. It’s called Spunk Chandelier.

Pathetically, that’s exactly what it looks like. Thus, the fifth of Saatchi’s core values is a growing absence of grace.

New Blood is at the Saatchi Gallery, SE1, from Wednesday

Saatchi says . . .

From The Times

March 20, 2004

The reclusive impresario breaks his silence to tell Richard Cork why his chamber of horrors is really a place for all the family

When Charles Saatchi moved his controversial collection into the overwhelming grandeur of County Hall a year ago, the art world was astonished. His old space, tucked away down a quiet North London alley, was the last word in bare, minimal whiteness. But the new building, opposite Big Ben and next door to a king-sized McDonald’s, is filled with sweeping staircases, lofty pillars and dark panelled walls. Sitting above the London Aquarium and one minute’s walk from the London Eye, Saatchi’s imposing temple could hardly be more palatial.

Saatchi, busily putting the finishing touches to his anniversary exhibition called New Blood, says that “the old gallery was fantastic. But I felt that I could do shows there while sitting on a deckchair on holiday in Margate. I needed a challenge.” Pausing from his labours, he admits that “this building may be too much of a challenge. But I’m getting used to it now. I love hanging around here.”

Indeed, he does. Before we meet I am aware of the reclusive multimillionaire’s silhouetted figure as he darts around, suddenly appearing in the distance and then, just as swiftly, vanishing through one of the many doorways. County Hall is a labyrinth, and it can prove disorientating. Even while we talk, Saatchi shifts restlessly and several times jumps up to pace the corridor with brisk, impatient steps.

Saatchi speaks quickly, but in a low-toned voice. A famously shy man, who rarely gives interviews, he nevertheless delights in talking about his enthusiasms. When he does so, his face becomes animated. The intensity of his gaze belongs to a man who knows how to stare long and hard at the images that fascinate him.

His County Hall adventure has been an outstanding success. More than 600,000 visitors have paid between £6 and £9 since it opened last April. “I’m thrilled with it,” he says. “We don’t have uniformed guards, only young invigilators. People are more sophisticated about contemporary art than the Daily Mail would like to think. And I’ve learnt that you don’t have to put barriers around lots of the works. We do get thuggish schoolboys visiting sometimes, but nothing has been damaged.”

To test him out, I ask Saatchi if I can touch one of his latest acquisitions: young Matt Calderwood’s Rope, which rises enticingly from the floor to the ceiling.

Although it looks sturdy enough, this deceptive sculpture is made from one mile of lavatory paper. Calderwood spent ages painstakingly twisting it, driven by the desire to fool us into thinking that the “rope” is real.

Children will undoubtedly want to climb it when New Blood opens next week, and the lavatory paper is far too vulnerable to bear their weight. But Saatchi allows me to touch it and becomes excited at the thought of young visitors encountering his collection. “The best thing is when school groups come round,” he says. “Very few of them came to my old place, but I do get a warm glow now thinking that children are visiting an art gallery and not yawning.”

Is he, I wonder, turning into a crusader for the idea of converting British schoolchildren into art devotees? “Nobody wants to be called a crusader,” he replies with a wry grin, “but it is terribly nice to know that I’m opening their eyes to contemporary art. Word of mouth is the key thing in bringing them here. If museum people wonder why people don’t rush to their contemporary shows, the answer is that the public doesn’t like dry and over-intellectual work. Looking at art should be accessible and fun.”

Judging by the popularity of County Hall, most visitors agree. But Saatchi would never be content to leave his collection in a becalmed state. He has altered much of the display. Only the work in the great circular chamber, where YBA icons such as Damien Hirst’s shark and Tracey Emin’s bed still reside, has largely escaped Saatchi’s appetite for change.

“I think of that room as a shrine,” he says, “but I’m not really in the shrine business. It would give me nothing to do at the weekends.”

So the other spaces have been rethought, none more dramatically than the first grand room that visitors will encounter. Here, in a space formerly inhabited by the Chapman brothers’ apocalyptic vision of Hell, we are greeted by the sound of grunts and low, painful groans. The sounds come from Francis Upritchard’s Save Yourself, which features a mummy trussed in strips of white cloth and lying on a stretch of raw ground, exposed by the removal of parquet flooring.

