Charles Saatchi
Charles Saatchi
Charles Saatchiis a British businessman and the co-founder with his brother Maurice of advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. The brothers led the business – the world's largest advertising agency in the 1980s – until they were forced out in 1995. In the same year, the brothers formed a new agency called M&C Saatchi. Saatchi is also known for his art collection and for owning Saatchi Gallery, and in particular for his sponsorship of the Young British Artists, including Damien Hirst...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth9 June 1943
Lots of ambitious work by young artists ends up in a dumpster after its warehouse debut. So an unknown artist's big glass vitrine holding a rotting cow's head covered by maggots and swarms of buzzing flies may be pretty unsellable. Until the artist becomes a star. Then he can sell anything he touches .
The art critics on some of Britain's newspapers could as easily have been assigned gardening or travel, and been cheerfully employed for life.
There are no rules about investment. Sharks can be good. Artist's dung can be good. Oil on canvas can be good.
Artists need a lot of collectors, all kinds of collectors, buying their art.
I primarily buy art to show it off.
Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity. The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn't.
Who's to say what will one day appear to have been trendsetting? Sometimes artists who receive breathless acclaim initially, seem to conk out. Other artists who don't register so keenly at the time, prove to be trailblazers.
I regularly find myself waking up to art I passed by or simply ignored.
Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.
I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.
I may not be much good at most things, but if I didnt have the pleasure of planning and installing shows, and doing it better than anyone else, I would have stopped buying art many years ago.
If you study a great work of art, you'll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let's have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.
Art collectors are pretty insignificant in the scheme of things. What matters and survives is the art.
I don't buy art in order to leave a mark or to be remembered; clutching at immortality is of zero interest to anyone sane.