Something smells funny at the Tate...

...and it's not just the elephant dung on a newly acquired £700,000 installation by Chris Ofili. Guy Adams reports on a scandal that has shaken Britain's modern art establishment

Tuesday, 29 November 2005

The crowds at Tate Britain last weekend were unlikely to have thought there was anything particularly strange about Christopher Ofili's work The Upper Room, except perhaps the fact that it was partly made using several dozen dollops of elephant dung.

But these are troubled times for the Tate. Behind the scenes, the critically-acclaimed series of 13 paintings, said to be Ofili's take on the Last Supper, is at the centre of a row that has engulfed some of the biggest names in Britain's artistic establishment.

At the heart of the affair is the fact that, when The Upper Room was purchased from him for £705,000 earlier this year, Ofili was himself a Tate trustee. This, critics say, represents a major conflict of interest. It also seems to contradict official guidelines, which say: "Even the perception of a conflict of interest in relation to a board member can be extremely damaging to the body's reputation."

The matter is so serious that, last week, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said it will investigate. Meanwhile, the Charities Commission is looking at whether the trustees breached its code of conduct. Pressure is mounting on the Tate's director, Sir Nicholas Serota, who was in charge of the Turner Prize when Ofili won it in 1998. A fortnight ago, he was forced to apologise for wrongly soliciting a charitable donation of £75,000 towards The Upper Room's asking price.

Sir Nicholas, 59, has made few enemies in his 17 years in office. He earns a modest salary of about £100,000, and even his critics acknowledge that he is open and approachable. However, he has attracted criticism as a champion of conceptual art.

And he is also facing flak after it emerged that he paid £3.3m to unnamed Balkan figures to secure the return of two stolen Turner works. Next Wednesday, when this year's Turner Prize winner is announced at the Tate, protesters will converge to call for Sir Nicholas's sacking.

Further investigations have prompted wider allegations of cronyism. Last week, it emerged that dozens of works associated with trustees - by Michael Craig-Martin, Peter Doig, Bill Woodrow, Christopher Le Brun, Michael Landy and Richard Deacon - have entered the gallery during the past 15 years. Originally, the Tate had defended the Ofili acquisition as a one-off "exception" to normal acquisition policy.

This is awkward for the great and the good who serve as Tate trustees. At present, they include the newscaster Jon Snow, the LSE director Sir Howard Davies, the HarperCollins chief executive Victoria Barnsley, the Guardian Media Group chairman Paul Myners and John Studzinski, the financier who secured Prince William's work experience stint at HSBC bank.

Meanwhile, the way the controversy unravelled has contributed to an aura of suspicion. The Tate at first refused to disclose the amount paid for The Upper Room, but it was forced to release a series of details under the Freedom of Information Act.

This precedent could have serious implications for Britain's major galleries, which may now have to release the costs of all new purchases and the identities of vendors, throwing the secretive, poorly regulated art market into turmoil.

None of these potential outcomes could have occurred to the Tate's trustees when they first met to discuss the purchase of The Upper Room in 2002. Then, it represented a unique opportunity for the Tate to get its hands on a work regarded as one of the most important pieces of British art of the past decade.

According to minutes of the meeting at which the purchase was agreed, the trustees were painfully aware of the potential conflict of interest. Ofili was required to leave the room when the potential sale was discussed, and it was agreed that the gallery would seek to minimise the cost by seeking additional funds from elsewhere.

In November 2003, Sir Nicholas "reminded trustees that... ordinarily it was the policy not to acquire work by serving trustees," but that there was a decision "to waive this rule on the basis that this was an exceptional group of works offered at an exceptional price".

The sale did not go entirely smoothly. Recently, confidential e-mails between Ofili's agent, Victoria Miro, and Sir Nicholas, sent in November 2002, have emerged. They show Miro pleading for the purchase to be speeded through because her client was getting married and might need the money. "I suspect he may be less willing than previously to wait for an extended period in terms of finance," she wrote. "Evidently, especially as Chris is a trustee, this is a sensitive situation, but if you could give me some indication as to which way to proceed, I will ensure that your decision is handled with discretion."

