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,”Continue Reading

The Times of London skips past Charles Saatchi’s art star program–School of Saatchi–and straight to his current show in St. Petersberg, Newspeak that arrives in London next Summer. Can Saatchi repeat the success of Sensation in 1997?

“He is very good at spotting new talent,” says Bridget Brown, who advises companies on investing in art. “When an interesting new artist has a show you always see him there, and he arrives early. He often picks them up when they’re with young dealers. He does sometimes miss a trick — he bought Peter Doig very late in the day — but not often. He’s an obsessive and acquisitive person; to be a collector of that status you have to be.”

Can he, though, create an art superstar single-handedly? Brown says not. “It isn’t simply a question of a collector buying low and selling high — an awful lot goes on in between, with dealers working very carefully to develop artists’ careers. Critics, museum directors and curators all play a huge part.” Hirst may have risen faster than most, but this was thanks to his business sense and genius for self-promotion rather than any Saatchi-assisted short cuts.

What Saatchi can be credited with is helping to create the whole contemporary art scene as we know it now, without which none of the YBAs would have struck it rich.Continue Reading