Saatchi savages critics

Charles Saatchi says he is being cast as a pantomime villian

11 April 2012

He is famed for his fortune, his art collection and his marriage to Nigella Lawson but, perhaps most of all, Charles Saatchi is renowned for his intense secrecy.

His latest show, New Blood, sparked outrage and condemnation thanks to works such as Stella Vine's portrait of apparent overdose victim Rachel Whitear and David Falconer's stomach-turning ball of rats.

Now Saatchi has launched an astonishing and unprecedented broadside against the "mindless" critics who savaged his show. "I feel I've grown into my role as pantomime villain," he told the Standard, "but it is mindless to dismiss the art I show just because it's me that is showing it."

Speaking this weekend from his Belgravia mansion, he went on: "It is pitiful that so many critics find it easier to review me than the art."

His show at his gallery in County Hall attracted vitriolic reviews from critics who heaped derision on Saatchi himself and the exhibits, which also include Vine's portrait of a bloodied, weeping Princess Diana. So infuriated is

Saatchi that he has turned the tables to draw blood of his own. He attacks some critics as ignorant, closed to new ideas and dependent on others to guide their conclusions.

He said: "Although there are some critics out there you can learn a lot from, too many of them know remarkably little about new art, can't cope without their PC guidebook or a press release and are always, but always, 10 years late getting their heads around anything new."

Despite the venom his New Blood show attracted, Saatchi can feel vindicated that the most important art lovers of all - the paying members of the public who keep the gallery afloat - have made it his most successful exhibition to date.

In its first 21 days the show had 56,000 visitors - about 2,650 a day - who spent £476,000 on tickets alone. That total is 4,000 more than visited The Chapman Brothers' show over the same period and 5,000 more than saw the Damien Hirst retrospective.

The daily average attendance at Tate Britain is around 2,800 and at Tate Modern - Europe's most popular modern art gallery - it is around 10,000.

Saatchi takes this as evidence that whatever his critics say does not ultimately matter because the public will form its own opinion.

He said: "It's lucky for me and the artists that normal people seem to enjoy coming to see art that's new and unfamiliar - even if they wouldn't want it in their home - and are not thrown into an aesthetic flap by the idiosyncratic setting of County Hall."

Twisting the knife further, he said that it is the critics who are last to recognise artists of note.

Saatchi, who more than a decade ago first championed Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the Chapmans, added: "You can be certain that some of the artists on show will be treated by these same critics, and the art world, as great international talents in about a decade's time."

WHAT REVIEWERS SAY

Brian Sewell, Evening Standard
"A disappointing exhibition. Nothing in it is evil, nothing is worth the hullabaloo of weeping parents and imploring policemen, nothing is yobbish, nothing is challenging, nothing is cutting-edge, nothing makes one want to vomit, nothing stimulates the sexual imagination. Such whimsical drift may suggest to the hyenas that the lion has lost his teeth"

Waldemar Januszczak, The Sunday Times
"Charles Saatchi has lost it, big time. His new show is an aesthetic Titanic, a momentous capsizing of taste filled with some of the most graceless, puerile and pig-ignorant art"

Tom Lubbock, The Independent
"It's the sort of art that, if you came across it in an art school, would be puzzlingly depressing... worthless..."

Richard Dorment, The Daily Telegraph
"The Saatchi Gallery has begun to feel irrelevant. If the move to County Hall means he is losing the ability to surprise his audience and make sense of the art he collects then the shows will feel pointless"

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