The beholder
Jul 28th 2007
From Economist.com
Beauty is in the eye of Charles Saatchi
THE art-buying frenzy subsides in the month of August, when most buyers are tucked away on some far island. Who would interrupt a holiday for a sale? The respite, however, allows the other players in the art market—the scholars, critics, collectors, dealers and gallerists—to take stock before re-entering the fray in September. These are the people, after all, who give art its perceived value, cultural, aesthetic and monetary.
Charles Saatchi plays a bigger part in this process than most. He is not only Britain’s most prominent collector of contemporary art, but also, possibly, the world’s. His boldness in plucking artists from obscurity and his zealous showmanship on their behalf has given him a decisive impact on their reputation. Although he buys art both at auction and from dealers, such as Larry Gagosian, his status as a quixotic kingmaker rests upon his ability to identify talent in students newly hatched into the art world. Far from having reached the secondary market, they have not yet made it into the first.
Notoriously elusive, so shy that he rarely appears at his own openings (or at least that’s the reason he gives) , Mr Saatchi has never been afraid to court controversy. Some high-minded critics accuse him of vulgarity and of ruthlessly promoting his own artists for personal financial gain; others in the arts establishment hold him responsible for a spate of art that values shock above all else.
What is beyond question is that he has shaken up the contemporary art world. His collaboration with the young British artists, or YBAs, whom he discovered in the early 1990s—including Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin—invigorated critical debate and helped secure London’s place beside New York as a leader in the global art market.
From the start, Mr Saatchi was as keen to display his art publicly as he was to collect it. In 1985 he opened the Boundary Road Gallery, in London’s St John’s Wood, with its high white walls and open spaces. The “Sensation” show of YBAs at the Royal Academy in 1997 lived up to its name. With “Neurotic Realism” in 1998, “Ant Noises” in 2000 and then, after moving his gallery to County Hall, “New Blood” in 2004, he kept the world apprised of to his evolving taste in conceptual art. In 2005 he pronounced a new shift with “The Triumph of Painting”. This, together with highly publicised sales of some of the YBAs, has ensured that Mr Saatchi has never become stale news.
The Saatchi Gallery “A Big Family”, 1995, Zhang Xiaogang
Now he is entering yet another new phase. Since a turbulent exit from County Hall (there was a tiff with the landlords in 2005), the Saatchi Gallery has been in limbo, waiting for its new home at the Duke of York’s headquarters in Chelsea to open in January 2008. Never one to be idle, Mr Saatchi took advantage of a seemingly unenviable position to place himself at the vanguard once again. In 2006 he launched a website for his gallery that has since become, with more than 40m hits a day, one of the most successful of its kind. In defiance of the art industry’s love of secrecy, he has created an encyclopaedic source of information and contacts, and established a virtual open-house called “STUART”, where young artists can display their work.
His latest coup, announced on July 16th, is a partnership with Phillips de Pury & Company, an auction house that concentrates on the contemporary market. Why make such an alliance? “To enable free entry”, Mr Saatchi says. In essence, Phillips will pay the entrance fees to the Saatchi Gallery, enabling it to become the first truly free big contemporary-art gallery. The commitment for the next few years is to show “very new art by very new artists”—its first show will be “New Art from China” (a featured work is shown above). For Mr Saatchi, this is an extension of his commitment to display work publicly: “Artists like their work to be seen and discussed by as wide a public as possible.”
Phillips, in turn, gets to reach out to new buyers and sellers, by being prominently featured on the Saatchi website. Simon de Pury, Phillips’s director, explains: “The market has totally changed over the last five years. You have collectors all over the world. But also, the market has become so much more transparent. Increased access, increased knowledge can only have beneficial consequences.” As ever, Mr Saatchi’s genius lies as much in the presentation as in the content.
fonte:
http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/artview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9567058
