" THE MEDICIS were patrons to some of the most renowned artists of all time — some of them include Botticelli, Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. They practically sponsored the renaissance period."

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30 THINGS ABOUT ART AND LIFE, AS EXPLAINED BY CHARLES SAATCHI

(PART 1)

He rarely gives interviews, but a new book offers an intriguing insight into what drives the enigmatic collector's PASSION FOR ART

The Observer,Sunday 30 August 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/aug/30/charles-saatchi-best-of-british

--- You've been successful at discovering new artistic talent. But are there not always great artists who go undiscovered?

By and large, talent is in such short supply that mediocrity can be taken for brilliance rather more than genius can go undiscovered.

----You have been described both as a "super-collector" and as "the most successful art dealer of our times". Looking back on the past 20 years, how would you characterise your activities?

Who cares what I'm described as? Art collectors are pretty insignificant in the scheme of things. What matters and survives is the art. I buy art that I like. I buy it to show it off in exhibitions. Then, if I feel like it, I sell it and buy more art. As I have been doing this for 30 years, I think most people in the art world get the idea by now. It doesn't mean I've changed my mind about the art that I end up selling. It just means that I don't want to hoard everything for ever.

Charles Saatchi with his wife, the broadcaster and cookery writer Nigella Lawson. Photograph: Ikon Pictures Ltd./ Rex Features

---Your practice of buying emerging artists' work has proved highly contagious and is arguably the single greatest influence on the current market because so many others, both veteran collectors and new investors, are following your lead, vying to snap up the work of young, relatively unknown artists. Do you accept that you are responsible for much of the speculative nature of the contemporary art market?

I hope so. Artists need a lot of collectors, all kinds of collectors, buying their art.

---Do you think you have messed up anybody's life by flogging off all their work?

I don't buy art just to make artists happy any more than I want to make them sad if I sell their work. Don't you think you're being a bit melodramatic?

Before you went into advertising, what other career did you consider?

"Consider" isn't quite how it was. At 17 and with two O-levels to show after a couple of attempts, a career path wasn't realistic, nor a chat with the Christ's College careers officer, who wouldn't have recognised me in any event as my absenteeism record was unrivalled. I answered a situations vacant ad in the Evening Standard for a voucher clerk, pay £10 weekly. It was in a tiny advertising agency in Covent Garden, and a voucher clerk had to traipse round all the local newspaper offices in Fleet Street – of which there were hundreds at the time – and pick up back copies of papers in which the agency's clients had an advert appearing. The voucher clerk's role was to get the newspaper, find the ad, stick a sticker on it so the client could verify its appearance, and the agency could get paid. Vital work, obviously. One of the advantages of it being a tiny agency was that one day they got desperate when their creative department (one young man) was off sick, and they asked me if I could try and make up an ad for one of their clients, Thornber Chicks. This ad was to appear in Farmer and Stock-Breeder magazine, and hoped to persuade farmers to choose Thornbers, as their chicks would grow to provide many cheap, superior quality eggs and a fine return. I didn't know how you wrote an ad, or indeed how to write anything much other than "I will not be late for assembly", for which I had been provided much practice. So I looked through copies of Farmer and Stock-Breeder and Poultry World, chose some inspiring-sounding words and phrases, cobbled them together, stuck on a headline – I think I stole it from an old American advertisement – and produced "Ask the man who owns them" as a testimonial campaign featuring beaming Thornber farmers. The client bought it.

---Does a love of art, particularly Renaissance art on a biblical theme, make one feel closer to God?

I believe God must be very disappointed in his handiwork. Mankind has clearly failed to evolve much in all these years; we're still as cretinous and barbaric as we were many centuries ago, and poor God must spend all day shaking his head at our vileness and general ineptitude. Or perhaps, we might just give him a good laugh. But of course, I hope God likes our art enough to forgive us our sins, particularly mine.

I like the new gallery but hated your gallery in County Hall. What were you thinking!

I was stupid, stupid, stupid. I got bored with knowing my first gallery in Boundary Road too well, so well in fact that I could hang my shows to the centimetre while sitting on a deckchair in Margate. Plus, I wanted to introduce new art to as wide a public as possible, and I went for somewhere with a much bigger footfall on the South Bank next to the London Eye. So I gave up the airy lightness of Boundary Road for small oak-panelled rooms, and nobody liked it. I saw it as a challenge, but one which I clearly wasn't up to.

---Which artists do you display in your own home? Are you constantly changing the works you have there? Is there a core of favourites which stay there?

My house is a mess, but any day now we'll get round to hanging some of the stacks of pictures sitting on the floor.

---Who are the artists you are most pleased with discovering?

Over the years I have been very lucky to see some great artists' work just at the start of their careers, so that I could feel "pleased with discovering" them. However, I have also "discovered" countless artists who nobody but me seemed to care much for and whose careers have progressed very slowly, if at all. So I certainly don't have an infallible gift for spotting winners. I think it's fair to say that I bought Cindy Sherman in her first exhibition in a group show, with some of her black-and-white film stills framed together in those days as a collage of 10 images, and went on to buy much of her work for the next few years. I bought most of the work from Jeff Koons's first exhibition in a small and now-defunct artist-run gallery in New York's East Village, which included the basketballs floating in glass aquariums and the Hoovers and other appliances in fluorescent-lit vitrines. But this is getting too self-congratulatory and the truth is I miss out on just as many good artists as I home in on.

---Are paintings a better investment than sharks in formaldehyde? The Hirst shark looks much more shrivelled now than it used to, but a Peter Doig canvas will still look great in 10 years and will be much easier to restore.

There are no rules about investment. Sharks can be good. Artists' dung can be good. Oil on canvas can be good. There's a squad of conservators out there to look after anything an artist decides is art.

---Why do overseas museums have better collections of Britart than the Tate?

Because the Tate curators didn't know what they were looking at during the early 1990s, when even the piddliest budget would have bought you many great works. But I'm no better. I regularly find myself waking up to art I passed by or simply ignored.

Looking ahead, in 100 years' time, how do you think British art of the early 21st century will be regarded? Who are the great artists who will pass the test of time?

General art books dated 2105 will be as brutal about editing the late 20th century as they are about almost all other centuries. Every artist other than Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd and Damien Hirst will be a footnote.

---If you were commissioning your own portrait, in which medium would you choose to be represented?

I'd rather eat the canvas than have someone paint me on it.

---What is it like being married to a domestic goddess?

She's too good for me, I know, but she knows it too and reminds me every day.

Do you ever do the cooking?

I can do eggs. And cornflakes.

---Do you encourage your children to look at your art and go to museums and galleries?

My children think it's very uncool to have anything to do with my gallery. But they quite like the gallery shop.

---What advice do you and your wife give your children?

Nigella's mum gave her an invaluable insight into nice behaviour. According to Nigella her advice went something like this: "It is better to be charmed than to charm." By this she meant that what makes people feel good about themselves is feeling as if they have been charming, interesting; in short, have been listened to. For her, the notion that one should oneself be riveting or aim to be quite the most fascinating person in the room was a vulgarity and just sheer, misplaced vanity. Trying to be charming is self-indulgent; allowing oneself to be charmed is simply good manners.

---Should the country be spending money on saving old masters for the nation, or buying up works by the next generation of artists?

At the risk of being lynched – again – by the art crowd, I don't think there is a great need any more to save paintings for the nation at the cost of supporting new art. What difference does it make if a Titian is hanging in the National Gallery, the Louvre or the Uffizi? This isn't the 18th century: people travel, so there's no need to be nationalistic about the world's art treasures. Much more important is to back living artists.