From the get go its made clear this programme isn’t really about art. In case you were wondering, it’s about Charles Saatchi’s incredible ego. Despite him not physically appearing in the show, every other sentence is praising him in some way, extolling his (undeniable) influence on the art world. Everything on the show is defined by Saatchi, even going as far as describing one of the other judges, Frank Cohen as the Saatchi of the North.
The prize is to appear at a Saatchi show in Moscow called Newspeak, which is not to be sniffed at. It’s a better prize than working for Alan Sugar. The format of the show is very similar to that of the apprentice, the group of wannabe art stars are given an unmanageable task to do in a short space of time, and judged on it, and the winner gets the prize. In this though, as the art world is so heavily dependant on networking and exposure, even those who don’t win will be a good few steps ahead of their peers, unlike the apprentice in which the contestants are roundly mocked and spat back out into the real world.
The show starts with an X factor style 2-minute presentation in front of the judges, in an abandoned warehouse. Various “how can that be art?” types are wheeled on and off for our amusement. There’s a guy who copied out War and Peace by hand, and some emails crumpled up into a ball. A couple of painterly painters are rejected too. Each of the contestants is also asked why what they’ve brought along is art, and are looked down on when they fail to answer such a complicated and loaded question on the spot, in front of a judging panel and TV cameras. Tracey Emin shouts down most of them, and already her role seems to be the Simon Cowell of the group, brutally dismissing the contestant’s attempts.
The criteria of what makes good art seems maddeningly vague from the start. Some of the artists that get past this first stage fail to answer this question properly, if at all. When one of the artists reverses the question onto the judges, they completely dodge it. Does the artist’s ability to explain himself or herself really affect the quality of the work? There’s also bizarrely few people at the audition. Considering around 2000 people a year graduate from art courses in the UK a year, and the career of an artist being uncertain at best, why were there only about 20 interviewees? Out of these 12 are selected to go through.
The first task they are set is life drawing, which of course, being conceptualists and not illustrators, they are rubbish at. The judges sneered at the lack of drawing skills they possessed, and I’m sure everyone at home did as well. This is used as a stick to beat them with later on when they are reduced from 12 to 6.
The twelve selected, that get enough airtime for me to form an opinion of, are listed below.
Saad Qureshi makes installations and videos and is from Pakistan. His work reflects this, and he goes on and on about it. He’s naturally charming and is profiled the most. His work is very art school, and not particularly good, although I like his titles.
Eugenie Scrase is the resident love to hate of the group chosen, ridiculously young at 19 and cute as a button, she is there to enrage the viewer by saying things like "there's no need for artists to study Life drawing" and producing "difficult" quasi readymades. Tracey fawns over everything she does, while saying Skills are really important. Where do you stand on this Tracey?
Suki Chan seems to be the most mature and, well, best, of the assembled group, the piece she shows at her interview, called interval II, is beautiful, and has the gods of olympus unanimously agreeing with her. Tracey Emin says it reminds her of things she's seen before, but can't remember who (the answer is Jeremy Deller's Turner prize piece) I think she'll be the winner, but this being a TV Docudrama, probably will drop out or burst into flames or something more exciting than that.
There are three painters in the group of twelve; one of them is dismissed outright. Another, Ben Lowe is an interior designer who hasn't been to art school. He's a normal bloke, nothing wrong with that, I expect him to be presented a fish out of water, a beacon of sanity amongst the “wacky” conceptualists.
Samuel Zealy presents quite interesting sculptures that dance with physical laws, relying on clever tricks, playing with our associations and the functionality of objects. He's the opposite of Eugenie really as Emin hates him. Bit of a likeable buffoon. There’s a fantastic scene where he explains why he made a decision about one of his pieces, and Emin’s face kind of folds in on itself, and she has a face like thunder. As below.
Rhys Himsworth presents a machine he's built that can draw, a pretty fantastic bit of engineering, he also presents a clear idea of what he will do with the 10 weeks with saatchi, which involves perfecting his design. Unfortunately for him, 10 weeks of someone hunched over a computer isn't particularly good television so he gets the boot.
Matt Clark presents a very swish and polished installation, enclosed in a chipboard box, which is very atmospheric, and evokes ideas of obsession and compulsion. He's kind of ripped off Ilya Kabokov though. And I don’t like that.
Saatchi is presented as a kind of omnipresent Lord Voldemort figure throughout, although never shown on screen, he is referenced constantly, and the voiceover constantly reminds you of his wealth, power and influence. Maybe it will turn out he’s been magically grafted onto the back of Emin’s head, like in Harry Potter. That would make for one hell of a finale.
In this first program, Matt Clark, Ben Lowe, Saad Qureshi, Samuel Zealy, Eugenie Scrase and Suki Chan make it through to the second round. One thing I noticed about the winning 6, is they are much more “photogenic” than the losers, and much more “based in the south of England” who I really felt for at the end of the show. To have something presented to you so tangibly close and then whipped away as entertainment feels wrong. I suppose it’s nothing new but that doesn’t make it less cruel.
Although this program is ostentatiously about Contemporary art, it’s really about Charles Saatchi first, entertainment second and Art is probably about eighth or ninth place, after subjecting people to Tracey Emin.
What with the Credit crunch really hammering the price of contemporary art, and lots going unsold at auctions, Saatchi hasn’t really been hitting the headlines. If Saatchi isn’t hitting the headlines he’s losing influence over the “art world” and his particular brand of art loses some of its value.
The last decade in art has been characterized by astronomic prices justifying a frenzied driving up of prices. With the credit crunch and the realization that most people in the world of finance were applying the principles of surrealism to investment banking, by making up impossible shit, there’s been a shift away from the idea that the market is always right. Maybe the work these impossibly large sums bought was in fact a load of old shite? By making this programme Saatchi is perpetuating the idea that this is the art that matters, and the opinion with the fattest wallet is right. And there is nothing else. When there quite clearly is.
Of course it’s not about art, which it isn’t, it’s about a TV programme people will watch. And as if to heighten the bizarrely unreal “art world” the program presents, next week’s task is produce a piece of large scale public art. I shit you not.
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Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it is described as being "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year"
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