Eventually, Miro obtained more than £300,000 from private benefactors to ensure the sale went through at a price acceptable to the Tate. The total cost, at £600,000 (excluding VAT) was about 20 per cent lower than the original asking price.

At this point, the plot thickens. Less than half the money eventually paid for The Upper Room was actually secured by the Tate (£120,000 from its funds, £100,000 from members and £75,000 from the National Arts Collection fund). The remainder came from five unnamed private benefactors.

This raises awkward questions. The identities of Miro's benefactors remain secret, but Tate minutes from November 2003 note that several of the donors were both "purchasing a new painting by Ofili and contributing X to Tate". Could they have been making an investment in order to increase the value of the works they hoped to acquire? An acquisition by a national collection often leads to a rise in an artist's value. Indeed, The Upper Room is said to be worth twice its original asking price.

Certainly, there was a buzz about Ofili as news of the Tate purchase began to filter through the art world. From 1998 to 2004, his auction prices fell by 24 per cent, yet on 12 May this year, two months before the Tate deal was officially announced, Charles Saatchi sold an Ofili painting, Afrodizzia, in New York for £550,000, more than four times his previous record price.

A report on the purchase by Charles Thomson, co-founder of the Stuckist movement of artists, has been submitted to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It notes: "Mr Saatchi is a client of Ms Miro, and it should be established whether any privy information passed between them. It should also be established whether Mr Saatchi was involved at any time in the purchase procedures."

The department has also been asked by Thomson to instruct the Tate, in future, to include details of trustees' holdings of artworks in its Register of Trustees Interests. It is not at present known if any of the remaining 11 trustees own works by Ofili.

Ofili himself has not escaped criticism. News of The Upper Room's purchase came a few months after, writing in The Guardian, he urged artists to donate their works to the Tate for free. Coincidentally, he stood down as a trustee last week when his five-year term ended.

It doesn't end there. This newspaper's Pandora column recently obtained a report by the Tate's conservator Natasha Duff suggesting that Ofili's paintings are being damaged by the conditions in the gallery. It records that the special "do not touch" signs are badly situated and light levels in the room are five times higher than the recommended maximum, and concludes that the works may have to be removed from view for several years.

In defence of the Tate, most critics acknowledge that The Upper Room is an exceptional piece, and seems to have been bought within a tight budget, at a reasonable price. The gallery is co-operating with all enquiries into the purchase, and is confident that Ofili's temporary absence from trustee meetings when the sale was discussed will save them from further criticism.

Also, the Tate has a duty to acquire important items of new British art. As at least three of its trustees are working artists, the gallery could be seriously inconvenienced if it is required to boycott the work of any trustee.

"My view is that this has been a cock-up rather than a conspiracy," says Martin Bailey of The Art Newspaper. "The gallery should have been more open when questions were first asked about the purchase. The fact that they weren't has contributed to a feeling of suspicion.

"The sale was probably handled properly, but from a PR perspective they should have been open from the start, rather than allowing this drip, drip of revelations. Ofili has yet to give his side of the story, and it would be helpful for him to explain his views on the sale," Bailey says.

Either way, the art world is waiting for the next development in the Ofili affair with bated breath. Who can tell when the next piece of elephant dung might hit the fan?

Image of 'cocaine Kate' inspires art exhibition

By Ciar Byrne, Media Correspondent
Thursday, 24 November 2005

Tousled blonde tresses tumbling over a short black dress, Kate Moss leans over to prepare a line of cocaine. It is an image that has gained near-iconic status, marking the moment when the media turned against the supermodel from Croydon who had been its darling for so many years.

This time though, it is not a grainy camera-phone picture but the work of the artist Stella Vine who has used pictures of Moss apparently snorting cocaine as inspiration for a new exhibition.

Entitled The Beautiful and the Damned after an F Scott Fitzgerald novel - which was also the theme of Moss's 30th birthday party - the exhibition includes four paintings of the supermodel. Must Be The Season Of The Witch, which Vine only completed yesterday just in time for the opening night, is based on the Daily Mirror picture.

A second portrait, Kate Unfinished, depicts Moss as a doe-eyed Brigitte Bardot-style beauty, clutching a champagne glass. In a third, Moss is shown smoking a cigarette, paint dripping from the outline of her chin, with the accompanying text: "Holy water cannot help you now."

