Charles Saatchi saved my life (and I still hate his book)

Charles Saatchi saved my life. It’s true. It was 1986. I was 19 and helping the MoMart team install Saatchi’s incredible Anselm Kiefer and Richard Serra exhibition at his Boundary Row gallery in West London. Saatchi came round to see how the hang was going. We were in the middle of erecting a piece of Serra's that involved four heavy lead sheets leaning against each other in a house-of-cards style. We balanced one upright, as Charles walked in. Scott said to me, “Just hold this a moment” and turned towards his client. For a moment I thought I was going to have to hang on to a one-ton sheet of lead by myself: Serra’s sculptures had already killed one assistant and put the artist in a wheelchair for months. “Don’t let that young man hold that all by himself,” Saatchi said, and a couple of other strong men leaped to my assistance. Saved!

Yet despite this enormous debt, I have nothing good to say about Saatchi's new book My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic (Phaidon, £5.95)—a sign of just how bad it is. To his credit, Saatchi does come across as self-effacing, unpretentious, enthusiastic and urbane; but that’s about it, folks.

For three decades we have been waiting to hear how Charles Saatchi would respond to questions about his art collecting. We will have to go on waiting. We want to know about Charles the speculator; we want to know what he bought when, and what he sold when, and, please, for how much—like the Peter Doigs he bought rather late in the day from Victoria Miro, exhibited in his County Hall gallery and then sold in bulk to Sotheby’s a year later. But there’s nothing here about this. When asked the one blunt and difficult question in the whole book, “Are dealers artificially inflating prices?” Saatchi disingenuously replies “How do you artificially inflate prices? People either want to buy it or they don’t." What about dealers bidding up the work of contemporary artists they represent at auction to set new price points? Saatchi has nothing to say.

Those hoping for anecdotes and gossip will also be bitterly disappointed. It’s not only that there isn’t any: it’s that Saatchi denies all the previous dark legends. Marc Quinn’s blood head never melted in his fridge when his cleaner turned off the electricity. There are no anecdotes about the rows Saatchi had with the Japanese owner of his County Hall gallery (though a charming admission that this was “a challenge, which I clearly wasn’t up to"). And he did not destroy the market in Sandro Chia by selling a large number of his works quickly in the 1980s: all the works, he says, were placed via the artist’s galleries with important collectors.

I could accept all this if Saatchi had anything of interest to say about art. We want to know how he views the work of Damien Hirst, the Chapman brothers, or any of the other artists he collected early or in depth. As a collector who has influenced the course of art history, we might expect him to have some insights into the art. Yet, amazingly, he doesn’t. This is art in its blandest contemporary definition: a religion—“there is nothing as uplifting as standing before a great painting"—but a religion without parables, commandments, reflection or exegesis.

So what can we learn from this book? Given that even voids can carry great meaning, we may charitably conclude that someone with a good eye does not necessarily possess a good mouth: a collector who can spot brilliant artists early on in their career may not have the ability to explain their choices verbally. But the void means something in itself too. This is not a dishonest book. Saatchi says, convincingly, that he is not a cynic. He denies collecting art for investment (“the more you like art, the more art you like. So I find it easy to buy lots of it, and seeing art as an investment would take away all the fun.) The most revealing answer, given twice, is that he collects art in order “to show it.” In other words, he is quite literally a showman. What interests him is the reception of the work. He wants to show off his work—and to win the approval of the public for his "taste."

But is it really his taste? If he buys work to show it, then it is bought to attract attention. This logic is a kind of void of taste. Saatchi is not actually buying work he likes: he is buying work that he think will make an impact on the public, which means, nowadays, work that will lead to a story in the media. This tells you all you need to know about the economy of short-term success in today’s art world.

I have my own theory about the secret of Saatchi, and it came to me while I was eating a delicious crème brulée. Two decades after he saved my life, Charles Saatchi invited me out to dinner. I was piggy-backing on the invite of my friend Cristina Ruiz, then editor of the Art Newspaper. We went to an insanely expensive hotel restaurant in Kensington. I was there to entertain Charles, I quickly discerned. He wanted me to regale him with funny stories from my TV show, Art Safari. I felt, in a small way, that he had identified another version of the subversive spirit of the yBas (young British artists) in my TV programmes. Charles reminded me of my classmates at my public school, aged around 15. He liked to provoke people, but was too shy to say what he really thought about anything. He didn’t answer any of my questions about his buying and selling. He had a cheeky grin and I had the impression that his mass acquisition of the yBas had been a kind of schoolboy prank. He wanted to try something out and see how far he could take it—and he was amazed by the outcome. He had no idea that this strategy would, in combination with the personalities of the artists and the media interest, create such a global cultural legacy.

Saatchi got lucky with Hirst and the other yBas. He’s probably been trying to repeat his success ever since, by buying mountains of photography, or paintings, or Chinese stuff. But, although that’s given London a series of terrific and exciting exhibitions which have covered global trends in art well, he’s never had the success he craved, that of launching a worldwide movement again. And this is probably why he tends to sell it all so quickly and move on. In the end, I "paid" for my dinner by taking off my shirt and showing Charles the Wim Delvoye tattoo on my back. He liked it but refused to make me an offer. Then I went home.