Saatchi Gallery
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/Chelseabarracks-1-.jpg/300px-Chelseabarracks-1-.jpg)
The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art, opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985 in order to show his sizeable (and changing) collection to the public. It has occupied different premises, first in North London, then the South Bank by the River Thames and currently in Chelsea. Saatchi's collection, and hence the gallery's shows, have had distinct phases, starting with US artists and minimalism, moving on to the Damien Hirst-led Young British Artists, followed by shows purely of painting and then exhibiting again contemporary art from America in USA Today at the Royal Academy in London. In 2008, an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art formed the the inaugural exhibition in the new venue for the gallery at the Duke of York's HQ.
The gallery has been a major influence on art in Britain since its opening. It has also had a history of media controversy, which it has courted, and has had extremes of critical reaction. Many artists shown at the gallery are unknown not only to the general public but also to the commercial art world: showing at the gallery has provided a springboard to launch careers.[citation needed]
History
Boundary Road
Opening and U.S. art
The Saatchi Gallery opened in 1985 in Boundary Road, St John's Wood, London in a disused paint factory of 30,000 sq ft (2787.0912 m2). The first exhibition held March – October 1985 featured many works by American minimalist Donald Judd, American abstract painters Brice Marden and Cy Twombly and American pop artist Andy Warhol. This was the first UK exhibition for Twombly and Marden.
These were followed December 1985 – July 1986 by an exhibition of works by American sculptor John Chamberlain, American minimalists Dan Flavin, Sol Lewitt, Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, and Carl Andre. September 1986 – July 1987 the Saatchi Gallery showed German artist Anselm Kiefer and American minimalist sculptor Richard Serra. The exhibited Richard Serra sculptures were so large that that the caretaker’s flat adjoining the gallery and one wall of the gallery was demolished in order to make room for the installation.
September 1987 – January 1988, the Saatchi Gallery mounted two exhibitions entitled New York Art Now, featuring Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Peter Halley, Haim Steinbach, Philip Taaffe and Caroll Dunham. This exhibition introduced these artists to the UK for the first time. The blend of minimalism and pop art influenced many of the young artists would later form the Young British Artists (YBA) group[citation needed].
April – October 1988, the Saatchi Gallery exhibited works by American figurative painter Leon Golub, German painter and photographer Sigmar Polke, and American Abstract Expressionist painter Philip Guston. November 1988 – April 1989 it held a group show featuring several contemporary American artists, most prominently Eric Fischl. April – October 1989, the gallery hosted exhibitions of American minimalist Robert Mangold and American conceptual artist Bruce Nauman. November 1989 – February 1990, there were a series of exhibitions featuring School of London artists including Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Howard Hodgkin.
January – July 1991, the gallery held exhibitions of the work of American pop artist Richard Artschwager, American photographer Cindy Sherman, and British installation artist Richard Wilson. Wilson’s piece 20:50, a room entirely filled with oil, became a permanent installation at the Saatchi Gallery’s Boundary Road venue. September 1991 – February 1992 there was a group show, including American photographer Andreas Serrano.
Young British Artists
In an abrupt move, Saatchi sold much of his collection of US art, and invested in a new generation of British artists, exhibiting them in shows with his own title Young British Artists (YBAs). The core of the artists had been brought together by Damien Hirst in 1988 in a seminal show called Freeze. Saatchi augmented this with his own choice of purchases from art colleges and "alternative" artist-run spaces in London. His first showing of the YBAs was in 1992, where the star exhibit was a vitrine by Hirst containing a shark in formaldehyde and entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. This was funded by Saatchi. It has become the iconic work of British art in the 1990s,[1] and the symbol of Britart worldwide.[2]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/38/Hirst-Shark.jpg/220px-Hirst-Shark.jpg)
More recently Saatchi has said of Freeze, "It’s not that Freeze, the 1988 exhibition that Damien Hirst organised with this fellow Goldsmiths College students, was particularly good. Much of the art was fairly so-so and Hirst himself hadn’t made anything much just a cluster of small colourful cardboard boxes placed high on a wall. What really stood out was the hopeful swagger of it all."
Saatchi's promotion of these artists dominated UK art throughout the nineties and brought them to worldwide notice. Among the artists in the series of shows were Jenny Saville, Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Rachel Whiteread. (Tracey Emin was initially hostile to Saatchi and was only finally included in the 1997 Sensation show.)
