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RA falls for the same con twice Commerce corrupts. Association with business always results in tainting from which the precious and fragile never fully recover. In this decadent age in which no criteria are accepted for gauging quality in art, and in which, therefore, the richest people and institutions will first define taste then impose it on the rest of us, art is especially vulnerable. The damage business does to art is in proportion to the vulgarity and dodgy motives of those dispensing the coin. Some artists are willing players in this dirty game because, unfortunately, the vanity and opulence of big collectors is exceeded only by the venality and self-importance of the artists they buy. Recently two of the more serious newspapers each ran the same two visual arts stories on the same page. Neither paper appeared to realise the ironical link connecting their stories. The main item in both papers concerned the decision taken by the Royal Academy as recently as April to stage an exhibition called 'USA Today' comprising a hundred recent paintings by forty fledgling American artists. What makes this newsworthy is that all the works are from the capacious stockroom of 62-year-old art dealer Charles Saatchi. They will be hung in the old Museum of Mankind, at the less salubrious rear of Burlington House, which the RA has owned for a couple of years. There were also rumours circulating of a second 'blockbuster' show of the same dealer's stock planned for 2007. This was to be on such a stupendous scale that it would have filled both the main showpiece galleries as well as the aforementioned tradesmen's quarters. However, I'm informed that the nuncio who came armed with this pushy proposal to the Academy's exhibitions' committee - none other than Saatchi's runner, Norman Rosenthal, who conveniently doubles as the Academy's exhibitions' clerk - was told to take it back to his master and tell him, in the politest possible terms, to shove it. We've been here before. The same advanced media fuss is being engineered over USA Today as happened the last time the same dealer was allowed to promote his wares in the capital's grandest galleries, that is with the 1997 exhibition called Sensation. Some RAs are in favour of this booster dose from the Saatchi's busy entrepôt and others are not; in short, here is the recipe for prolonged publicity of the sort on which the dealer thrives. The most vociferous protagonists on each side appear to be the same as those who performed the same function in the run-up to the 1997 show. This manner of fuss works to no one's advantage except Saatchi's. Between now and the opening of USA Today in October, we can expect the rumpus to be spun fortnightly into life with ingeniously leaked revelations about the moral or pornographic obscenity of this or that work to be included. Rising predictably to the bait, the tabloids' High Dudgeon Factory will be on war footing, especially during the summer silly season of slow news. The likes of Mrs Margie Doonham of Nottingham will be fetched out of their Barratts' boxes to pronounce on the wicked depravity of showing the Virgin Mary's privates, or whatever, in public. Mullahs will rant about the ungodly West deserving its inevitable imminent annihilation, whilst bishops, cardinals and rabbis will as usual mince about on the fence playing pat-a-cake. Over-rehearsed cultural commentators - including some who've been on the Saatchi payroll - will jockey to pass comment (for a hundred quid plus return cab) on orange television banquettes and in underground radio bunkers. Mr Charles Moore will play Solomon in The Spectator and Sir Simon Jenkins will pen 900 words of manufactured contrariness for whichever paper phones him first. Professor Lisa Jardine will make a badly argued case for favourably comparing (her friend) Saatchi to, among others, Pericles, the Medicis and Frederick William the Great Elector. “Fleet Street's toughest interviewer”, Lynn Barber, will profile Saatchi in The Observer and declare herself convinced that, despite eating his wife's cormorant terrine with mouth wide open and boorishly lighting his farts after the coffee, he is a universal genius on a par with Julius Caesar. If this isn't sufficient, coverage with then gather further momentum in the countdown to the opening. Dressed in his Uncle Sam bondage outfit, Rosenthal will act as barker on Piccadilly and Sam Taylor-Wood will give interviews to anyone who'll listen proclaiming that it was young American artists and cancer (but mainly cancer) which made her the shallow twerp she is. Tracey Emin will keep the wheel spinning with the shock disclosure that she performed fellatio on Peter Blake in her tent during the private view of Sensation. By this time, the exhibition's organisers will hope the public is queueing past Slough - although I have a strong suspicion that beyond a few suggestible and unlettered art students the public won't give tuppence for young American art. Virtually all the critics - the exceptions will be the familiar Corkballs' dupes who think everything's brilliant - will say the work is vacuous rubbish undeserving of its prominence, opinions which won't matter because no one will read them. Whatever the critical response and box office turn out to be, the show's apologists will resolutely tow the State Art party line. They will point to the overwhelming nationwide