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Saatchi: the last word Numerous recent addictions lie in wait for the unsuspecting. The first, most ubiquitous, most irresistible and incurable is greed. One needs only half-opened eyes to see clearly greed's epidemic dominion in all allegedly civilised and prosperous countries. Western populations over-consume to a visibly disgusting degree and find collective solace in pointless shopping and spending, equipping and stuffing themselves to an unsustainable and unnecessary surfeit. In this decadent age of unrestrained self-gratification where lack of consideration for others and loss of self-control are accepted as rights, we live to spend and for solace most of us eat trash non-stop. This insanity has advanced to a point now reversible only by major social and economic collapse. Inside as little as a generation, the gluttonous satisfaction of addictions, whether physical or psychological, have become both our natural condition and aspiration. So normal are these vices that no one any longer even bothers to identify them as the serious problems they have become. And greed comes in many more wrappings than gluttony and material acquisitiveness. One way or another few are immune. Vanity and conceit, hunger for the attention of others, aggressiveness of self-promotion, these too are species of greed. In art the condition manifests itself uniquely in the hyperactive yearning among its more egregious personnel for constant visibility. Such people ardently believe in visibility for its own sake without apparently realising that the desire to be noticed and talked about is as psychologically damaging as overeating is physically poisoning. In artists its presence is most often characterised by an inverse relationship between the craving for endorsement and the meagreness of the talent underpinning their pitch for notoriety. Like other addictive illnesses, self-importance requires constant fixes and is a pig of an sickness to kick. I know because I once briefly suffered from it myself. For sufferers invisibility becomes the most dreaded of enemies. No one wants to be a nobody but what the former addict of visibility can't comprehend is that invisibility need not mean a reduction in status as an artist. The 1990s marked the apotheosis of this species of greed for attention. It was the decade which launched a new breed of celebrity comprising those who were famous because they said so. A similar desire found a willing billet in the colonies of fashionable art where fame became confused with accomplishment and where charisma supplanted ability. Many seemed to forget that in art only the object counts, the rest is casuistry whilst fame for its own sake is a fire of straw. The fatal mistake of art in the 1990s was, to paraphrase the mountain-climbing Reverend, to judge art by the colour of its skin not the content of its character. SaatchiWorld is the mausoleum of the 1990's greed phenomenon. It is a monument to the moment when razzmatazz and relentless promotion finally bored us to death. Have we not been here dozens of times before discussing the pros and cons of this narcissistic dealer's purchases, his influence, his eye, his guileful loans, his buying in bulk and his trading in, his clear-outs, stock sales, nifty manipulations and fancy footwork? Well he's pushed his luck too far with this one. Like all those approaching the end, he clings to past glories and work he attempts to pass off as fleet of foot is deader than a kipper. It was Charles Saatchi, encouraged and abetted by fellow riders with the State Art caravan, who crowned superficiality king. Every piece of evidence indicates that he did this not because he enjoys art - demonstrably he doesn't have the humility required for that - but because he is consumed by self-esteem. Each new opening and each new purchase or sale always results in discussion of him: he, not art, is the subject of his machinations. His genius, if he had one, was to realise that in the absence of criteria for judging new art, any old nauseating effluvium could be pushed to prominence by marketing. Unfortunately for him it isn't a stunt which in art can be repeatedly worked. Fashion is ephemeral and the law of diminishing returns quickly comes into play. Neurotic Realism (remember that rubbish?) and the landscape school having failed dismally to attract attention, Saatchi is now reduced to feeding his ego by re-warming yesterday's veg; namely, those publicity campaigns of the 1990s which so successfully sucked the press into the art equation and launched art from the review section to the front page. He has opened his museum of Yesterday's Men accompanied, naturally, by a deft media campaign. Hacks and 'independent' critics, some of whom are so independent they've been on his payroll, have been allowed into the presence and given guided tours of his new premises on the understanding that they won't quote him. This process, relying on the sycophancy of those vouchsafed an audience, has been perfectly judged. The press has been drip-fed to sating with more 'exclusives' than Harrods. Curiously, art critics have avoided any actual art criticism, sticking instead resolutely to the issues of Saatchidom, Saatchiness and Saatchification to the point of saturation. The art has been little more than listed, at best tangentially discussed, because in truth there is nothing more to say about Damien's spots or Tracey's VD. But the building, the hang, the 'death-of-white' wood-panelled rooms, what was worn by whom, the queues, the vox pops, the strippers, the curator's connections, the ticket offers, who's been invited and who hasn't, the man behind the mask, the phoney war with Serotaland, the calculated enigmas, the sell-offs from the second eleven, the reputations trampled, the double bluffs, the overwhelming exceeding of expectations etc. etc., these