MODERN ART OR WHAT

Cover. Table of Contents. STARS ILLUSTRATED. SPECIAL EDITION OF THE YEAR. P. 101

THE BIZARRE AND EXPENSIVE ART

The New Saatchi

Photos: Vermin Death Star by David Falconer (2000-02) (detail).

Art collectors do not collect art to make money. They collect art because they have money and want to turn it into something else. That might be respectability - the longing for legitimacy that drove New York's robber barons to pour dollars into august high culture. It might be the desire to participate in creativity. But more often than not it is power the collector craves. The power to make and break reputations, to influence museums, to establish critical consensus, to change history. Whether or not that is what Saatchi wanted, whether it is even anything he thinks about, it is what he has got. It is also what we want to know about.

Photo: Balancing The Beer Table by James Hopkins (2002)

It was launched with more hype than the Titanic, but the new Saatchi Gallery is showing signs that it will stay afloat for a lot longer. More than 21,000 people dodged past Damien Hirst's spotty Mini on the stairs of the County Hall museum in London during the bank holiday weekend to take a closer look at Tracey Emin's now notorious bed and ponder Sarah Lucas's ribald arrangements of fruit and vegetables. With such a tidal wave of publicity, a big turnout had been predicted but the gallery claims the numbers were "well beyond expectations". Impressive they might have been, but the throngs willing to part with £8.50 for a peep at Charles Saatchi's collection of work by Young British Artists were dwarfed by those trying to get a final look at the blood-curdling Aztecs show at the Royal Academy, which closed a few days earlier.

About 7,000 people paid to see the show on its final day, the biggest box office of any show since the RA's own record-breaking Monet extravaganza. The Aztecs will now tour to Berlin. If anything this shows the huge hunger there is for the visual arts in Britain. As the queue outside the Saatchi Gallery stretched to 100 metres on Monday, across the Thames at the National Gallery they were having to control access to the Titian show. Only 360 people an hour can see the paintings comfortably, and on Saturday more than 2,700 squeezed in. The clamour for tickets is likely to increase further as the exhibition enters its final three weeks. And downriver from the Saatchi at Bankside, nearly 100,000 people will have paid to see the Max Beckmann show at Tate Modern by the time it closes next month, an unusually large number for an artist who is far from a household name. Despite the good weather, which usually keeps arts lovers in their gardens, between Friday and Monday 55,000 people poured into Tate Modern, which has the added attraction of being free. Now the dust has settled after its trail-blazing opening, an average 15,000 people a day walk down the ramp into the bowels of the former power station. Despite the grandiose claims made for it before it opened, the Saatchi is never likely to be a serious rival to Tate Modern. Already its curators are trying to play down predictions that it would attract up to 750,000 in its first year. "We never used that figure ourselves," said William Miller, the gallery's spokesman. "We don't know where it came from. We would be more than happy with 450,000." But what has cheered the gallery is the radical change in the type of people they are attracting to County Hall. "Our main audience was the art world, the aficionados. Here we are getting families and lots of people from outside London - a very different spread of people completely." Continues next