Sensation opened in September 1997 at the Royal Academy in London to much controversy and showed 110 works by 42 artists from the Saatchi collection. In 1999 Sensation toured to The National Galerie at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in the autumn, and then to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, creating unprecedented political and media controversy and becoming a touchstone for debate about the "morality" of contemporary art.[citation needed]
Neurotic Realism and philanthropy
Meanwhile other shows with different themes were held in the gallery itself. In 1998 Saatchi launched a two part exhibition entitled Neurotic Realism, though widely attacked by critics the exhibition included many artists who were later recognised as international stars including; Cecily Brown, Ron Mueck, Noble and Webster, Dexter Dalwood, Martin Maloney, Chantal Joffe, Michael Raedecker and David Thorpe. In 2000 Ant Noises (an anagram of "sensation"), also in two parts, tried surer ground with work by Hirst, Lucas, Saville, Whiteread, the Chapmans, Turk, Emin and Chris Ofili.
During this period, The Saatchi Gallery made several large philanthropic donations including 100 artworks in 1999 to the Arts Council of Great Britain Collection, which operates a "lending library" to museums and galleries around Britain, with the aim of increasing awareness and promoting interest in younger artists; 40 works by young British artists through the National Arts Collection Fund, now known as The Art Fund, to eight museum collections across Britain in 2000; and 50 artworks to the Paintings in Hospitals programme which provides a lending library of over 3000 original works of art to NHS hospitals, hospices and health centres throughout England, Wales and Ireland in 2002.
County Hall
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Saatchi_Gallery.jpg/220px-Saatchi_Gallery.jpg)
In April 2003, the gallery moved to County Hall, the Greater London Council's former headquarters on the South Bank, occupying 40,000 ft² (3,700 m²) of the ground floor. There were 1,000 guests at the launch, which included a "nude happening" of 200 naked people staged by artist Spencer Tunick.
The opening exhibition included a retrospective by Damien Hirst, as well as work by other YBAs, such as Jake and Dinos Chapman and Tracey Emin alongside some longer established artists including John Bratby, Paula Rego and Patrick Caulfield.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/07/Damien-Hirst-1_%282007%29.jpg/170px-Damien-Hirst-1_%282007%29.jpg)
Hirst disassociated himself from the retrospective to the extent of not including it in his CV.[3] He was angry that a Mini car that he had decorated for charity with his trademark spots was being exhibited as a serious artwork.[3] The show also scuppered a prospective Hirst retrospective at Tate Modern.[3] He said Saatchi was "childish"[4] and "I'm not Charles Saatchi's barrel-organ monkey ... He only recognises art with his wallet ... he believes he can affect art values with buying power, and he still believes he can do it." (In July 2004, Hirst said, "I respect Charles. There's not really a feud. If I see him, we speak, but we were never really drinking buddies.")[4]
On 24 May, 2004, a fire in the Momart storage warehouse destroyed many works from the collection, including the Tracey Emin work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95 ("the tent"), and Jake and Dinos Chapman's tableau Hell. A gallery spokesman said that Saatchi was distraught at the loss: "It is terrible. A significant part of the work in his collection has been affected." One art insurance specialist valued the lost work at £50m.[5]
In 2004, Saatchi's recent acquisitions (including Stella Vine) were featured in New Blood, a show of mostly then-little-known artists working in a variety of media. It received a hostile critical reception, which caused Saatchi to speak out angrily against the critics.[6]
Saatchi, said that most YBAs would proved "nothing but footnotes" in history, and sold works from his YBA collection, beginning in December 2004 with Hirst's iconic shark for nearly £7 million[7] (he had bought it for £50,000 in 1991), followed by at least twelve other works by Hirst.[8] Four works by Ron Mueck, including key works Pinocchio and Dead Dad, went for an estimated £2.5 million.[7] Mark Quinn's Self, bought in 1991 for a reported £13,000, sold for £1.5 million.[8] Saatchi also sold all but one work by Sam Taylor-Wood (he showed five in the Sensation show).[9] The sale was compared to his sale in the 1980s of most of his postwar American art collection.[8] David Lee said: "Charles Saatchi has all the hallmarks of being a dealer, not a collector. He first talks up the works and then sells them."[7]
In 2005, Saatchi showed a major change of direction with the announcement of a year-long, three-part series (subsequently extended to two years and seven-part), The Triumph of Painting. The opening exhibition focused on a number of already established European painters, including Marlene Dumas, Martin Kippenberger, Luc Tuymans and Peter Doig, who had not previously received such significant exposure in the UK. Shows in the series were scheduled to introduce Britain to young painters from America like Dana Schutz and Germans such as Matthias Weischer, as well as Saatchi's choice of up and coming British talent.
