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Charles Saatchi's on-line art gallery
Patrick D. Hazard
Every artist a star (in cyberspace):
Charles Saatchi's on-line art gallery
PATRICK D. HAZARD
Have you yet grown accustomed to the new on-line museology, with Witold Rybczynski taking you by the hand, guiding you through a Slate lecture on architecture? Or Alice Rawsthorn showing you how to look at design in the International Herald Tribune? (See my earlier post on “The new museology.”)
Well, brace yourself. That British advertising genius, Charles Saatchi, who has made an art of advertising his own uncanonical art collection, has struck again. Between galleries (he closed the one on the South Bank of the Thames in 2005, and his new 50,000-square-foot jobbie on the Kings Road won’t open until Summer 2007), what’s an antsy ad man to do? Answer: He opens a free web site for art students (www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/stuart), a kind of YouTube for the aspiring artist. (That “stuart” in the URL address doesn’t allude to former British royalty; it’s short for “student art.”)
And artists of the world are uniting, in droves, to cash in on their own free one-page website, as offered by Saatchi. His site is already attracting 3 million hits a day! Can you dream that Saatchi will make a world sensation of you, as he’s done for Damien Hirst and other former unknowns? This free venue is called Your Gallery, and it already has 20,700 contributions, including 2,000 pieces of video art. Some 1,300 student artists have already created website pages. Eight hundred new artists sign up each week, 6,000 so far from the UK and 6,000 more from the USA, and the rest from any and everywhere in the world. An aesthetic UN!
The collectors are lining up
Nobody gets a cent from the transactions so far. But international collectors and museum curators are already lining up to cash in on the Damien Hirsts of their hoped-for futures. “When I launched the site,” says Saatchi, “I took the view that the best thing was to leave it alone for the first year and purposely not buy anything, because I didn’t want to compromise what the site was supposed to do: appeal to a wide group of students.”
In addition to publicizing their own work, these students can share ideas about their art education with their global peers. There’s always a Discussion Board in this egalitarian ethos.
Time Magazine catches a scent
Add to this Time magazine’s Person of the Year being truly You, and the media horizon of art creation and appreciation begins to take on new dimensions. Imagine Time managing editor Rick Stengel secretly ordering 6,965,000 rectangles of mylar so every You out there could see his/her own reflection on the cover page.
Saatchi’s site even includes several thoughtful essays on the epistemology and metaphysics of all of this inventive commotion. Wikipedia is hardly an infallible Bible. And amateur bloggings are by definition subprofessional. So will the esthetic equivalents of Rush Limbaugh ranters take over Stuart? Who knows? But art students could do worse than having Witold Rybczynski and Charles Saatchi for tutors and sales reps. We’ll see, as the art experience goes cyber.
To read a response, click here.
To read a commentary by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
Charles Saatchi's on-line art gallery
PATRICK D. HAZARD
Have you yet grown accustomed to the new on-line museology, with Witold Rybczynski taking you by the hand, guiding you through a Slate lecture on architecture? Or Alice Rawsthorn showing you how to look at design in the International Herald Tribune? (See my earlier post on “The new museology.”)
Well, brace yourself. That British advertising genius, Charles Saatchi, who has made an art of advertising his own uncanonical art collection, has struck again. Between galleries (he closed the one on the South Bank of the Thames in 2005, and his new 50,000-square-foot jobbie on the Kings Road won’t open until Summer 2007), what’s an antsy ad man to do? Answer: He opens a free web site for art students (www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/stuart), a kind of YouTube for the aspiring artist. (That “stuart” in the URL address doesn’t allude to former British royalty; it’s short for “student art.”)
And artists of the world are uniting, in droves, to cash in on their own free one-page website, as offered by Saatchi. His site is already attracting 3 million hits a day! Can you dream that Saatchi will make a world sensation of you, as he’s done for Damien Hirst and other former unknowns? This free venue is called Your Gallery, and it already has 20,700 contributions, including 2,000 pieces of video art. Some 1,300 student artists have already created website pages. Eight hundred new artists sign up each week, 6,000 so far from the UK and 6,000 more from the USA, and the rest from any and everywhere in the world. An aesthetic UN!
The collectors are lining up
Nobody gets a cent from the transactions so far. But international collectors and museum curators are already lining up to cash in on the Damien Hirsts of their hoped-for futures. “When I launched the site,” says Saatchi, “I took the view that the best thing was to leave it alone for the first year and purposely not buy anything, because I didn’t want to compromise what the site was supposed to do: appeal to a wide group of students.”
In addition to publicizing their own work, these students can share ideas about their art education with their global peers. There’s always a Discussion Board in this egalitarian ethos.
Time Magazine catches a scent
Add to this Time magazine’s Person of the Year being truly You, and the media horizon of art creation and appreciation begins to take on new dimensions. Imagine Time managing editor Rick Stengel secretly ordering 6,965,000 rectangles of mylar so every You out there could see his/her own reflection on the cover page.
Saatchi’s site even includes several thoughtful essays on the epistemology and metaphysics of all of this inventive commotion. Wikipedia is hardly an infallible Bible. And amateur bloggings are by definition subprofessional. So will the esthetic equivalents of Rush Limbaugh ranters take over Stuart? Who knows? But art students could do worse than having Witold Rybczynski and Charles Saatchi for tutors and sales reps. We’ll see, as the art experience goes cyber.
To read a response, click here.
To read a commentary by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
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