popularity of 'Challenging Contemporary Art', with encouraging signs of curiosity even among the Somalian troglodytes beloved of Culture Ministers. They always say this - they have to because the politics of art are the same as the politics of everything else: those in charge repeat self-justifying lies ad nauseam until their index-linked pensions mature, at which moment they retire to the Vaucluse, don battered hats and purple and draw trees badly. Saatchi is practiced at this modus operandi. His shows are always infamous even before they've opened. He is after all only a hobbyist art dealer. The rest of his working day is spent as an advertising executive; that is, as a professional purveyor of falsehoods who understands intimately that the importance of any commodity - but especially art - is the perception of it and the anticipation and promise associated with it. He knows it is never substance that sells. Saatchi's legacy is, thus, that feeling of disappointment felt by us all when the reality of new art fails so miserably to live up to its billing. In microcosm this is the story of capitalism. Saatchi sells his art to us as so many Aston Martins, but we recognise them on sight as only mopeds. At the moment the rumpus over 'USA Today' is still in the familiar incipient phase, during which squares of RAs are drawn up against one another in battle formation, scrapping, they seem to think, for the soul of their 238-year-old institution. It is a pointless fight because in truth the Academy has neither soul nor integrity left to preserve: it sacrificed both the moment it began betraying its charter's reference to “artists of distinguished merit” by following mindless fashion and enlisting as members those of no discernible ability. For example, the fact that Gary Hume can't paint for toffee didn't stop them making him an Academician, a disgrace they then compounded by appointing him Professor of Painting. What on earth could this oaf possibly profess? I suppose we'll have to wait for his 'Discourses on Art' to discover the answer to that one. Hume's professorship is symptomatic of the fact that as an art school the Academy has inexcusably descended to the same travesty of academicism as operates in every art school in the country. By the time you read this a few RAs will be threatening to resign. Eventually, one or more will. Then, when the dust settles, the same few will regret their hastiness, realise which side their bread's buttered and crawl back chastened having realised it didn't matter anyway. The second story featured downpage in both papers concerned the sale by Christie's in New York of a pickled sheep by Damien Hirst for what is an artist's auction record price of £1.8 million. At first I was under the misapprehension that this was the lamb pickled for an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1994 and sold to Saatchi for what The Sun then claimed - with undoubted exaggeration - was £250,000: the real price was probably nearer £100,000. This was the stuffed fleece famously vandalised with Quink and then restored. The piece subsequently featured in the Sensation exhibitions in London, New York and Berlin before finding its place in the vestibule of Saatchi's townhouse where it was, apparently, after the chatelaine's embonpoint, the first thing noticed on arrival. Saatchi sold it in 2004 reputedly for £2.1 million, a meagre profit by his standards: 800% in ten years can't compare to the 14,000% in 14 years (£50,000 to £7 million) which he realised on the same artist's shark, another work included in the Royal Academy spectacular of 1997. The sheep was an important work for Hirst because it was for this piece that he was nominated the following year for the Turner Prize, which on this occasion he won. Damien never misses an opportunity to capitalise on the popularity of his principal lines of merchandise so the sheep sold recently was not the one mentioned above but another one which was cut in half to show its innards and which he made in 1995 for his victorious Turner Prize display. He sold that one to an Italian ship owner in 1996 for, allegedly, £40,000. Before we move along, it's worth noting in passing - because it demonstrates Saatchi's commercial and financial imperatives - that in the same sale as the second sheep fetched £1.8 million, a work by Marlene Dumas bought three years ago by Saatchi for £190,000 and shown in his 'Triumph of Painting' extravaganza was sold for £641,000. In the same week the same dealer sold a painting by German Dirk Skreber for £268,000, at least twice what he'd paid for it; a painting by Peter Doig which had cost £12,000 for £530,000; and a Cecily Brown bought for £10,000 in 1998 for £518,000. There is nothing to stop the Royal Academy showing Saatchi's extensive stock but there is equally no apparent reason why they need to do it. Saatchi will, after all, be opening his own huge gallery in Chelsea next year and might just as easily show USA Today there. It's not as though recent American painting is thought to be of such trailblazing originality. The RA has interesting form in this department. The last time the Academy suffered a fit of the transatlantic vapours they tried to convince us that there was a 'New Spirit' in young American painting as represented by Julian Schnabel and David Salle, both of them now embarrassing has-beens. These days Schnabel is box office poison, a bloated, tragi-comic monument to