Art Market Monitor

What can you do when you’re a magazine writer and trying to write a story about one of the world’s most famous–and elusive–art collectors? If you’re Forbes magazine, you take quotes from Charles Saatchi’s recently published book and juxtapose them against a little reporting. The result turns out to be not half bad:

A collector by nature, he favored Superman comics as a child, then nudist magazines (he is said to wander naked around the $12 million Belgravia mansion where he lives with third wife, British cooking doyenne Nigella Lawson) and, later, jukeboxes. His first wife, Doris Lockhart, an American-born art writer, encouraged him to focus on art. [...]

In 1985 Saatchi opened his first public venue, in a spare, white gallery in the leafy London neighborhood of St. John’s Wood, which quickly became a destination for art lovers. Saatchi’s chief contribution: displaying a long list of pop artists and minimalists who had yet to get much of an audience in the U.K. [...] “He likes digestible ideas, in the form of art that can appeal to a mass audience–just like advertising,” observes Manhattan dealer Robert Goff, who has sold Saatchi the work of Iraqi-born artist Ahmed Alsoudani, 35. “Because he’s private, he can move quickly, he can take risks, he doesn’t care what the back draft is,” adds Goff. [...]

“The whole Saatchi thing has deteriorated,” laments one longtime Manhattan dealer, who declines to be named because he does business with Saatchi. “He was, in his day, the leading collector of contemporary art, without any comparison. He was so sharp with his curatorial edge.” By contrast the current show, says this dealer, has “a lot of second-rate work. It’s a shadow of what the Saatchi collection once was.”

Of course, Saatchi had an answer for scolding pundits: “I certainly was more dynamic once, building my advertising business and my art collection with ferocious energy. Now that I have fizzled out, I still enjoy putting on art that I like and introducing new artists to our visitors, so I hope it makes it worthwhile to plod on.”

The Art of Being Charles Saatchi (Forbes)

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