Sometimes singing in a crazed, unearthly voice, the mummy has a gold cigarette pack stuffed incongruously in his waistband. But the pack appears empty — the lack of nicotine probably adds to the mummy’s desperation.

Saatchi relishes work by young artists prepared to explore a sense of crisis. While Upritchard evokes a remote past, Daniel Richter’s nearby painting, Gedion, shows youths looking for trouble in a bleak city street. They quarrel, strip naked or encourage voracious dogs to join the conflict.

Some of the most rasping images that Saatchi has acquired recently can be found in smaller, white-walled rooms leading off the maze of corridors. In one of these spaces, Tim Noble and Sue Webster magnify their reputation as enfants terribles by displaying two multi-coloured neon figures.

Girlfriend from Hell and Puny Undernourished Kid confront each other on opposite walls. Both these cartoon-style figures are covered with graffiti. She has “angry bitch” and “good shag” scrawled on her body, while he is peppered with “wanker” and “sod off”.

Saatchi, it is clear, has lost none of his fascination with the rudeness of youth. He has never been afraid of brash self-exposure in art, as his Tracey Emin collection proves. And he continues to acquire work that, like the notorious Myra Hindley portrait, is capable of causing offence.

The latest controversial image, Stella Vine’s bloodied painting of a heroin addict, Rachel Whitear, who died in 2000, has provoked widespread anger before the show opens. But it reflects Saatchi’s long-standing preoccupation with death, a recurrent theme in the new display.

The most repellent of his purchases is David Falconer’s Vermin Death Star, a colossal fragment of meteor debris covered in entwined rats. Marooned in a clinical room of its own, it could hardly be more gruesome. But when I ask the 60-year-old Saatchi about his obsession with mortality, he shrugs and says: “it’s such a good subject, and it’ll always be with us.”

New Blood is a busy and bewildering show, ranging from outrageous shocks to surprisingly restrained paintings by older artists such as Luc Tuymans. “You never know what’s coming next,” Saatchi says, “something new and rude by Noble and Webster, or something classic by Tuymans. I’m not one of those who think that painting has died on us, and I’m planning to do a show of the most interesting painting around.” He also wants to stage an exhibition of Clyfford Still, one of the finest, yet least-known, American abstract expressionists.

Although Saatchi has problems with abstract art, one of his greatest memories is seeing the Still exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. But he is quick to dispel the suspicion that he is falling back on the art of the past.

“I won’t let go seeing all those grisly shows of new work,” he says. “What’s so thrilling about London is that you can visit El Greco at the National Gallery and all the other museum shows, and then go somewhere disagreeable in the East End, where there is always something new. Interesting art keeps popping up in Britain, infinitely more than in America.”

So why is London, the capital city of a nation traditionally suspicious of innovative art, such an effective breeding ground for new work? “Because we’ve got very few really good dealers. That’s a big plus. In New York, all the artists have dealers, whereas there’s very little in the way of a market over here. So the young London artists put on their own shows. Almost everything new in this show wasn’t seen by me in a dealer’s gallery.”

Saatchi continues to visit the most out-of-the-way warehouses, searching for new, unknown artists. He has a 50-year lease at County Hall, and looking at art is his life. “I’m constantly at it here, and I’m always wanting to visit churches when we go on Italian holidays. I keep boring my wife, telling her we must go off for a two-hour drive and see some paintings by Piero della Francesca.”

He remains committed to the County Hall experiment. “I haven’t been outside for days,” Saatchi says. “I think you can only be really effective if you concentrate, and I fiddle around here all the time.” And with that he darts off into the welcoming shadows.

New Blood opens at County Hall, Belvedere Road, London SE1, on March 24 (020-7823 2363). Four volumes of Richard Cork’s writings on modern art were published recently by Yale

Gallery urged not to show portrait of dead addict

• Steven Morris and Rosie Cowan
• The Guardian,
• Tuesday March 16 2004
• Article history

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This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday March 16 2004 . It was last updated at 17:38 on April 07 2004.