The gallery received 800,000 visitors a year. In 2006, 1,350 schools organised group visits to the gallery.[citation needed]
Court case
The gallery's tenancy of County Hall had ongoing difficulties with Makoto Okamoto, London branch manager of the owners, who Saatchi complained had kicked artworks and sealed off the disabled toilets.[10] On 28 September 2005, the gallery announced they would be moving to new and larger premises in the Duke of York's Headquarters, Chelsea, though Saatchi said it was "tragic" to leave.[11] On 6 October 2005, a court case began, brought by the owners and landlord of County Hall, the Shirayama Shokusan Company and Cadogan Leisure Investments, against Danovo (whose majority shareholder was Charles Saatchi), trading as the Saatchi Gallery,[12] for alleged breach of conditions, including a two-for-one ticket offer in Time Out magazine and exhibition of work in unauthorised areas.[13] The judgement went against the gallery; the judge, Sir Donald Ratee, ordered the gallery to leave the premises because of a "deliberate disregard" of the landlords' rights.[14]
On 8 October 2006, Danovo was forced into liquidation with debts around £1.8 million, having failed to pay the amount ordered by the court to the County Hall landlords.[15] However this order was rescinded on the 16 March 2006 by Judge Simmonds in the High Court, and all sums due to creditors having been paid in full.[16]
In 2006 a selection from The Triumph of Painting was exhibited in Leeds Art Gallery and USA Today: New American Art from the Saatchi Gallery opened at the Royal Academy in London. This exhibition toured to The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia in 2007.
Duke of York's HQ
On 9 October 2008 the gallery opened its new premises, one of "the most beautiful art spaces in London",[17] in the 70,000-square-foot (6,500 m2) Duke of York's HQ on Kings Road, London, near to Sloane Square. The building was refurbished by architects Paul Davis + Partners and Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. It consists of 15 equally-proportioned exhibition spaces "as light, as high, and as beautifully proportioned as any in London".[18]
The gallery is the only completely free-entry contemporary art museum of its size in the world.[19] Free entry is enabled by the gallery's partnership with contemporary art auction house Phillips de Pury & Company.
The main show which opened the gallery was of new Chinese art, The Revolution Continues: New Art From China, bringing together the work of twenty-four of China’s young artists in a survey of painting, sculpture and installation. Artists included Zhang Huan, Li Songsong, Zhang Xiaogang, Zhang Haiying[20] and conceptual artists Sun Yuan & Peng Yu. An accompanying book included an essay by Jiang Jiehong, director of the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts at the UCE Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. The show exemplified Saatchi's predeliction for the "rude, sensational and epigrammatic", including a "big fairground attraction" of thirteen realistic life-size figures of world leaders colliding with each other in moving electric wheelchairs.[17]
Much work in the show relates to political issues surrounding China's Cultural Revolution and also to the wider contemporary political context.[21][22] The decision to open with The Revolution Continues was directly influenced by global interest in China as a result of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.[23]
Jackie Wullschlager in the Financial Times said it was "the most persuasive showing of contemporary Chinese art yet mounted in this country," and, contrasting it with the "deadly" contemporaneous Turner Prize show, "Saatchi's collection of Chinese art is one that Tate would kill for, and could not begin to afford"; she said that it was "an example of a private museum grand and serious enough to compete with national institutions."[24]
Adrian Searle in The Guardian called the premises "a study in blandness. If not for the art, we might be at a King's Road corporate wellness retreat", and the exhibition "a tiresome kind of entertainment" with work that "says familiar, Saatchi-type things. A giant turd coils on the floor, packed with semi-digested toy soldiers."[25]
Philosophy
Saatchi's goal is to continue to show contemporary work that would otherwise not be seen in big London institutions such as Tate Modern.[26] The gallery's head of development, Rebecca Wilson, said, "The gallery's guiding principle is to show what is being made now, the most interesting artists of today. It's about drawing people's attentions to someone who might be tomorrow's Damien Hirst."[27] The gallery's aim is to make art more accessible to the mainstream, rather than an exclusive artworld pursuit.[28]
Timeline
1985 – Charles Saatchi opens the 30 000 square foot Saatchi Gallery at Boundary Road, London NW8, featuring many key works by Donald Judd, Brice Marden, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol. This was the first UK exhibition for Twombly and Marden.