Vine has also painted Moss surrounded by a gaggle of celebrity friends at the Priory, where she spent six months in 1998 being treated for drink and drug problems.

Moss is seen waving her arms from a window, while her boyfriend, the Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty reaches out to her from another window. The scene features Moss's former boyfriend Johnny Depp with his current partner Vanessa Paradis, Jude Law and Sienna Miller and Law's ex-wife Sadie Frost.

Vine, who worked as a stripper to support herself until she came to prominence last year when Charles Saatchi bought two of her works, has painted Moss before, but has never met the model, working instead from photographs. She once painted a portrait of Moss, adorned with the words "I only make love to Jesus", which was bought by the fashion designer Alexander McQueen. Vine said: "I struggled for quite a long time to paint her. All last year I couldn't and then I got quite used to her and really enjoyed painting her. I feel quite compassionate about her.

"There's something in her eyes, a spirit that we're fascinated with. She's been in the business for so long. She's almost the most beautiful woman in the world, a Mona Lisa. She has that Catherine Deneuve mysterious thing. You can read her how you want to. We're fascinated by rock and roll wild culture, because most of us can't do that for whatever reason. It's nice to see people being hedonistic, decadent and glamorous."

Alongside the pictures of Moss, Vine has included a painting of the Rolling Stones in their younger days, to highlight the inconsistent attitudes towards hedonism in male and female celebrities.

She said: "If a woman has a child and has a really wild life, it all gets a bit more vindictive, she's a terrible person, whereas if a man has a wild life and a child, it's OK, because the mother's looking after it."

The artist feels particularly sympathetic towards Moss because she herself has just kicked a £600-a-week cocaine habit. Most of the pictures in the exhibition were painted during a four-month cocaine binge, which Vine blames on the pressure she came under to work non-stop.

Dossier sheds light on the Tate's £700,000 payment to Chris Ofili

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Saturday, 29 October 2005

Critics of the Tate are piling on pressure over whether the gallery should have purchased works by a serving trustee, the Turner Prize-winning artist Chris Ofili.

Stuckism International, a group of artists critical of the conceptual work it claims the Tate favours, has submitted its own dossier about the affair to the Charity Commission. Charity commissioners have already asked the gallery to explain itself.

Questions were raised after documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act detailed exchanges between Nicholas Serota, director of Tate galleries, and Victoria Miro, Ofili's dealer, in which she emphasised that the artist was getting married and was unlikely to want to wait long to be paid.

The papers revealed that the Tate paid £600,000 for The Upper Room, a series of 13 paintings. The £600,000 price is without VAT, which brought it to £705,000.

The Tate and its members supplied £220,000, with the rest coming from benefactors. The Charity Commission has written to the Tate asking it to address issues raised by the row including the question of conflict of interest, although a spokeswoman stressed this was not - yet - an official investigation.

Charles Thomson, co-founder of the Stuckist movement, said in his submission to the commission that there were other questions that needed to be answered.

The Museums Association guidance on acquisitions states that the value of any potential purchase should be researched and at least one independent valuation sought. "There is no indication in the trustees' minutes that there has been any research to establish the value of the item," Mr Thomson said.

He also argued that there was a conflict of interest for Sir Nicholas Serota, who was appointed to his post by the trustees. "As his employment is in their remit, it creates a conflict of interest when he is involved in procedures which directly affect a trustee's interest," he claimed.

And he said the role of the private benefactors who contributed to the acquisition should be examined. All were private purchasers of Ofili's works from the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, who therefore stood to benefit from the boost to the artist's status and prices that would stem from the Tate acquisition, Mr Thomson said.

Two months before the announcement of the purchase of The Upper Room, Charles Saatchi, the art collector, sold another Ofili work at auction for more than £500,000, four times the previous highest price for an Ofili. "A leading question is whether the impending announcement by the Tate was known by others involved in the auction," Mr Thomson said.

However, a Tate spokeswoman defended the purchase. "Chris Ofili's The Upper Room was acquired because it is an exceptional work, marking a major development in Ofili's career.