Police chiefs yesterday called on an art gallery to cancel plans to hang a disturbing portrait of Rachel Whitear, the heroin addict whose death is being reinvestigated.

The painting by Stella Vine, which shows the 21-year-old with blood pouring from her mouth, is due to be displayed at the Saatchi Gallery from next Wednesday, 24 hours after Ms Whitear's body is exhumed.

But Detective Chief Superintendent Paul Howlett, the senior investigating officer, said: "I'm attempting to enter into negotiations with the gallery regarding this particular piece. I hope that we can broker some agreement regarding the unfortunate timing."

Ms Whitear's parents, Mick and Pauline Holcroft, who allowed photographs of her body to be used in an anti-drugs campaign, were said to be devastated by news of the painting. Titled Rachel, it was taken from a school photograph the artist found on the internet. She said: "Rachel's family will believe that I gratuitously exploited her image. I'm sad if that's how they feel .... It comes from love and from passion and I'm not going to stop making art."

The painting, purchased by Charles Saatchi, is to form part of the exhibition New Blood. The body of the Bath University student is to be exhumed from a Herefordshire graveyard next Tuesday. She was found dead in her flat in Exmouth, Devon, four years ago.

Family of heroin girl outraged at Saatchi portrait

From The Times

March 16, 2004

By Lewis Smith CHARLES SAATCHI has angered the parents of a dead heroine addict by buying and exhibiting a macabre portrait of her just as police are about to exhume her body to investigate the cause of her death.

A “shock art” portrait of Rachel Whitear is to be exhibited in public within hours of the exhumation.

The family of the dead woman were said to be “churned up and devastated” by the painting which depicts their daughter with blood pouring from her mouth.

In the portrait, Rachel, that will show in the exhibition New Blood at the Saatchi Gallery in London, Ms Whitear is dressed as a schoolgirl.

Detective Chief Superintendent Paul Howlett, leading the inquiry for Wiltshire Constabulary, called on the gallery to change its plans.

He said: “My understanding is that it is intended this piece will be exhibited next week, which will coincide with the exhumation of Rachel’s body.

“This is clearly extremely distressing for Rachel’s parents and family and I hope that the gallery will respond in a sympathetic and positive manner.”

Mr Saatchi bought the artwork by Stella Vine, a former stripper who was the focus of controversy for her picture of Diana, the Princess of Wales, for £600. Ms Vine admitted the picture was “grotesque” and that the dead woman’s parents may not understand why she chose to paint it. “If anything, I should think that Rachel’s family will believe that I gratuitously exploited her image,” she admitted .

“I’m sad if that’s how they feel, but I know that isn’t how I painted it. It comes from love and from passion and I’m not going to stop making art.”

A spokeswoman for Herefordshire Police, who have been in close contact with with the family, added: “This is absolutely distasteful and quite unnecessary. The family have gone through enough at the moment without having this thrust at them.”

Ms Whitear’s parents, Pauline and Mick Holcroft, will be at the graveside of their daughter when her body is lifted from the ground next week for a post-mortem examination to be carried out.

Ms Whitear, 21, had been trying to beat her heroin addiction when her body was found slumped in a kneeling position with a syringe in her hand. Photographs of her body in her flat in Exmouth, Devon, after her death on May 12, 2000, were used in an anti-drugs campaign.

She was assumed to have died of an overdose but a blood sample revealed that there was too little heroin in her body to have killed her. An open verdict was recorded by a coroner and her death, originally investigated by Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, is being re-examined by Wilt- shire Constabulary.

The exhumation at St Peter’s Church, Withington, near Hereford, and the post-mortem examination are being undertaken to find clues that may have been missed.

YGAs* set to take BritArt by storm

* Young German Artists

By Robin Stummer
Sunday, 29 February 2004

It may be the beginning of the end for BritArt. Vastly expensive, habitually hyped and predictably shocking, the work of the YBAs (Young British Artists) is having to make way for the new passion among wealthy collectors and international art-market speculators: the Young German Artists.

It may be the beginning of the end for BritArt. Vastly expensive, habitually hyped and predictably shocking, the work of the YBAs (Young British Artists) is having to make way for the new passion among wealthy collectors and international art-market speculators: the Young German Artists.

