Saatchi, art and taste

 Model: Susie Photographer: me

My break was short. I thought I would have no time left for blogging but I managed to make some for it. I got messages from a few people saying they really liked the blog and wished me luck and hoped I'd come back soon. How could I let them down?
As I am writing this I am mulling over some ideas stimulated by a recent visit to the Saatchi Gallery. The gallery belongs to Charles Saatchi and has been around for several years now but I had never been there until I got an opportunity last Monday. I was bowled over by the location. It's in the heart of Chelsea, at the Duke of York former HQ, the rooms are really spacious and kept totally uncluttered, with only the artworks on their white walls, with natural light streaming in from the celings.
The gallery hosts exhibitions of contemporary art from the entire globe and one permanent installation by Richard Wilson, a room flooded in oil which plays havoc with your  spatial perception.
The most interesting thing about the gallery is that the art works are personally selected by Mr Saatchi, even though he does have a board of curators to advise. This is unusual.
Visiting the gallery gives you a sense of entering someone's home. As one of my companions remarked, it was like going to visit a friend who had just moved into a spacious new home and had only had the time to hang the paintings on the wall, no furniture yet.

Model: Susie. Photographer: me

Mr Saatchi has a say on who is an artist and who is not by simply choosing to exhibit someone rather than another. He looks for people who are not so well known and by virtue of being exhibited in the gallery the unknown artist becomes famous almost overnight. His/her art work can command high fees, because it has been exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery. Once the exhibition is over it will sell.  It's the kind of art work that doesn't really fit into someone's living room, unless their home is palatial. They are for corporate clients and public spaces.
 The same art work would not be regarded as excellent if it were exhibited, say,  in a church hall rather than the Saatchi Gallery. And people like Mr Saatchi. through their patronage, inevitably  have a say on what is or isn't perceived as art in the contemporary world. It's therefore very much a case of the context establishing artistic excellence and the criteria by which an art work is evaluated. Somehow those criteria remain aleatory and are constantly constituted and reconstituted, reformed by contextual factors, among which are socio-economic structures.

 A few days ago some Facebook friends  resurrected and circulated an old story about a busking violinist in a New York subway, whom no one seemed to be paying attention to. It turned out that he was a very famous virtuoso  musician, playing a complex piece by Bach on a violin worth thousands of dollars. A few days before busking he had played in a famous theatre, absolutely packed, in a concert for which the audience had paid at least a hundred dollars per seat. My FB friends bemoaned the insensitivity of the passers by, unable to recognise 'beauty'. I am not at all surprised by their behaviour. There were no pointers that the music the man was playing was high art. There were no frames of reference. Crass though this may sound, for many people the artistic yardstic is monetary - if it is worth a lot of money it must be art. But if that is the case it is because of the socio-economic context in which art is produced and reproduced.We live in a capitalist society.
Therefore I find the endless debates on what is or is not art and statements such "I only do it for the art" somewhat bemusing. Sure, let's talk about Beauty and Art and Passion.  It is not until the Saatchis of this world choose to include your work in their collections - and sell it - that your work can be called art. No matter how talented you may be.