1986 – The Saatchi Gallery exhibits works by Anselm Kiefer and Richard Serra. The caretaker’s flat and one wall of the gallery was demolished in order to allow the installation of large Serra sculptures.
1987 – The New York Art Now show introduces artists including Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Ashley Bickerton, Carroll Dunham and Phillip Taaffe for the first time to the UK. The blend of minimalism and pop art has a profound influence on British art students.
1988-1991 ¬– The gallery introduces artists including; Leon Golub, Phillip Guston, Sigmar Polke, Bruce Nauman, Richard Artschwager and Cindy Sherman to British viewers.
1992 – The Saatchi Gallery curates its first in a series of shows entitled Young British Artists introducing the term “YBA” for this generation of artists. Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn, Rachel Whiteread, Gavin Turk, Glenn Brown, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville and Gary Hume were all presented to a wider public in these shows.
1997 – Sensation: Young British Art from the Saatchi Gallery opens at the Royal Academy of Arts featuring 42 artists including The Chapman Brothers, Marcus Harvey, Damien Hirst, Ron Mueck, Jenny Saville, Sarah Lucas & Tracey Emin. Sensation attracted over 300 000 visitors, a record breaking attendance for a contemporary art exhibition.
1999 – Sensation travels to The National Galerie at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in the autumn, breaking attendance records.
1999 – Sensation tours to Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, creating unprecedented political and media controversy and becoming a touchstone for debate about the “morality” of contemporary art. This exhibition also broke attendance records at the museum.
1999 – The Saatchi Gallery donates one hundred artworks to the Arts Council of Great Britain Collection, which operates a ‘lending library’ to museums and galleries around Britain, with the aim of increasing awareness and promoting interest in younger artists.
2000 – The Gallery donates 40 works by young British artists through the National Arts Collection Fund to eight museum collections across Britain.
2000 – The Gallery begins a series of one person shows of major international figures who have been largely unseen in Britain, including Duane Hanson, Boris Mikhailov and Alex Katz. Shows entitled Young Americans and Eurovision introduce a number of artists to the UK including John Currin, Andreas Gursky, Charles Ray, Richard Prince, Rineke Dijkstra, Lisa Yuskavage and Elizabeth Peyton.
2001 – I am a Camera exhibition opens at the Gallery, an exhibition of photography and other related works where traditional boundaries are blurred as photographs influence paintings, and paintings influence photographs. The show included work by many artists who had never exhibited before in the UK.
2002 – The Gallery donates 50 artworks to the Paintings in Hospitals programme which provides a lending library of over 3 000 original works of art to NHS hospitals, hospices and health centres throughout England, Wales and Ireland.
2003 – The Saatchi Gallery moved to County Hall, the Greater London Council’s former headquarters on the South Bank, creating a 40 000 square foot exhibition space. The opening show included a retrospective by Damien Hirst as well as works by other YBAs such as the Chapman Brothers, Tracey Emin, Jenny Saville and Sarah Lucas. There were 1,000 guests at the launch, which included a "nude happening" of 200 naked people staged by artist Spencer Tunick.
2004 – A fire in the Momart storage warehouse destroyed many works from the collection, including the major Tracey Emin work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95 ("the tent"), and Jake and Dinos Chapman's tableau Hell.
2005 – The Saatchi Gallery launches a year-long, three-part series exhibition, The Triumph of Painting. The opening exhibition focuses on a number of influential European painters, Marlene Dumas, Martin Kippenberger, Luc Tuymans, Peter Doig, Jörg Immendorff, and followed with younger painters including Albert Oehlen, Wilhelm Sasnal and Thomas Scheibitz.
2005 – The gallery announced it was moving to take on the entire Duke of York’s Headquarters building in Chelsea. This put a halt to London shows while the new premises were being prepared.
