In common with the art world as a whole, I’ve long wondered about the economics of the country’s biggest contemporary art operator, Charles Saatchi (of course). Thanks to a remarkable interview by Stuart Jeffries, published in the Guardian, we now know a lot more. At first sight it looks quite straightforward - Marc Quinn’s notorious Self, ‘a cast of the artist’s head in nine pints of his own frozen blood’, cost Saatchi £13,000. Last year he sold the work for £1.5 million.
Marc Quinn, Self, 1991
That’s the time-honoured hobby of buying it cheap and selling it dear. But Saatchi doesn’t, apparently, follow the first part of this policy: ‘I’m not in it for the money. I make a lot of money from the stuff I sell, but then I pay incredibly high prices for the things I want. That’s how I get what I like’. Rubbing in the point, ‘If that means I pay ten times the market price, I don’t mind doing it’.
How do you make sense of that? Well, the £13,000 for Self wasn’t a very high price by art world standards, but it may well have been a very big sum for Quinn at that time. According to the Guardian piece, Saatchi’s device for recovering those incredibly high prices is to put them in his shows: ‘I always buy art with the idea that I’m going to show it’. That was the point of opening his original gallery in Boundary Road, St John’s Wood, followed by the disastrous venture into County Hall, to be succeeded now by a vast place in Chelsea. But Saatchi has also profited greatly from shows staged by others, notably the Royal Academy, which is to exhibit recent Saatchi purchases of American art in October under the title ‘USA Today’.
Charles’s hope is to repeat (at long last) his success with a previous generation of Americans and then with the ‘New British Artists’. Efforts to repeat the latter’s triumphs have been thwarted by their very success. When the NBAs appeared, Saatchi was more or less their only buyer. Without his prices and mass purchases, the artists could never have risen so far so fast. But today’s artists are less to Saatchi’s taste and the competition much fiercer. He cites a hedge fund investor, who allegedly made $500 million last year, who owns 212 Kippenbergers.
Martin Kippenberger, Paris Bar Berlin, 1993
Kippenberger who? Martin Kippenberger, an Austrian, died in 1997, aged only 44, after producing an enormous amount of figurative art and making an enormous amount of money - ‘as much as possible’. A boastful fellow, he called himself ‘the ultimate embodiment of the artist of the 80s’. Saatchi claims to know where all the 60 or 70 good Kippenbergers are, but maintains that ‘most of it was so-so’. That doesn’t matter, though: given four or five years, the hedger will make a fortune from his Kippenberger lode - somewhat, it seems, to Saatchi’s disgust.
Yet the hedger’s modus operandi doesn’t sound too different from Saatchi’s own. Both are light years away from the painstaking care which collectors like the great Peter Ludwig take over the selection of an artist and the artist’s best work. That’s what I always recommend over the Saatchi method - maybe with a touch of sour grapes. The Guardian piece says that he bought a depiction of suburban houses by British artist David Hepher ‘on a trip to Paris’.
Not so: Saatchi bought this excellent work in London, from the Angela Flowers Gallery. It was sold in Paris when Saatchi rapidly turned his attention to the Americans. That Hepher was Saatchi’s very first painting. He never bought from Angela again. Her Gallery has done fine without him, but still…