"The Tate trustees felt strongly that to neglect to acquire this major group of paintings would represent a missed opportunity and it was acquired with support from the Art Fund, Tate Members and a group of individuals."

It was the gallery's policy only to purchase work by serving artists in exceptional circumstances, she said. Such cases were debated in full, in the absence of the artist in question.

Sentenced to the Saatchi

From The Times

October 25, 2005

By Derwent May SO CHARLES Saatchi’s gallery has finally been expelled from London’s old County Hall. It seems a pity, because the charm of the absurd permeates this gallery. The current exhibition consists of large, aggressive paintings — and these ferocious works hang, astoundingly, on the walls of little 1920s committee rooms, each still with its rusting coal fireplace and clock over the mantelpiece.

What is less charming is the commentary in the gallery’s Picture by Picture Guide and in panels beside the pictures. These comments are almost unintelligible, written in a mishmash of old Marxist sociology and fashionable media analysis, with curious glimmers of Walter Pater’s aesthetics and St Augustine’s theology thrown in.

There is a painting of a two crashed cars wrapped round poles. The guide’s comment is that “alluring in its sterile beauty . . . (it) promises nothing beyond our commodified conception of the infinite: a terrible fascination glimmering with airbrushed newness”. Of an untitled painting of what looks like an Oxford don in his mortar board, by Thomas Scheibitz, we learn that “in Scheibitz’s world of synthetic replication and commodity signifiers, even people are reduced to ideologically pragmatic form”. There are 64 paintings, and 64 explications.

There is, of course, nothing new in art critics using language as nobody else would. George Orwell remarked long ago that if one critic writes about the extraordinary blackness of a painting, while another praises its exquisite whiteness, we no longer think that they contradict each other.

But no one should write sentences such as those in the Saatchi guide. With considerable effort, you can prise some sort of sense out of some of the remarks, but even that seems to have an extremely tenuous connection with the pictures. Imagine a person who came here hoping that these paintings might give him some up-to-date insight. If he read the captions, he would go home scarred for life.

In very small print at the end of the guide the “text” is attributed to Patricia Ellis, without any indication of who she is. But the gallery’s owner must surely take responsibility for these verbal monstrosities. So move your works to Chelsea, Mr Saatchi, and good luck to you. But before you go — in the words of the shocked Dudley Moore in the old Dud and Pete sketches — “Wash your mouth with soapy water!”

'Young British Artist' rakes Momart's ashes

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Monday, 17 October 2005

One of the "Sensation" generation of Young British Artists who lost paintings in last year's art warehouse fire in east London is to unveil new work modelled on those that were destroyed.

Just as Jake and Dinos Chapman, the former Turner Prize nominees, are working on recreating a new - if modified - version of their monumental sculpture Hell, Richard Patterson, 42, has returned to a giant series of paintings from the mid-90s known as Culture Stations. Four of his paintings, including three of the collage-based Culture Station works, all owned by the collector Charles Saatchi, were lost in the fire that swept through the Momart warehouse in May last year. Each painting took up to five months to complete.

"After the initial loss and getting over that, this is a good moment to think about them again, " Patterson said. "I had wanted to return to them for a while,

The new work in the series, Back at the Dealership Culture Station No. 5, will be unveiled to the public on Saturday as part of a new month-long show at the Timothy Taylor gallery in London entitled "Paintings from Dallas", referring to the city where Patterson now lives with his American wife.

And although only one Culture Station is included in the new exhibition, he said: "There will be more of them. They were quite major works that if I was to do a big museum show at some point, would represent an important part of my early career.

"Originally I wanted to literally remake some of them but then that seemed crazy. End to end, that's two whole years' work [from 1995 and 1996]."

Instead he has settled for creating new work in the same sequence and with the same title, taking similar inspiration from advertising, television and the internet.

But whereas his work of a decade ago involved painstakingly building up collage layers, with additional painting, advances in computers mean he can now work faster.

Patterson, like Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Fiona Rae, attended Goldsmiths College of Art in London and was in the enormously influential show, "Freeze", organised by Hirst.

But it was "Sensation" at the Royal Academy in 1997, that brought these artists to mainstream public attention. A selection of the work owned by Charles Saatchi, it featured many of the original "Freeze" stars.