2005 – A selection of works from The Triumph of Painting was exhibited in Leeds Art Gallery
2006 -– During the period in between premises, the Saatchi Gallery website began an open-access section where artists could upload works of art and a biography onto their own pages. The site currently has over 100 000 artist’s profiles and receives over 68 million hits a day, and is ranked at 316 in the Alexa Top 50 000 World Websites.
2006 – The Saatchi Gallery in association with the Guardian newspaper opened the first ever reader-curated exhibition, showing the work of 10 artists registered on Saatchi Online. In November the Saatchi Gallery launched a new site within Saatchi Online exclusively for art students, called Stuart. Art students from all over the world were able to create their own home pages with images of their art, photos, lists of their favourite artists, books, films and television shows, and links to their friends' home pages. The site also allows students to chat online with each other, enabling art students across the globe to talk and exchange ideas about their art work. Other sections on Saatchi Online include; a daily art magazine, a forum, written and video blogs, as well as sections for street art, photography and illustration.
2006 – USA Today: New American Art from the Saatchi Gallery opens at the Royal Academy in London
2007 – A new feature was added to Saatchi Online at the beginning of 2007 called "Museums around the World" where over 2 800 museums can now be found online, showing highlights of their collections, exhibitions and other relevant information. 2 700 Colleges and Universities from around the world also include their profiles, enabling potential students to examine their prospectuses.
2007 – USA Today: New American Art from the Saatchi Gallery toured to The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia.
2008 – The Saatchi Gallery reopens on the 9th of October in the entire 70,000 square feet Duke of York's Headquarters building on Kings Road in Chelsea, London. The inaugural exhibition is The Revolution Continues: New Art from China, bringing together the work of 24 of China’s leading young artists in a wide reaching survey of recent painting, sculpture and installation.
Controversies
- Artists such as Sandro Chia and Sean Scully, to whom Saatchi had been a patron in the late 1970s and early 1980s, felt betrayed by him when their work was sold in bulk from his collection, and Saatchi was accused of destroying Chia's career.[29] Saatchi said that the matter only became an issue because Chia "had a psychological need to be rejected in public" and is now "most famous for being dumped", but that he had only ever owned seven Chia paintings, which were sold back to Chia's two dealers, who re-sold them easily to museums or notable collectors.[29] Saatchi said that a sale of strong work can help to galvanise the market for them.[29]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Burlington_House-Courtyard.jpg/220px-Burlington_House-Courtyard.jpg)
- In 1997, in Sensation, London, Marcus Harvey's giant painting of Myra Hindley made from children's hand prints was attacked by two men with ink and eggs, and picketed by the Mothers Against Murder and Aggression protest group, accompanied by Winnie Johnson, the mother of one of Hindley's Moors murders victims.[30] The work was restored and exhibited in the show, which drew nearly 300,000 visitors, exceeding any previous contemporary art show.[31]
- The Sensation show in New York offended Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, because of Chris Ofili's painting, Holy Virgin Mary, which incorporates elephant dung.[31] Guiliani, who had seen the work in the catalogue but not in the show, called it "sick stuff" and threatened to withdraw the annual $7 million City Hall grant from the Brooklyn Museum hosting the show, because "You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else's religion."[31] John O'Connor, the Cardinal of New York, said, "one must ask if it is an attack on religion itself," and the president of America's biggest group of Orthodox Jews, Mandell Ganchrow, called it "deeply offensive".[32] William A Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, said the work "induces revulsion".[31] Guiliani started a lawsuit to evict the museum, and Arnold Lehman, the museum director, filed a federal lawsuit against Guiliani for a breach of the First Amendment.[32]
- Hillary Clinton spoke up for the museum, as did the New York Civil Liberties Union.[31] The editorial board of The New York Times said Guiliani's stance "promises to begin a new Ice Age in New York's cultural affairs." [33] The paper also carried a petition in support signed by 106 creatives, including Susan Sarandon, Steve Martin, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Kurt Vonnegut and Susan Sontag, saying that the mayor "blatantly disregards constitutional protection for freedom of the arts."[32] Ofili, who is Roman Catholic, said, "elephant dung in itself is quite a beautiful object."[32]
