[ Home | Comment | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Nned Thisom
Date: 31 Mar 2010
Time: 12:42:14 -0600
Great! Are you mad! This woman seems to display absolutely no interest in contemporary art what so ever. 'I went here, had dinner with so and so, flew to New York, danced with this person, bought some art, visited some gallerist, snogged the pope, ate a sabre toothed tiger, bought some more art, flew somewhere else, shot my daughter, went to an opening, so and so was there, blah blah blah...' At the height of Charles Saatchi's powers, when other collectors either kept quiet about their collections or indeed were few and far between, artists were keen on his patronage. Now, perhaps due to the rise of the internet, we can all see how many thousands of artists he collects, (and I believe there are many more not advertised on the site). Anita does this too. Why does this bubble brain who seems to be attempting to make the artworld version of The National Enquirer buy art? And why would one as an artist want ones work in her collection? It's not an elite bunch. To me this kind of collecting is cheapening the ups and downs that artists go through to make this stuff. It also seems very speculative and rather pathetic. I remember many years ago watching a TV show called 'Life, death and Damien Hirst' (sorry to bring Hirst as an example but I think it's relevant). On it Hirst said that Jay Jopling had asked him to make more of the ones that were cheaper to make and easier to sell. Is this the curator/gallerist becoming artist? I thought of this story recently because of the School of Saatchi TV show. I found this an amusing idea, not just because the artists were making work specifically to appeal to the taste of one person-a stranger, but because there has been a lot of speculative artwork made for the hope of Saatchi patronage over the last 2 decades anyway. Saatchi having the school programme seemed to me to be acknowledging that. In this sense I feel like he is the uber-artist, unlike Hirst or Koons he doesn't need to pay his assistants and yet they make the work they think he wants. Perhaps now they can make it for Anita too!