NEWSgrist: *Annette Weintraub: Life Support* Vol.4, no.20

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Vol.4, no.20 (Dec 22, 2003)

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*Underbelly*

Bulletin board: post your own news, press releases, urls:

http://pub11.bravenet.com/forum/show.php?usernum=870870569

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CONTENTS:

- *Splash* Annette Weintraub’s Life Support

- *Url/s* Synesthetic Bubble Gum Cards (Lab404)

- *Most Wanted?* Iraqi Playing Card Art (The Art Newspaper)

- *Brooklyn Bonanza* Line-up for Brooklyn Museum (Artnet)

- *Alias* Ad Reinhardt as Abstract Double Agent (NYTimes)

- *Dia Goes Dark* Chelsea temporary closing (Artnet)

- *Que Linda Es Cuba* Art + it’s enemies (The Art Newspaper)

- *Open Call* Aspect Mag Accepting Artwork Submissions

- *Book Grist* Aspect Mag.; ‘Supercollector’ critiques Saatchi

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*Splash* http://newsgrist.net

Life Support

by Annette Weintraub

Hall for dreamers or impersonal machine?

Life Support explores the subjective experience of space

and the way in which medical environments affect

behavior, perception and healing.

Life Support is a featured 'Spotlight' at http://www.Turbulence.org

see other projects by Annette Weintraub at

http://www.annetteweintraub.com

splash archived at: http://www.newsgrist.net/Splash_Weintraub.html

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*Url/s*

Synesthetic Bubble Gum Cards

by curt cloninger (a Lab404 production - http://www.lab404.com/ )

http://computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/bubblegum/picture/

Pictures can tell a story, and lots of folks have used them to do just

that! Now you can collect your favorite picture-makers in this era-

spanning set.

Porting the pictures of:

masaru shichinohe

hieronymus bosch

donald roller wilson

william blake

rene magritte

arthur rackham

Previous and Forthcoming Sets may be gotten at:

http://computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/bubblegum/

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*Most Wanted?*

British Museum buys Iraq “most wanted” cards

Curator hopes to acquire eventually a pack actually distributed to soldiers

By Martin Bailey

The Art Newspaper

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=11472

LONDON. The British Museum has acquired a set of the playing cards

showing Saddam Hussein, his entire cabinet, chiefs of staff and an

assortment of other Iraqis on the US “most wanted list”. The cards

were issued to US troops in Iraq to help them identify the enemy.

The first pack of Iraqi playing cards acquired by the museum’s Prints

and Drawings Department turned out to be a fake—the prominent

“Made in China” stamped on the back of the packet was a giveaway.

The pack was a modest gift from a friend of the department, which

also collects ephemera. This prompted museum curator, Martin

Royalton-Kisch, to search for an authentic set to add to the museum’s

collection of historic playing cards—which numbers well over 1,000

sets, mostly pre-1900. On the internet, he bought a pack produced

by the Liberty Playing Card Company, costing a mere $10. Even this,

however, is not quite the real thing, as The Art Newspaper discovered

when we set out to investigate the esoteric world of the “most wanted”

cards.

It all began on 11 April, when the US military announced that the 52

“most wanted” Iraqis were being featured on a set of cards for the

troops, with Saddam Hussein as the Ace of Spades. The first batch

of 200 packs was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, but

inadvertently the two jokers carried the “Hoyle” trademark of the

United States Playing Card Company, which was not involved. The

military then ordered a much larger print run from a rival firm, the

Liberty Playing Card Company in Virginia. These went out in their

thousands to the Gulf, where bored servicemen and women played

poker while awaiting action.

Both the Liberty and United States card companies quickly cashed in by

producing similar “casino quality” packs for the home market—each

claiming to be “authentic”. These have proved a bonanza, and the

United States Playing Card Company has voluntarily contributed

$100,000 to charity from these sales. In recent weeks, others have

jumped on the bandwagon including firms in China and Britain. Prices

are falling and now start at $4 for foreign-produced cards and $6 for

those from the two major American producers. However, the really keen

collectors are scrabbling to get the originals which were given to the

troops. “Ideally, we would like to acquire one of the sets which were

officially distributed in the Gulf,” explained Mr Royalton-Kisch.

At press time, several packs were for sale on eBay; the most expensive

was going for $300, with no proof it was authentic.