The buying habits of the multi-millionaire collector Charles Saatchi can shape art markets. Mr Saatchi is credited with "making" celebrated BritArtists, such as Damien Hirst, the Chapman brothers and Tracey Emin, but over the past 18 months he has been discreetly buying up work by young continental artists in their 20s and 30s, including several Germans.

Now, The Independent on Sunday has learnt, another major international art buyer, the Korean property magnate-turned-artist CI Kim, has focused his attentions on Germany. Mr Kim, who, like Mr Saatchi, has been an avid collector of British contemporary art, has just completed his own hurried shopping spree in Leipzig and Berlin. The IoS understands that he has bought around 20 works by various YGAs. Mr Kim's office would not reveal the amount he spent in Germany, but on a similar spree in London last August, he is believed to have paid several million pounds for works including Charity, Damien Hirst's massive bronze statue of a disabled-girl collection box.

Mr Kim's office told the IoS yesterday: "He is interested in this art because they have such a distinctive character and style." And, of course, if you've a few hundred thousand pounds to spare, new German art could also prove to be a very good investment.

Though yet to command the vast sums paid for some of the BritArt oeuvre, many YGA works are believed to be selling for between £20,000 and £100,000 - the kind of amounts achieved in the early days of the BritArt boom.

Mr Kim has already amassed the largest collection of contemporary British art outside the UK, housed in a specially built gallery complex in the city of Cheonan, Korea. He now intends to create one of the world's great repositories of recent German art.

Such is the current feeding frenzy among buyers for the work of German painters and sculptors that experts say Leipzig, the powerhouse of the country's burgeoning art industry, has sold out of new art. There is now a waiting list of up to three years to acquire new work.

Since the 1960s, a series of German artists have attracted international attention, notably Josef Beuys, Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke. The city of Cologne provided much of the energy behind the modern art resurgence of the 1980s. More recently, the conceptual photographer Thomas Ruff and the Leipzig painter Neo Rauch have received critical acclaim.

Mr Kim is believed to have bought at least one work by Tobias Lehner, a 24-year-old Leipzig painter, while Mr Saatchi is believed to have bought several works by the Berlin-based painter Jonathan Meese. One of these, the huge, three-panel Temptation of the State of the Blessed Ones in Archland, was unveiled in January at the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Temptation is among many European works bought by Mr Saatchi over the past 18 months, and will feature in the New Blood exhibition, which opens next month at the Saatchi Gallery. It marks a clean break with Mr Saatchi's almost exclusively BritArt tastes of the past 10 years.

Including work by several Germans, as well as artists from Belgium, Japan, New Zealand, Israel and the United States, the exhibition will contain only a smattering of young British artists, among them the 26-year-old conceptualist Conrad Shawcross, son of the writer and journalist William Shawcross.

"New German art is being very strongly collected by collectors and banks from within the country," says Jari Lager of the Union Projects gallery in London. "But there are also a few major private collectors in Britain who are now making their first purchases and contacts and visits to Germany.

"The Leipzig artists have sold out of their work - you can't buy anything," she adds. "Everything has been bought. There are around a dozen artists there who are doing very, very well."

According to Anna Somers Cocks, founding editor of The Art Newspaper, the rise of the YGAs began across the Atlantic. "The reason the Germans have become strong is because the Americans adopted German contemporary art with a vengeance about five years ago," she says.

"The Germans have a school of photographers who produce enormous architectural images. The Americans like photography anyway, but these Germans are by far the best photographic artists around."

How Saatchi discovered the art of a stripper

From The Times

February 24, 2004

By Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent A STRIPPER with no training as a painter has found herself in the art market’s spotlight after Charles Saatchi bought her first painting.

Stella Vine, 35, was astonished to learn that Britain’s foremost collector of contemporary art had bought her portrait of a bleeding Diana, Princess of Wales, for £600 — the pay for four nights’ work in a strip club.

When Mr Saatchi buys and sells, the art world takes note. His activities are regarded as a barometer of the market. Damien Hirst, the animal pickler, and Tracey Emin, best-known for her unmade bed, are among the artists whose reputations have been made by Mr Saatchi’s interest in them.

