There’s a fine old-fashioned row over the Tate Gallery and its purchase of The Upper Room, representing the 13 Stations of the Cross, by the British artist Chris Ofili for a healthy £600,000.
Chris Ofili The Upper Room 1999-2002 © Courtesy Chris Ofili - Afroco and Victoria Miro Gallery
The fuss isn’t about the merit of the works, which are, however, said to be decomposing somewhat, but over the propriety of the transaction. Ofili, who is relatively young, is a Trustee of the Tate - which no doubt was delighted to recruit a hot Young British Artist (also, as it happens, a black one). But the malcontents wish to know how Sir Nicholas Serota, the titan of all the Tates, can justify buying from a Trustee in this manner.
It’s not just Ofili whose pockets are benefiting, of course, but those of his dealer, Victoria Miro. She has raised half the money needed for the Tate to buy the work. Much of that charitable loot, however, will end up in her own hands.
All this is manna from heaven to those who suspect the art world of being infinitely corruptible. In any controversy, the Tate is quite likely to be involved - because it has a near-monopoly of influence on the contemporary art scene, apart from the activities of art tycoon Charles Saatchi. The latter was once thought to be exercising too much influence on Serota. Although the two have since fallen out, lo and behold here’s the secretive Saatchi, bobbing up in the Ofili saga. Two months before the Ofili purchase was announced, Saatchi sold an Ofili painting for £550,000 in New York - four times the previous record for this artist.
What’s really happening? It has little to do with misbehaviour - if Saatchi sold with advance knowledge of the Tate purchase, so what? If he bought with prior knowledge, it looks worse, but many people must have known about the Ofili transaction.
The real villain is the huge escalation in contemporary art prices. High prices encourage high greed, and high greed stretches the bounds of integrity. Dealers like Miro get the room to argue (as Serota did on her behalf with the Ofili) that a large price is actually a wondrous bargain. The Miro-Tate combination worked in much the same way in a transaction with which I was involved.
But I don’t think either art lovers or collectors should worry unduly. The bulk of the transactions and most of the dealers are absolutely straight. As for the artists, some are, some aren’t. But they, too, are becoming rich enough to afford honesty. For example, Damian Hirst has bought a 300-bedroom chateau in the West of England, maintains a huge staff partly to supply an eager market with lesser art works, and is opening his own large art gallery.
As for Ofili, the prices his works are now fetching represents a huge return on the cost of the elephant dung which features in large dollops on his pictures (much to my bafflement, I should add). But once an artist becomes fashionable with the curators of the world, the sky has a very high limit.