============================

*Brooklyn Bonanza*

Artnet News, 12/18/03

LINEUP FOR "WORKING IN BROOKLYN"

The Brooklyn Museum of Art plans to celebrate the April 2004 opening

of its new parkway entrance pavilion and public plaza, designed by

James Polshek Partnership architects, with the latest version of the

museum's popular survey show of Brooklyn artists. Billed as the largest

and most comprehensive survey of B-boro artists, "Open House:

Working in Brooklyn," Apr. 16-Aug. 15, 2004, includes over 300 works

by 200 artists curated by Charlotta Kotik and Tumelo Mosaka.

The lineup: http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/news/artnetnews2/artnetnews12-18-03.asp

============================

*Alias*

Ad Reinhardt, Newspaper Cartoonist: The Abstract Double Agent

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

NYTimes, December 21, 2003

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/arts/design/21WOOD.html

Abstract expressionism is not famous for being a lot of laughs. Though

the movement was diverse and riven into factions, it is commonly

stereotyped as angst-ridden and blustery — a caricature that the Pop

artists helped to draw so they could more effectively mock their more

solemn predecessors.

But long before Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg took shots

at the high-mindedness of the postwar American avant-garde, Ad

Reinhardt (1913-67) was blasting away from a privileged vantage in

the middle of the fray. A wise-cracking contrarian whose penchant for

dialectics would not allow him to hold any position he could not later

undermine, he was a consummate art-world insider and a fierce

defender of abstract painting. At the same time, his ingrained populism

made him suspicious of the rhetoric and institutional power brokering

that supports any art elite.

His visual and verbal assaults took their most lasting form in a series

of cartoons and satires, done mainly for the liberal New York

newspaper PM in the late 1940's and for ArtNews in the early 1950's.

Some of these were featured in the 1991 Reinhardt retrospective at

the Museum of Modern Art, but a more generous sample had been

collected earlier, in 1975, and reproduced as offset prints by the

Marlborough Gallery in Rome. A complete set of 29 is now on display

through Dec. 31 at the Daniel Silverstein Gallery in Chelsea in "How

to Look at Ad Reinhardt."

The critic Thomas Hess wrote in a booklet for the 1975 edition that

Reinhardt's lampoons are "like precious containers of the air of New

York, 1946-61." They are also like core samples from the artist's brain,

revealing a side of his personality not apparent in his canvases. Using

cutouts from 19th-century illustrated books and periodicals, as well as

line drawings and hand-drawn dialogue balloons, he concocted a style

in which the surrealism of J. J. Grandville and Max Ernst was inflected

with a tough Queens accent. As jabbering, pugilistic and outright funny

as his abstract paintings are serene and self-contained, the cartoons

can be enjoyed both as pointed social commentary and as autobiography.

You need Hess's annotations to get all the inside jokes, references to

galleries long gone and to critics and artists obscured by history. But in

the work for PM, Reinhardt was asked to explain the principles of the art

he practiced to a mass audience. This was a time, just after World War

II, when New York's art institutions were truly conservative and not

pushovers for the latest trends. Reinhardt has a fine time deriding

museums, critics and a public that believed everything in a picture had

to stand for something real. One of his recurring panels shows a stick

figure pointing at a canvas of crisscrossed lines and asking, "What does

this represent?" The indignant painting, having grown eyes, a mouth,

arms and legs, punches him in the jaw and answers with an even more

aggressively New York question, "What do you represent?"

In the 16-panel "How to Look at Art-Talk," from 1946, he continues the

question-answer format. "Isn't abstract art `just a design,' just

‘composition,' just an empty bucket into which one can drop some

subject matter?" asks a young woman wearing a blindfold. To which

her companion answers bluntly, "No." In the middle of the cartoon

Reinhardt also takes time to make fun of 57th Street galleries that

price works according to the style (realist or abstract) of the artists

they represent and the real estate (tenement or country manor) the

art will decorate.

But elsewhere he takes a dim view of those who would connect

progressive art to progressive politics. The liberal editors and readers

of PM certainly belonged in this category. In "How to Look at Looking,"

he compares "picture artists" and "abstract painters" with a pair of

chickens. The former is a hen that lays eggs of "Ignorance" while the

latter produces "Intelligence" and "Progress," a result so laughably

crude one can only assume that Reinhardt is razzing the idealism of

his employer. It's not surprising that PM soon fired him; as Hess pointed

out, it's laudable that they turned him loose in the first place. The art

criticism in New York newspapers of the day was stunningly obtuse

about contemporary art.