“I really love your painting,” he had told Ms Vine, after noticing it at the Transition Gallery in North London. Ms Vine, a friend of the gallery’s owner who had been included in a show of emerging artists, said that Mr Saatchi had said: “ ‘How much is that? I’ll have it’. I couldn’t believe it.”

The artist, who is a single mother, had until recently performed at the Windmill Club in Soho. Now she has moved to a smaller venue in London.

Her painting Hi Paul Can You Come Over, which shows the Princess begging for help from her butler Paul Burrell, will be featured in an exhibition from Mr Saatchi that is to open next month, New Blood. Ms Vine painted the work after reading that the Princess had believed that there were plans to kill her.

Ms Vine said her dream is to become a full-time artist. It was the “dark side” of stripping that she wanted to get away from, she said. “You meet some wonderful women — people in the law, nursing and single parents trying to get by,” she said. “But you also meet a lot of dark men and it is easy to get sucked into dodgy stuff. You’ve got to be really tough inside to maintain who you are.”

Ms Vine left home at 13 and became pregnant at 16 by the caretaker at the bedsits where she was living. She eventually left him and went to a drama school in Wandsworth.

She worked as a waitress but was not making enough to live on, and found work in hostess bars and strip clubs, dancing nude. She said: “At one point, I was totally broke. I began table-dancing in Wembley, earning £20 a night. I was struggling.”

A year after opening its doors at County Hall, the Saatchi Gallery will feature previously unseen work by a new generation of artists in its new show. The exhibition features a vibrating mummy by a New Zealand artist, Francis Upritchard; a travelling theatre caravan constructed from old tables and cupboards by an English artist, Brian Griffiths; and taxidermal horses’ bodies posed like Henry Moore sculptures by a Belgian artist, Berlinde de Bruyckere.

Since its opening, the Saatchi Gallery has attracted more than half a million visitors. The forthcoming exhibition will fill most of the 40,000 sq ft gallery, although works by the Chapman Brothers, Emin and Hirst will also be on view.

Painting without the pandering

From The Times

January 1, 2004

The art market downturn will expel hyped-up tosh and allow more enduring work to thrive

By Rachel Campbell-Johnston

THE shadow of economic slump has spooked the art market. Old-Master dealers tend to stick it out, however heavy the going, but the contemporary scene is more highly strung. Over the coming year it is likely to grow even more skittish. And observers can expect a few nasty falls.

Art lovers may think this won’t affect them. But it will, because art, seen at one level, is simply the production of a saleable commodity much like any other but less useful than a washing machine.

The state of the market directly affects contemporary production. When markets are buoyant, the contemporary is kept afloat.

London founded its Frieze Art Fair this autumn. Our capital needs to be able to compete, though with art fairs now overcrowding the cultural calendar (fairs in Berlin, Paris, Cologne, Turin and Miami Beach all take place in the same few months), dealers will be choosing carefully where they want to be represented. And it’s the dealers who control the contemporary scene.

Brit Art was the creation of Charles Saatchi. An advertising man, he understood the power of a certain type of spectacle. And by creating a market value for this, he launched a brand. As prices increased, so did media coverage. And since most of us are less interested in art than in what other people are interested in, Saatchi-style aesthetics were soon being consumed like soup.

This had an adverse effect on artistic standards. “A lot of artists are producing what is known as Saatchi art,” Chris Ofili told The Times. “You know it’s Saatchi art because it’s one-off shockers. And these artists are getting cynical. Some with works already in his collection produce half-hearted crap knowing that he will take it off their hands. And he does.”

But now the buzz of Brit Art is over. Only the strongest will survive the hard times. It is significant that Saatchi has chosen this moment to sell almost his entire collection of the work of Damien Hirst. Hirst was the leader of the Brit pack. His were the pieces that first turned the conceptual into a craze. And this sale marks a turning point. For though Hirst was a trendsetter and will no doubt survive, the fate of many of his followers is less certain.

Over the past years, artists whose work passed all but uncommented upon in the Royal Academy’s landmark Sensation show of 1977 have, one by one, found enthusiastic advocates. This was not necessarily an indication of the calibre of their work.