the power of marketing over staying power. Needless to say, Saatchi backed both Schnabel and Salle in a big way, once owning 27 Schnabels. He controversially loaned nine of these to a 1982 exhibition of eleven Schnabels in total at the Tate before, predictably, unloading the lot at a profit. No, the only plausible justification for the Academy showing Saatchi's stock is that they are flat broke and Saatchi is paying for this unrepeatable advertising opportunity. And if he isn't paying he should be because the Academy is doing him a favour by showing the work of artists few have heard of. Any other dealer exploiting the Academy's galleries to inflate the value of their stock would be expected to divvy up, although I suspect that other dealers would be told that the Academy is above such squalid associations with trade. Saatchi, it seems, is beyond this reproach because there are still among the Academy's gerontocracy those advertisements for euthanasia who still believe he's an important collector, not a dealer. The Sleep of Reason comes to mind. Nothing in the way Saatchi operates suggests he has either a discriminating eye or a choice collection: he is an art trader who buys and sells in bulk, mostly at a profit. All of Saatchi's reported transactions suggest he has the same love for art that a commodity broker has for the ore and sugar he ships unseen by the tanker load. In easily the longest of his published interviews to date, that over three pages in The Art Newspaper 18 months ago, Saatchi spoke only about buying and selling as though it were all a tactical game. He didn't describe with feeling a single work which had touched him to the core in some way. Make no mistake, Saatchi should be paying heavily for this privilege of validating his currently low-priced stock with the Royal Academy imprimatur because his strategy is obvious. As soon as the doors are closed on USA Today he'll be profit-taking. He did it the last time with Sensation. At least 99 of the 110 works in that exhibition have been sold, a figure which includes all the works of 38 of the featured 43 artists. Some valueless scraps were admittedly given away in very public gestures of munificence to penniless regional galleries who are in no position to refuse crumbs from Saatchi's table. The Sensation rump who remain in the stockroom are Peter Davies, Tracey Emin, Mat Collishaw, Jenny Saville and Martin Maloney - I would wager good money that Maloney's puerile daubs are there only because they can't even be given away. Notwithstanding the opportunistic methods of the show's marketing, there were convincing arguments for mounting the Sensation exhibition in 1997 which don't apply in the case of USA Today. The work was by a new generation of British artists who were being heavily sold to us as a critical mass moving art in a new direction whilst simultaneously taking the international art community by storm. Both claims, it turned out (like those made previously for Schnabel and co.), were necessary exaggerations. Although most of the work in Sensation had been seen at least once before, the exhibition was, nevertheless, an opportunity to evaluate all this alleged cutting-edge innovativeness together in one place. One would like to believe that the Royal Academy is capable of redressing the imbalance next year by curating a show of paintings by 40 young British painters - and in the process not just opt for the lazy expedient of borrowing a job lot from one dealer. Why can't I see this happening? The answer is that State Art, of which the Academy's exhibitions' clerk is a senior apostle, are obsessed with what happens abroad. I was recently chastised by one of the mid-ranking priestesses of State Art for not having heard of an artist whose only exhibition so far had been in Basel. She considered it inconceivable that I hadn't seen it? “You must have seen it. Everybody saw it.” It had apparently been the talk of the State Art bush telegraph, a service to which unfortunately The Jackdaw does not subscribe. Additionally, I was found to be even further at fault. How could I claim to be informed if I hadn't seen 'History: Zeitgeist: Relativity - The Confederacy of Gender Displacement', or whatever it was, at the Bregenz Kunsthaus? Believe me, these State Art twitchers have serious addictions. They now spend more time on the Ryanair website than anywhere else - and their peregrinations filter through into the selection processes. Like many, I receive information about forthcoming exhibitions at Arts Council galleries around the country. Daily I read of thematic shows with pretentious titles featuring long lists of foreign contributors, obviously identified during the curators' weekly sojourns to the backwoods of Europe. Surely these obsessives could find equal numbers of British mediocrities to feature in their unvisited exhibitions. This isn't, by the way, a plea for insularity, but State Art is too unhealthily obsessed with using taxpayers' cash to promote the work of foreigners. However temptingly profitable and convenient it may be for the Academy to take another consignment from one dealer, the artistic and moral justifications for showing the stock of someone who is a proven speculator in the momentarily fashionable are non-existent. The art Saatchi buys and sells is tarnished by its association with him, and so too will be the Academy. | |||||
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