What is going on when the greatest authority on modern art is not a critic or an expert but a man who has specialised in advertising? Charles Saatchi. If he says something is good then the price rises immediately. Recently he has "bought almost the entire degree shows of three postgraduate students at The Royal Academy Schools."
Good for them you may say. It certainly is good for them if making money is the only criterion by which art may be assessed.
A few years ago he bought a portrait of Princess Diana by Stella Vine called "Hi Paul can you come over." It is a daub, seemingly done by a child's hand, the face of the princess is a coloured atrocity and the title is splashed onto the background.
Stella Vine is made. Her paintings are now selling well, God help us. Beryl Cooke had more talent in her little finger than this woman has in her whole body. With a Beryl Cooke you have to admire her consistency of approach if not her (little) painting talent, there is humour in her work, there is love in her choice of people she paints..... This Stella Vine daub shows us nothing about the subject, in fact the face could be anyone's, or rather no one's - because it is not a carefully executed drawing and painting.
As David Lee wrote in The Times last week :"Her work is jaw-droppingly inept."
Charles Saatchi is a fraud. Yet the art world listens to him and goes out and buys the stuff he recommends.
Has the art world gone barking mad?
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