- The museum produced a yellow stamp, saying the artworks on show "may cause shock, vomiting, confusion, panic, euphoria and anxiety."[32] and Ofili's painting was shown behind a Plexiglass screen, guarded by a museum attendant and an armed police officer.[33] Jeffrey Hogrefe, New York Observer art critic, said, "They wanted to get some publicity and they got it. I think it was pretty calculated."[31] The editor-in-chief of the New York Art & Auction magazine, Bruce Wolmer,said: "When the row eventually fades the only smile will be on the face of Charles Saatchi, a master self-promoter."[32] Guiliani lost his court case and was forced to restore funding.[34]
- The Sensation show was scheduled to open in June 1999 at the National Gallery of Australia, but was cancelled, the director, Brian Kennedy, saying that, although it was due to be funded by the Australian government, it was "too close to the market", since finance for the Brooklyn exhibition included $160,000 from Saatchi, who owned the work, $50,000 from Christie's, who had sold work for Saatchi, and $10,000 from dealers of many of the artists.[34] Kennedy said he was unaware of this, when he accepted the show; Saatchi's contribution, the largest single one, was not disclosed by the Brooklyn Museum, until it appeared in court documents.[34] When the show opened in London at the Royal Academy, there had been criticisms that it would raise the value of the work.[34]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/2005_Saatchi_Gallery_demo.jpg/220px-2005_Saatchi_Gallery_demo.jpg)
- In 2004, media controversy arose over two paintings by ex-stripper, Stella Vine. One was of Princess Diana called Hi Paul Can You Come Over, showing the Princess with blood dripping from her lips. The other was of drug user Rachel Whitear, whose body was being exhumed at the time; Whitear's parents and the police appealed for the painting to be withdrawn,[35] but it was not.
- In 2004 the Stuckists reported Saatchi to the Office of Fair Trading alleging unfair competition.[36] The complaint was not upheld. They also picketed the opening of The Triumph of Painting claiming that Saatchi had stolen their ideas.[37][38] (Vine had previously been involved with the Stuckists.)
- In 2006 the work of several artists in "USA Today", an exhibition of contemporary American art from the Saatchi Gallery at the Royal Academy in London, provoked controversy in the media and among some Royal Academicians who called for certain works to be installed in an 'adult-only' room. A notice advising 'parental guidance' before viewing the work of Dash Snow and Gerald Davis was posted by the Royal Academy,[39] on a wall outside the room in which the controversial works were hung: Dash Snow's 'Fuck the Police', in which newspaper cuttings relating to police corruption are smeared with the artist's own semen, and a painting entitled Monica by Gerald Davis in which a young woman engages in fellatio.
Artists shown at the Saatchi Gallery
- Boundary Road
|
|
|
|
|
forthcoming:
|
Web site
In 2006, during the period in limbo between premises, the Saatchi Gallery website began an open-access section, including Your Gallery,[40] where artists can upload up to eight works of art and a biography onto their own page. Over 100,000 artists have done so, and the site receives an estimated 68 million hits a day. Your Gallery was later rebranded as Saatchi Online. In July 2008, Alexa Internet ranked Saatchi Gallery at 316 in world’s sites. In November 2007 it was estimated that the professional artists registered on the website sell over $100 million of art directly from the site annually.[citation needed] In 2008 Saatchi Online launched a saleroom section that hosts over 84,000 entries from artists wishing to sell their work. The site takes no commission from either buyer or seller.
In October 2006 the Saatchi Gallery in association with the Guardian newspaper opened the first ever reader-curated exhibition, showing the work of 10 artists registered on Saatchi Online; users also have the opportunity to be featured in the Saatchi Online stall at various art fairs. In November 2006 the Saatchi Gallery launched a new site within Saatchi Online exclusively for art students, called Stuart, which includes online chat rooms.[41] An annual competition, 4 New Sensations, in association with Channel 4, is run via the Stuart section of the site.
There are other spaces on Saatchi Online for meeting new people, a forum, live chat, blogs, videos, photography and illustration. The site also publishes grant and funding opportunities for artists. A daily art magazine features 24 hour art news updated every 15 minutes, as well as articles and reviews by well known art critics such as Jerry Saltz and Matthew Collings. The site recently began broadcasting an online television channel which gives visitors video access to art openings, artists' studios, performances and interviews.
