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From: aspendex Category: Art Date: 07 October 2006 Time: 06:55 AM Review: http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/usatoday/ Poor Charles Saatchi. It must be hard being a collector today. You search high and low, west and east, uk and us, looking for the next big thing. Your last big things, new blood, which received a horrific critical reaction, and painting: triumph of, which got mediocre press, weren't big enough to qualify as even medium large. So you are left spending every weekend searching squalid little galleries for big talents. You even set up a website so that people can submit their own work, in case you and the art world has missed anything. It's very hard work being a great collector and recognising tectonic art movements, exhausting and debilitating on the eye seeing so much crap, just hoping for that stand out catchy visual surprise that might herald the next YBAS. Perhaps they were a one-off, a once in a lifetime find, the equivalent of the Impressionists or Picasso. You just can't know. USA Today looks like the highlights from some MA shows at good colleges (which is nearly exactly what it is). Even shabbily hung to add to its authentic art school look. Artists like Dana Schultz might be quite good, but the whole looks like the usual hole-hearted attempt at creating art, make some vaguely spectacular or carefully crafted, or carefully careless stuff that looks like other art, add a small twist, or a whiff of the perverse, make a bigger version, blend and churn out yet more average quite pretty large-scale pieces of nothingness. So poor Mr Saatchi has tried very hard to put this all together, and you just wish he had better material to work with. This probably is the best show of youngish Americanish artists he could find, it is just that he is scooping water out of a barrel with a hole in it.