By the 50's, Reinhardt's colleagues were better established, and so he

trained his guns on outposts that supported them, including the

Museum of Modern Art. In his "Museum Racing Form," a 12-panel work

that he did in 1951 for the short-lived magazine "Trans/formation," he

handicaps the artists for the coming season and pairs them with their

advocates. Clement Greenberg, James Johnson Sweeney and Alfred

Barr pick Jackson Pollock, while Hess has his money on Willem de

Kooning. He fills a final panel, "From the Horse's Mouth," with a series

of dialogue balloons.

"My painting paints me," says one bubble. "I'm a primitive," says

another. "I don't know what I'm doing. Please buy my masterpieces

anyway."

As examples of the kind of blather that can still be overheard in cafes

and galleries and art schools, Reinhardt's cartoons are still timely as

satire. But they may be even more valuable for capturing the high

spirits of a wily provocateur and his hot-house milieu. The Pop artists

weren't the only ones who knew how to have fun.

[Richard B. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.]

============================

*Dia Goes Dark*

Artnet News, 12/18/03

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/news/artnetnews2/artnetnews12-18-03.asp

DIA TO CLOSE CHELSEA OUTPOST (TEMPORARILY), SEEK $50 MILLION

The Dia Art Foundation, which came into being three decades ago as the

one of the art world's wealthier and more elite institutions, is now seeking

money. Dia director Michael Govan has announced a $50-million capital

campaign, including $20 million for the Dia:Beacon endowment and $30

million to renovate and endow the Dia Center for the Arts on West 22nd

Street in Chelsea. The fundraising looks promising -- Dia has pledges of

$10 million already. The renovations in Chelsea are to include air-

conditioning, which would allow the celebrated art center to remain open

in the summer. The Chelsea facility closes next month, and stays

shuttered at least till 2006.

But Dia:Beacon remains open -- and a success story. Attendance has

totaled over 100,000 since the museum premiered six months ago in

May 2003, a number that includes lots of area schoolchildren

participating in the museum's extensive educational program (the

Chelsea facility averages about 60,000 visitors a year). The Metro North

railroad has even noted a 20 percent increase in ridership on its Hudson

River line since Dia:Beacon opened.

The foundation's administrative staff still has its hands full, despite the

closed New York facility. Govan is working on a major Dan Flavin

retrospective slated for 2004 at the National Gallery of Art, accompanied

by a catalog raisonné-type publication. The current Robert Whitman

survey is traveling to Porto, Portugal, and a major publication on Blinky

Palermo is forthcoming. Dia hopes to continue the New York lecture

series at various sites in the city, and an expanded readings series is

planned for Dia:Beacon as well. "And in six months, we start planning

for the reopening," said Dia spokesperson Laura Raicovich.

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*Que Linda Es Cuba*

The Havana Biennial

Some of the art is overtly political but, for the most part,

Cuban artists just want to survive

By Jason Edward Kaufman

The Art Newspaper

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=11474

Earlier this year, Cuban President Fidel Castro imprisoned 26 journalists

and human rights activists accused of conspiracy with “the enemy.” In

response, the US reaffirmed trade and travel restrictions to Cuba and

the EU cut back political and cultural ties. Several European funders of

the Havana Biennial, including the Hague-based Prince Claus Fund,

withdrew support of the show, and another Dutch organisation, the

International Humanist Institute for Co-operation, suspended sponsor-

ship when it learned that the exhibition organisers were censoring

artists’ proposals.

“There is more control this year,” says one Cuban artist taking part in

the eighth edition of the biennial, noting that the government is not

permitting as many private spin-off shows as in the past.

But with the Castro government struggling to maintain its place on the

world stage, and its population suffering under US sanctions dating back

to 1961, the hosting of an art biennial is an important opportunity for

Cuba and its artists to engage in six weeks of cultural discourse and

exchange, as well as for a much needed injection of foreign spending

on the island. And with Cuban artists dominating the display, the

exhibition functions as an advertisement for native talent. “All third

world biennials are a strategy to promote the local art,” says Cuban

artist Tania Bruguera. “Cuba is no exception.”

The exhibition (until 15 December) presents dozens of single-artist

shows in a vast 18th-century stone fortress at the mouth of the harbour

and in several venues around the dilapidated town, including the

government-run Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center, whose

curators organise the exhibition. The entire budget was reported to be

less than $200,000, about the cost of some of the gala parties that take

place at more glamorous biennials such as Venice, but the result was a

surprisingly professional presentation, marred more by bureaucratic

rather than logistical problems.