As far as an Old Master is concerned, there are certain criteria to be met. Experts assess an oil painting according to its condition. They judge the minute distinctions between different impressions of a print. But when it came to the conceptual, an awful lot of the appeal can lie in the fact that a piece is in accordance with a certain dominant trend.

A trend promotes a certain “look”. And in recent years this “look” has focused on lifestyle, pop and youth culture. It has subverted ideals of traditional beauty to appeal to a younger, more diverse, audience. It has been influenced by, and reflected in, the world of fashion and magazines — the Royal Academy of Arts’ Armani retrospective is one example.

This “look” has given a lift to entire areas of the contemporary. And it is these pieces — buoyed by fashion and hype — that, now put under financial pressure, will be subjected to closer scrutiny. As the tide of fashion goes out, observers will start to see who exactly is swimming naked.

The beginnings of this process could well be most marked in photography.

This year Tate Modern broke ground with its huge photographic exhibition Cruel and Tender. But when the show moved to Germany, audiences were far from impressed, says Melanie Puff, a freelance curator. Germany, after all, was the nation that had produced such pioneering photographers as Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth. And these artists had influenced a host of empty imitators.

“Art photography, in the past ten years, has become a commercial career,” says Charlotte Cotton, a curator of photography at the V&A. “And some younger photographers are looking at the work of mature picture makers such as Gursky or Struth and, without having a subject or approach of their own, they are imitating their deadpan aesthetic. They think it will make their work into art. But it doesn’t. It just makes it look like art. These also-rans are just trying to appeal to an assumed constituency of new collectors.”

Such opportunism could survive while the art market was booming and collectors were ready to buy anything that looked as if it could be cool. But as markets grow wary, photography faces a serious reassessment. And MoMA’s spring show, Fashioning Fiction in Photography (the first devoted to fashion photography), is likely to become a focus of argument.

It is high time this happened. Art that endures is not that which simply cashes in on a craze. It tends to be rooted in a profound sense of engagement. Content is as important as style. And this intense engagement with subject matter tends to arise out of periods of silence and retreat, which is precisely what market success won’t allow the creator, because when prices are high so is the corresponding hype. Some of the most creative moments arise when there is little money about.

As far as the contemporary art scene is concerned, economic downturn should be seen as a source of hope. The Brit Art phenomenon began only after the recession of the early 1990s when dealers who survived financial troubles were looking to capitalise on the next big thing. Which is why, in 2004, we should watch the contemporary art world more carefully than ever.

Don't miss...

Vuillard (Royal Academy)

The first major retrospective of a French modern master famed for the warm domestic intimacy of his interior scenes. Jan 31-Apr 18.

The Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature (Tate Britain)

Every intricate detail of nature picked out in pure Pre-Raphaelite colour. Feb 12-May 3.

Roy Lichtenstein (Hayward Gallery)

Wham! Comic-book kitsch on a vast scale by the American Pop pioneer. Feb 26-May 16.

Brancusi (Tate Modern)

40 works by a founder of modern sculpture in all their eloquent simplicity. Jan 29- May 23.

Rubens (Palais des Beaux- Arts)

Lille celebrates being joint Euro Culture Capital with a spectacular show of the great Baroque master. Mar 6-Jun 14.

Cy Twombly at the Serpentine (Tate Britain)

Echoes of our horticultural passions in the master scribblings of one of America’s most admired living artists in the Serpentine Art of the Garden show. Jun 3-Aug 30.

The Liverpool Biennale

New commissioned works by international artists are a focus for the biennale of the city that knows how to party. Sept 18-Nov 28.

Exotic Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500 to 1800 (V&A)

East meets West in a display that charts 300 years of artistic, cultural and technological interaction. Sept 23-Dec 5.

Helen Chadwick (Barbican Art Gallery)

Only in her forties when she died in 1996, Chadwick described the feelings her work provoked as “gorgeously repulsive, exquisitely fun, dangerously beautiful”. Apr 29-Aug 1.

New directions

Charles Saatchi has dumped his works by Damien Hirst, affecting the artist’s “look”. His pieces will still set the upper price limit for new art, but values will fall from there, forcing fellow artists to be less derivative.