Patterson said: "From 1993 to 1996 was a particularly exciting period in London and there was a tremendous amount of openness among artists working in London. My peer group were aware of each other but no one knew how many other people were making interesting work. You could sense it but no one had done 'Sensation' yet.

"The meaning of the work was locked up in that sense of possibility. It's hard to remember when you look back historically what the mood was like at the time, the optimism. You can see it in the music as well such as Blur - real optimism mixed up with slight cynicism. It was very knowing."

He had already moved to America when the fire broke out in the Momart warehouse, destroying hundreds of works including contemporary classics by Tracey Emin, Hirst and the Chapman brothers as well as key pieces by important older artists such as Patrick Heron.

"Now I'm really sad about it because ultimately they're just irreplaceable," said Patterson. "Artworks have an independent life and they're continually reassessed. What seemed profound and important in 1995 I might be embarrassed to see now. But maybe in five years' time they might seem good again. But they were the very best I could do at the time."

Many of the artists and owners of the destroyed works are due in court next year in a joint action against Momart. All parties are due to meet in December to decide on procedure for the claim which could cost the warehouse millions.

County Hall owners hit back at 'scurrilous' Saatchi in gallery dispute

By Cahal Milmo
Friday, 7 October 2005

Less than a fortnight after Charles Saatchi announced he was moving his London gallery because of a dispute with its "malevolent" landlord, it was claimed yesterday that he is not leaving the South Bank site after all.

Lawyers representing the family-owned Shirayama Shokusan corporation told the High Court that Mr Saatchi, 62, plans to open a museum of photography or work by new young artists at County Hall once he moves his flagship collection to Chelsea in 2007.

The claim comes after the former advertising magnate last month cemented his very public falling out with the building's landlord by alleging an "endless campaign of petty unpleasantness" by Makota Okamoto, head of Shirayama's European operation. Christopher Pymont QC, representing Mr Okamoto and Shirayama, yesterday called Mr Saatchi's remarks "scurrilous". The barrister told the High Court that despite Mr Saatchi's description of his lease as "untenable", the art collector has plans to use the gallery space as "either a low-cost museum of photography or a museum of very new young artists".

Last night representatives of Mr Saatchi refused to comment on whether he intended to continue his 30-year lease at County Hall.

Shirayama, a Japanese property investment company which bought the building opposite the Houses of Parliament for £60m in 1993, is seeking to end the lease immediately by claiming that the Saatchi Gallery repeatedly exceeded its rights in the building. This allegedly included placing art works and signs outside the space rented by the gallery and using a corridor that was not part of the lease as a cloakroom.

Shirayama is seeking to end the lease on the ground that the gallery breached a requirement to charge a minimum amount per ticket by arranging a "two for the price of one" offer with the magazineTime Out.

Relations between the two sides soured soon after the opening of the gallery in April 2003 when Mr Okamoto is claimed by Mr Saatchi to have sworn at gallery staff. The locks to a disabled lavatory that the gallery used were changed by Mr Okamoto, forcing disabled visitors to use lavatories in an adjoining hotel.

Mr Saatchi plans to move his collection to the Duke of York's Headquarters in King's Road, Chelsea.

The case continues.

Saatchi Gallery in eviction suit

From The Times

October 7, 2005

A dispute between Charles Saatchi and the landlord of the premises where he keeps his art collection moved to the High Court in London yesterday, where the Saatchi Gallery faced a barrage of claims over its occupation of the County Hall site on the South Bank of the Thames, including breach of its lease.

Since the gallery opened in April 2003, the family-owned Shirayama Shokusan corporation, owner of County Hall, has issued writs against Danovo Ltd, the gallery operator. The Japanese company wants to evict the gallery to stop it using parts of the building it says are not covered by a lease issued by Cadogan Leisure Investments.

Christopher Pymont, QC, for Shirayama and Cadogan, told the judge, Sir Donald Rattee: “Relations between the parties soon deteriorated.” Mr Saatchi made defamatory remarks to Shirayama’s European representative, Masakazu Okamoto, and his wife, Mr Pymont said. The hearing continues today.