The exhibition’s anti-elitist title is “Arte con la vida” (Art together with

daily life). “We are interested in the life of millions of men and women

on Earth [and] as curators we will do everything in our power to

contribute to the improvement of that life,” declare the organisers in

an official statement. They condemn the international art market “that

contaminates almost the whole visual environment,” but there is little to

distinguish the art here from that in other biennials. It may be tamer

than the shock spectacles we have grown accustomed to elsewhere,

and most of it comes from developing countries in the Caribbean, South

America, and Africa instead of the usual US-Europe axis. If these works

were transplanted into the Venice Arsenale, however, no one would bat

an eye.

Outside the entrance to the exhibition, Wilfredo Prieto’s black-and-white

versions of national flags declare an end to global politics. But inside,

some works take a decidedly third-world stance—a 1940s automobile

supported not by wheels but barefoot brown human legs (Armando

Marino of Cuba), a dining table piled three-feet high with a glut of dishes

(Zeger Reyers, Holland), and GI Joe advertisements and toy guns

remind us of US bellicosity (Carlos Rivera, Puerto Rico), while a room

stacked with clothed bodies bluntly condemns the barbarism of

regimes the world over (Siron Franco, Brasil). Some Cuban offerings

have a more subtly dissident if ambiguous tone. Ms Bruguera’s

installation in the top floor of the National Museum of Fine Arts is a

white room with a sound track emulating decades-old revolutionary

rallies, and a rumbling platform with a microphone facing an ugly

unfinished wall—does it represent Castro’s revolution as ongoing or

failed?

Among the younger talents are Yoan and Ivan Capote. Yoan makes

television sets with prison bars instead of screens, though he denies

that they comment on media restrictions in Cuba, where the two legal

channels are both State-owned. His brother Ivan, a recent graduate of

the State art school, is showing a piece he made with the assistance of

his father, a mechanic specialising in hand-fashioned replacement parts

for the rickety pre-revolutionary cars that barrel along Havana’s dusty

treets. It is a kinetic sculptural machine with a metal arm moving back

and forth through a pool of used motor oil, alternately revealing and

concealing a text embossed on the bottom of the pan which reads, “Life

is a text that we learn to read only too late.”

State-run galleries sell selected works to tourists and pay artists a

percentage, but successful artists like Sandra Ramos and The

Carpinteros (Dagoberto Rodriques and Marco Castillo) prefer to deal

directly with collectors, inviting them into their homes and studios where

they do business in dollars that allow them to support their entire

families. The opening week of the biennial is a feeding frenzy of foreign

buying with collectors arriving in tours organised by US museums or

European travel agencies. (The US allows importation of Cuban art and

educational materials.)

With such considerable interest in the biennial, the State has been quick

to recognise the potential of the market: an art auction at the biennial

raised more than $100,000 to benefit a children’s cancer hospital, with

an anonymous collector from Monaco paying $11,000 for a drawing by

Kcho, an artist whose signature motif is a simple boat that might be

interpreted as an allusion to Cubans’ efforts to escape the island.

Somehow Kcho has been co-opted as a quasi-official artist, painting

backdrops for Castro speeches and occupying a huge government house.

While the arts in Cuba retain a potential for cultural and political change,

Helmo Hernandez, president of the nine-year-old German-funded Ludwig

Foundation for Cuba (the only foreign-funded foundation in the country),

sees artists repeating commercially successful formulas rather than

breaking new ground and creating dialogue with their domestic audience.

He plans to emphasise new media in the work he supports, but the lure

of dollars in Cuba remains great. As one artist explains, “To be an artist

is a privilege here. I have a beautiful house and a nice family, but it has

nothing to do with the rest of the people in Cuba. Even doctors can never

have this kind of economic or political independence because they get a

fixed salary and depend on a government institution.”

============================

*Open Call*

Aspect Magazine Accepting Artwork Submissions

for its Spring 2003 Issue:

The Artist as Content

BOSTON, Massachusetts, December 17, 2003

Aspect Magazine is accepting submissions for the Spring 2004 edition

of its biannual DVD publication titled ‘The Artist as Content.’ With the

recent launch of Aspect Magazine, cutting-edge experimental artists

finally have a magazine that embraces their mediums. Because the

full effect of kinetic, time-based, experienced-based, and installation

art usually requires a viewer's presence, traditional print media has

proved inadequate in bringing such works to a wider public. Utilizing

a multi-media format to showcase these works of new media art,

Aspect creates a museum experience in the home or classroom.

