Private view

Two idiotic notions emerged from the recent fire in an east London storage warehouse which frazzled hundreds of works of art. The works lost included over 50 paintings by the late Patrick Heron, a decade’s worth of work by the painter Gillian Ayres, and some of the most notorious works owned by Charles Saatchi, including the Chapman brothers’ Hell and the tent by Tracey Emin entitled Everyone I Have Ever Slept With.

The first idiocy was the idea that Charles Saatchi and some of the artists whose work was lost were getting their come-uppance after years of hype and charlatanism.…