Interactive features include the weekly Showdown competition, where users can win a place in an exhibition in the Gallery, the Online Studio which allows visitors to create art on the website (each month a critic selects a winner in whose name a £500 donation is made to a children's charity, a Crits section in which artists can comment on each others' work, and the Street Art section for graffiti, murals, and performance art.
"Museums around the World" displays over 3300 museums with highlights of their collections, and other relevant information. These include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the London National Gallery, the Louvre, and the State Hermitage, as well as small museums.
As of July 2008, 4,300 art dealers and commercial galleries have put their profiles on the site. Over 2,800 universities and colleges have uploaded their prospectuses and student information on the site: these include Yale, Harvard, the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford, as well as local art colleges. Over 1,500 schools have uploaded up pupils’ art work. Schools range from Eton College to small Primary and High schools. The Portfolio Schools Prize [42] is open to schools with pupils aged between 5 and 17.
A Mandarin language version of the site allows Chinese artists to upload their profiles in Chinese and to be read in English. There is also a Chinese language chatroom, forum, and blog. The site provides automated translations in most of the world’s leading languages; Russian, Spanish and Portuguese versions of the site are planned.
Books
- The Revolution Continues: New Art From China
- Sarah Kent, "Shark Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the 90s", Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd, 2003, ISBN 0-85667-584-9.
- Rita Hatton and John A. Walker, "Supercollector, a Critique of Charles Saatchi", The Institute of Artology, 3rd edition 2005, paperback, ISBN 0-9545702-2-7
- USA Today
- The Triumph Of Painting
- The Triumph Of Painting, Supplementary Volume
- The Triumph Of Painting, Supplementary Volume
- 100 The Work That Changed British Art
- Hell, Jake & Dinos Chapman
- Paula Rego
- Young Americans
- Stephan Balkenhol
- Fiona Rae & Gary Hume
- Duane Hanson
- Shark Infested Waters, The Saatchi Collection Of British Art In The 90's
- Young German Artists 2
- Sensation
- Alex Katz: 25 Years Of Painting
- Young Americans 2
- Neurotic Realism
- Eurovision
- Ant Noises 1
- Ant Noises 2
- The Arts Council Gift
- I Am A Camera
- New Labour
- Young British Art
- Saatchi Decade
- Boris Mikhailov: Case History
- Damien Hirst
Notes and references
- ^ Brooks, Richard. "Hirst's shark is sold to America", The Sunday Times, 16 January 2005. Retrieved 14 October 2008.
- ^ Davies, Serena. "Why painting is back in the frame", The Daily Telegraph, 8 January 2005. Retrieved 15 October 2008.
- ^ a b c Gibbons, Fiachra. "Hirst Buys His Art back from Saatchi", The Guardian, 27 November 2003. Retrieved 14 October 2008
- ^ a b "I Knew It Was Time to Clean up My Act" Daily Telegraph, 26 July 2004 Retrieved 14 October 2008
- ^ Malvern, Jack; Nugent, Helen, "Britart masterpieces feared lost in blaze", The Times, 26 May 2004. Retrieved 14 October 2008.
- ^ Clenell, Andrew. "Saatchi returns fire at 'pitiful' critics of New Blood show", The Independent, 27 April 2004. Retrieved 15 October 2008.
- ^ a b c Brooks, Richard. "Saatchi starts Britart sell-off", The Sunday Times, p. 10. 28 August 2005.
- ^ a b c Higgins, Charlotte. "Saatchi sells Britart classic for £1.5m", The Guardian, 21 April 2005. Retrieved 14 October 2008.
- ^ Morrison, James; Costello-Dougherty, Malaika. "Saatchi's new art row - this time it's personal", The Independent, 4 May 2003. Retrieved 14 October 2008.
- ^ Smith, David. guardian.co.uk "The ****ing row over Saatchi's vanishing art", The Guardian, 9 November 2003. Retrieved 15 October 2008.
- ^ Higgins, Charlotte. "Saatchi blames 'malevolent' atmosphere and says sad goodbye to the South Bank", The Guardian, 28 September 2005. Retrieved 15 October 2008.
- ^ Butt, Riazatt. "Saatchi in 'deep rage' during row over toilets", The Guardian, 7 October 2005. Retrieved 15 October 2008.
- ^ "Saatchi Gallery row at High Court", BBC, 6 October 2005. Retrieved 15 October 2005.