Aspect’s third volume will feature artists working with self portraiture or

using their own image in new media art.

The staff of Aspect is asking curators, art critics, and members of the

contemporary art community to help assemble and comment on works

for the next issue by submitting a work of art on which they wish to

provide audio commentary. Due to the format of the publication, the

criteria for selection will include both the qualifications of the comment-

ator and the quality of the video submitted. Audio recordings of the

commentary will be assembled after the submissions have been selected.

Submissions should include:

- resume of the commentator

- brief notes outlining the contents of the proposed commentary

- video documentation of a work or small group of works by a single artist

- resume of the artist

- contact information for the commentator

Submissions should be postmarked by January 31, 2004 and sent to:

Aspect Magazine

322 Summer St.

5th Floor

Boston, MA 02210

Submitters will be contacted via email no later than February 14th,

2003. Accepted submissions will require an original or digital copy of

the master video documentation.

Company Information -- Aspect Magazine is a biannual DVD magazine

of new media art. The publication’s mission is to distribute and archive

works of time-based and new media art. Each issue highlights artists

working new media whose works are best documented in video or sound.

Aspect can be viewed on any consumer DVD player. Individual issues

and subscriptions are available directly from the Aspect web site.

============================

*Book Grist*

Volume II of Aspect Magazine is now shipping!

Aspect is now shipping Volume II: Artists of the West Coast. Aspect

magazine is a biannual publication on DVD highlighting 5 new media

artists with optional audio commentary.

Volume II: Artists of the West Coast

- Anthony Discenza (commentary by Marisa S. Olson)

- Carole Kime and Jesse Gilbert (commentary by Julie Lazar)

- Scott Snibbe (commentary by George Fifield)

- Survival Research Laboratories (commentary by Susan Joyce)

- Brent Watanabe (commentary by Bill Arning)

Individual issues are $25.00 ($30.00 for international orders)

and are available at:

http://www.aspectmag.com/order/

Check out our full list of publications:

http://www.aspectmag.com/issues/

Thanks for spreading the word...

- Mike Mittelman

Founder and Publisher

Aspect Magazine

.......................................................................

Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi

By Rita Hatton and John A. Walker

Ellipsis, London, 2003

@Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1841660248/qid=1072018301/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-1305733-5114446?v=glance&s=books

REVIEW

Art Buccaneer and Gambler

by Donald Kuspit

Artnet Magazine, 12/15/03

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/index/kuspit/kuspit12-15-03.asp

Rita Hatton and John A. Walker's Supercollector: A Critique of Charles

Saatchi is an important, terrifying book -- perhaps the most important,

terrifying book you're likely to read about the socioeconomic realities of

the contemporary art world. Hatton and Walker offer what they call "a

hostile critique written from an anti-capitalist standpoint," but their

generalized anti-capitalism is less to the point than their very detailed,

meticulously researched description of Charles Saatchi's comings and

goings -- power and authority, more particularly, the power and authority

of his money -- in the art world.

The terrifying thing is that the money gives him the right to create art

value where there is none -- to create art history where there is little

or no esthetic and intellectual value, as Hatton and Walker argue. They

make it clear that Saatchi is a speculator in art futures, and that art

itself has become a speculative enterprise with no clear future -- except

the future it has on the art market, which is where art history is really

made.

It is as though Saatchi completes what Marcel Duchamp initiated: the

de-estheticization and ultimately devaluation of art. There is no longer

any such thing as art that is intrinsically art. It all depends on who

backs whatever they're backing as art -- who makes an argument that

convinces us that it is art, if never with any clear, definitive

understanding of what it means to say that it is art. We are never sure

what makes it so special that we are willing to accord it the "status and

dignity of art," as Andre Breton said Duchamp did when he labeled banal

objects as works of art, in effect graduating them from naive second-

class citizenship to sophisticated, aristocratic treasures of civilization.

Intellectualizing banal objects into stillborn works of art, he made an

ironical case for art while undermining it. (Duchamp, incidentally, was

obsessed with money, a fact documented in the "Dada in New York"

exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.)

