Newspaper Article

What Saatchi did next Art

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

2004

Overview

Most of it was of museum quality, a fact that underlined the superiority of the Saatchi holdings in American post-war art to those of the Tate (as it was still known, quaintly, in those distant days). It was also solid blue-chip stock, and was subsequently disposed of to bankroll the development of a very different collection. This was to be a speculative, venture capitalist's project, with a much greater concentration on new and unfamiliar artists. In market terms, Saatchi turned his attention from the FTSE 100 to AIM-listed stocks, unlisted stocks and start-ups. Like many another venture capitalist, he had some notable successes - he bought Hirst, he bought Emin, he bought Lucas, all at the bottom of the market - and corrected his mistakes by selling. This, broadly speaking, is the policy he has stuck with. About 100 of these recent acquisitions have been shoe-horned into a display which still contains most of the emblematic works associated with second-phase Saatchi collecting: Hirst's shark pickled in increasingly murky formaldehyde, Emin's unmade bed, Jake and Dinos Chapmans' bleeding Goya mannequins, etcetera. Those tried- and-trusted examples of winning Brit Art formulae still occupy the heart of the gallery, its rotunda. This room, which looks more and more like a contemporary art version of the London Dungeon, now also looks as though it is meant to be seen as a kind of gold standard against which to measure the plethora of new arrivals. Are they sufficiently shocking, sufficiently disgusting, sufficiently impactful, to measure up to expectations? Quite what Saatchi's new acquisitions say about The State of Art Now is moot. Cumulatively they suggest that many younger artists have realised that going all out for shock impact is a tactic cruelly subject to the law of diminishing returns - and that the effects of Saatchi's own sponsorship of what might be termed the neo- Dadaist wing of contemporary art practice, exemplified by Hirst, Lucas, and others, may finally have run its course.

• Publisher: Daily Telegraph
• Subject: Meese, Jonathan / Saatchi, Charles