- ^ Staff and agencies. "Judge orders Saatchi out of County Hall", The Guardian, 21 October 2005. Retrieved 15 October 2005.
- ^ Muir, Hugh. "Saatchi firm wound up with debts of £1.8m", The Guardian, 9 March 2008. Retrieved 15 October 2008.
- ^ High Court of Justice, Chanceries Devision, Companies Court. Case Number 8287 of 2005, before Judge Simmonds. March 16, 2006.
- ^ a b Cumming, Laura. "Fitting home for a veteran collector, The Observer, 12 October 2008. Retrieved 14 October 2008.
- ^ Dorment, Richard, "Review: The Revolution Continues: New Art From China at the Saatchi Gallery", The Daily Telegraph, 7 October 2008. Retrieved 15 October 2008.
- ^ Adams, Stephen. "Revolution Continues at the Saatchi Gallery", The Daily Telegraph, 6 October 2008. Retrieved 15 October 2008.
- ^ Saatchi gallery
- ^ Adams, Stephen, "Charles Saatchi's attention-grabbing new exhibition on Chinese art", The Daily Telegraph, 6 October 2008. Retrieved 14 October 2008.
- ^ "New Saatchi gallery in London puts China's artists on show", Trend News, 9 October 2008. Retrieved 14 October 2008.
- ^ Collet-White, Mike, Reuters, 7 October 2008. Retrieved 14 October 2008.
- ^ Wullschlager, Jackie. "The Stuff of People's Prayers and Dreams", Financial Times, 11 October 2008. Retrieved from saatchi-gallery.co.uk, 15 October 2008.
- ^ Searle, Adrian. "Saatchi gallery: A study in blandness", The Guardian, 7 October 2008. Retrieved 15 October 2008.
- ^ Ward, Ossian, Charles Saatchi: Interview, TimeOut.com, 7 October 2008
- ^ London's New Saatchi Gallery Looks to China's Emerging Artists, The Canadian Press]
- ^ Smith, Matt, Saatchi Gallery: A new exhibition of modern wacky art, Sky News, 7 October 2008
- ^ a b c "Art Newspaper readers' questions", The Art Newspaper, retrieved from the Saatchi Gallery, 17 October 2008.
- ^ Blanchard, Tamsin. "Arts: Sensation as ink and egg are thrown at Hindley portrait", The Independent, 19 September 1997. Retrieved from findarticles.com, 17 October 2008.
- ^ a b c d e f "Sensation sparks New York storm", BBC, 23 September 1999. Retrieved 17 October 2008.
- ^ a b c d e f Davies, Hugh; Fenton, Ben. "Whiff of sensation hits New York", The Daily Telegraph, 2 October 1999. Retrieved 17 October 2008.
- ^ a b Rapp, Christopher. "Dung Deal - Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Sensation" exhibition", National Review, 25 October 1999. Retrieved 17 October 2008.
- ^ a b c d Vogel, Carol. "Australian Museum cancels controversial art show", The New York Times, 1 December 1999. Retrieved 17 October 2008.
- ^ www.guardian.co.uk
- ^ Stummer, Robin. "Charles Saatchi 'abuses his hold on British art market'", The Independent on Sunday, 28 March 2004. Retrieved 17 October 2008.
- ^ Hermione Eyre, "Talk of the Town", The Independent on Sunday 2005-01-30.
- ^ Nigel Reynolds, "Saatchi's Latest Shock For The Art World Is Painting", The Daily Telegraph, 2004-10-04
- ^ royalacademy.org.uk
- ^ saatchigallery.com Saatchi Gallery
- ^ saatchigallery.com Saatchi Gallery
- ^ artsaward.org
External links
- Official website of the Saatchi Gallery
- Virtual tour of the gallery
- Sunday Times Q&A with Charles Saatchi, 2008
- BBC video coverage of The Revolution Continues
- Video review of The Revolution Continues from The Daily Telegraph
- The Revolution Contines in pictures, from the BBC
- Pictures of the gallery at County Hall highlights of the collection
- Charles Saatchi, Readers Q&A, The Art Newspaper
- Charles Saatchi, Readers Q&A, The Independent
- The Stuckists' criticisms
- STUART in The Independent November 30 2006
- STUART in The Sunday Times December 24 2006
- STUART in New York Times December 18 2006