have all been rehearsed for the umpteenth time. Cuttings files are full of the same campaign strategy which ends with Saatchi's name in neon and the supporting cast cited somewhere illegibly in the footnotes. Saatchi has succeeded in maintaining and even enhancing the mythology of himself as the wily Solon of the cutting edge against the available contrary weight of evidence, all of which suggests that he has nothing interesting to say. Surely only the certifiably braindead now believe that Saatchi is anything other than self-interested. Being an adman, that is a purveyor of polished lies, he has a natural flair for such image building. His greatest moment in advertising, the work he and those around him are most proud of, is his 'Labour Isn't Working' campaign of 1979. This showed a snaking dole queue, the message being that if you voted Labour unemployment awaited, so you'd be better off voting Tory. When the ad came out unemployment under Jim Callaghan was 850,000. Within two years of Thatcher taking office, even the fiddled figures had surged to two million and were soaring like a Sam 7 towards three. Saatchi's great achievement as an adman was a barefaced lie: in essence all advertisements are lies but 'Labour Isn't Working' was prima inter pares. Then there is the famous recluse who doesn't attend his own openings, protesting his shyness of publicity (like Tracey Emin does), but who sends along his celebrity squeeze to hold the fort and grin at the cameras and tell anyone who'll listen where Charles is. The same famous recluse is known not to give interviews, but has actually now taped more conversations than Lucian Freud, the other famous recluse who never opens his mouth except every five minutes. Saatchi insults our intelligence by expecting us to believe his rot. In order to be so relentlessly in the public eye he has to be courting publicity but, as with so many other sufferers from chronic addictions, he pretends otherwise. Temporarily off the scene last year following the closure of his gallery in St John's Wood, he couldn't take the cold turkey. He couldn't stand the declining dividends to his self-esteem so he invented a canard about Marc Quinn's bloodhead melting in the Domestic Goddess's freezer? Well you read it here first that that was a shameless publicity-seeking scam. It was an obvious falsehood fed to gullible newspapers who chewed it over for what seemed like weeks. He might so easily have ended speculation with a conclusive statement, but he didn't. Guess why. Every step of Saatchi's allegedly secretive gallery and studio visits have found their way into the papers and with each column-inch the ego-shine is buffed afresh. He is, when all's said and done, The Chief Puppeteer, and lazy papers are willing to play ball with daily bulletins of his self-aggrandising activities. Not surprisingly, many artists represented in his collection, being intimates of his modus operandi, can't stand him. They've met him and know him for what he is, someone with only self-interest at heart. A couple of them, those clever devils the Chapman Brothers, exquisitely exploit his vaingloriousness. Nevertheless, all his marionettes are willing to hold their tongues and surrender their identity because he buys in industrial quantities what hardly anyone else wants. In the end his artists are willing pawns who need him far more than he needs them because there are plenty more where they came from but, crucially, only one of him: needless to say, those who haven't made it are desperate to catch his eye. If you were to scrape away the vulgar gloss of presentation deposited by Charles Saatchi on whatever art has had the misfortune to be touched by him, what would remain? The answer is almost nothing. Apart from assisting in the poisoning of art education by encouraging only the slick and catchpenny, his influence has contributed to art and its appreciation nothing worthy of a repeat visit. Hardly anything in his entire collection need be seen more than once. Even Damien Hirst, Saatchi's in-house court-jesting cock flasher and nosepicker, says as much. It's pointless and a waste of time because we've seen it all before too many times, he announced angrily in a recent interview. Was he prepared to play the game with SaatchiWorld? Not bloody likely. He was variously reported as 'working in South Africa' and 'on holiday in Mexico'. Hirst is right, we have indeed seen it all before and art made for shock won't shock twice. I have no intention of ever going to Saatchi's circus for that very reason: I've seen before almost all that is on display. Most of it fell flat first time around whilst some of it engaged but not enough to require repeated viewing. Saatchi is an adman through and through, his feeble expectations of art unfailingly directing him to what is threadbare by the second glance. Life is too short, and national galleries and museums too full of discoverable new treasures, to spend time re-visiting Saatchi's dealer stock. More than ever before it is now obvious that Saatchi's purpose is only the servicing of his own squalid addiction to publicity, an addiction now so tedious that it sullies irreparably even the small quantity of worthwhile work he deals in. As a self-serving egoist he doesn't deserve our attention and his existence will henceforth never be acknowledged in The Jackdaw. There is a good use for Saatchi. He is an Iraqi, so as penance for boring us for so long he should join the 16,000 other Iraqi exiles currently in Britain and return home to Baghdad to assist in his tragic country's reconstruction. He might take with him his friend and studio-visiting accomplice, Leonardo 'expert' Alan Yentob, another Iraqi, who coincidentally commissioned a long BBC documentary on the subject of ... his friend. Small world eh? David Lee |  | ||||||
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