Where intellectuals once gambled on the meaning and significance of art--

and Duchamp's readymades are intellectual gambles that would collapse

into triviality without the interminable theory that backs them -- Hatton

and Walker make it clear that only money, audaciously betting that

what it bets on will be an art-historical winner, gives art meaning and

significance. Intellectuals don't mean a damn in the world of money,

which now has its own legitimacy -- it alone has intrinsic value. They aree

simply advertisements for the art, just as Saatchi, who made his fortune

in advertising, chooses art that calls attention to itself, preferably

with all the blatancy of an advertisement, as Hatton and Walker argue.

Their message is that so-called art has no inner dignity and social status

apart from the dignity and status that money and advertising give it. They

also show that there is no real risk involved: Saatchi makes money by

dumping art that seems like a bad bet on the art market (most famously

Sandro Chia’s work). The dumping itself makes the art a bad bet, that is,

devalues it artistically -- after all, the only value it had was the value

of the money bet on it.

The book begins with an account of the founding and growth of the

advertising empire of Charles and Maurice Saatchi, showing how their

work for Margaret Thatcher put them over the top. They eventually

lost control of their empire, but Charles had begun to invest in art, first

by collecting it, then by opening a gallery which doubled as a museum.

He eventually became a patron, cultivating artists -- many of whom

were slavishly submissive to him, whatever their disclaimers (after all,

he enriched them) -- and finally organizing the so-called "Sensation,"

"Neurotic Realism," and "Young British Artists" (yBa) movements. He

became prominent on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and

the Tate Gallery, and began making gifts to the latter -- another way of

promoting his purchases and gaining power over the system of art

information, as well as stifling critical dissent.

Hatton and Walker document Saatchi's buying and selling of art and its

profound effect on the art market as well as on the conception of art.

They show how he in effect controlled the production as well as

distribution of art. Most subtly, they show how his efforts to make a

quick buck from art led to the production of quick art -- "amateurism,"

as they call it. They show how art is trying to emulate the speed with

which money moves in a global economy. Clearly, the changing value

of art on the global art market reflects the changing value of money in

the global economy.

They also analyze its effect on artists, most worthily Damien Hirst,

whom Hatton and Walker compare to Gordon Gekko, the hero of Oliver

Stone's 1987 movie Wall Street. "Integrity is bullshit," Hirst said, "I'm

not anything at heart. I'm too greedy" (quoted on p. 37). Gekko: "It's

all about bucks.

...Money isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one

perception to another. This painting here [he points to a Mir], I bought

it ten years ago for $60,000. I could sell it today for $600,000. The

illusion has become real and the more real it becomes the more

desperate they want it -- capitalism at its finest. . . I create nothing.

I own" (quoted on p. 114). Gekko is clearly more Saatchi than Hirst.

The book is essentially a sociological analysis, as its use of Thorsten

Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption and Raymonde Moulin's

analysis of the art market makes clear. Hatton and Walker also offer

some trenchant insights into Saatchi's character, based on accounts

of his behavior --apparently as impulsive, and when necessary as

ingratiating, as that of much of the British art he supports, or rather

uses to make money. There are also many quotations from artists

and art thinkers critical of Saatchi's influence, which is generally

regarded as pernicious, particularly because it draws attention away

from other kinds of art, obscuring awareness of the full range and

complexity of contemporary art production.

Saatchi's defenders are also quoted, as though to add a momentary

balance to the lopsided case Hatton and Walker make against him.

They also show how Saatchi's collecting of British art coincided with

Thatcher's -- and Anthony Blair's -- efforts to "re-brand" Britain as

a hot entrepreneurial society, thus helping it shed its cliched image

as a hide-bound tradition-oriented society, where the landed gentry

and propriety mattered more than rootless money and slick success.

The Saatchis, who immigrated to Britain from Iran, are certainly

examples of the new upward mobility that both the Tories and New

Labor encourage. Hatton and Walker make it clear that Saatchi is

not corrupt; for them, the system is necessarily corrupt in capitalism.

What they neglect to note is that it has encouraged and supported

a good deal of important art that has nothing to do with the kind of

quick-fix art that Saatchi generally admired -- art of lasting not

simply market value, that is, art that transcends the capitalist

system to offer values that from Hatton and Walker's standpoint

are alien to it.

Nonetheless, Hatton and Walker do make it clear that to have power

over art, as Saatchi does, is to have the ultimate power that money

can buy.

[DONALD KUSPIT is professor of art history and philosophy at SUNY

Stony Brook and A.D. White professor at large at Cornell University.]

============================

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