Saatchi's new book stirs up old controversies

Posted by News on 18 September 2009 at 1:54pm

Those who’ve been complaining that Charles Saatchi is too powerful to be so private will be happily devouring the reclusive supercollector’s recently released ‘tell all’. But as ARTnews reports, the publication last month of My Name Is Charles Saatchi and I’m an Artoholic hasn’t made all the old controversies go away. The book is presented as answers to a series of question posed to him by a committee of interested parties – journalists, critics, members of the public. Among the questions asked of the former adman and future television impresario (the BBC will be airing his art-talent reality show in October) was whether he felt responsibility towards artists whose work he had sold in bulk: “Of course some artists get upset if you sell their work”, Saatchi responds. “But it doesn’t help them whimpering about it, and telling anyone who will listen.” Italian painter Sandro Chia was famously one such person, and though Saatchi’s sudden exiling of seven of Chia’s works from his collection did seem to precede a waning of interest in the artist (as was described in a Vanity Fair article more than 20 years ago), questions of motivation and intention behind the buying, selling and swapping of these works remain – and will surely continue to remain – unanswered. In their place: a cautiously phrased minor factual correction from Chia’s then-dealer in the US; words of support for Saatchi from Chia’s then-dealer in Europe; and Chia’s own confusing assertion that Saatchi was "the one who started saying that he dumped my work and destroyed my career, which was absolutely not true… I freed myself from the old mechanism and in a sense I had freed myself from the burden of the gallery. I’m independent, so, thanks to Saatchi."

5 Comments

Comment by CAP on 18 September 2009 at 2:51pm: This doesn't sound much different from the Q&As on his website.

Comment by Christopher John Hobby on 19 September 2009 at 9:27am: Apparently the book launch was a flop and now he is afraid to go out to his favourite fish restaurant with Nige. The Independant ran a story recently asking if he is arts mr.nice guy. No he is not. One Question that he did not include in his book was Mr. Saatchi are you a bully and do you approve of bulling. He would have had to answer yes.
Will the real Charles Saatchi please stand up, and is there a newspaper in the UK that is not influended by him being a member of the St. John's Wood Maffia that will dare to print a not so glowing story about him!

Just like all the other articles, you are afraid to show the other side of Charles Saatchi, Saatchi the bully, Saatchi the destroyer of artists.

My prospects for further my career as an artist has been shot to pieces by Charles new toy his online gallery. For almost four years I have been the victim of his online gallery. Virtually on a daily basis by reputation has been destroyed in his online chat room, forum and magazine blogs. Until i got the uk police and my lawyer involved two years ago he allowed anyone to anonymously publish libel and defamation on his website, and there it would stay forever in cyberspace, endlessly turning up in google searches on my name! Why you can even break the law and impersonate the police, as some anonymous poster did almost two years ago in publishing a Dorset police wanted poster with a photograph of me on appropriated from a local newspaper, encouraging readers to report me to the police for the careless actions of my impostor. You could even at one time publish the grossest libel and name your victim in his front page online magazine blogs and forums, until a lawyer and police investigation gets them to moderate and review all publications for their approval before publishing!

The truth is Charles Saatchi is a well known bully. Apart from saying to his brother Lord Maurice Nathan Saatchi that he could not believe that they came from the same womb, he bullied Maurice. At one time in the boardroom of their advertising offices, Maurine was reviewing a current ad campaign and Charles got up onto the table and walked across to Maurice and hit him over the head with a chair. In a bitter dispute with his landlord at county hall, the pop impressario Pete Waterman, Waterman describes a phone call from Charles as being simply a diatribe of abuse, and in a court case Charles gets hold of Watermans colleague Peter Caselton by the throat and tells him he would make sure that he went to bed with Waterman in jail!

Still, I need not rant on in an online comment. I invite you to view several of my video diaries showing what saatchi-online is truly like, abusive, homophobic, racist, and more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRkuJnX-DHc

In the following video you can see how his director Philly Adams implied blackmail to me if i did not stop visiting their website. A website where just anyone can surf into their chatroom http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/chatlive. Where, despite them having a notice claiming that they have email registration to chat, you can totally ignore this and choose a thousand different id's a day and supply a totally made up email address, and be given instant access to chat and abuse, especially as one can also use the firefox browser and instal the Tor Vidalia proxy button into it, and then get into the chatroom on a proxy server, replacing their own ip address with one on the other side of the planet, and you can just press a button in Tor and change the ip address six times a minute, thereby encouraging the grossest abuse one could possibly imagine :-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTJ6HEfXjSw

In the following video from over two years ago you can see a comedy noir comic strip i made of just a little of the abuse i received on his toy :-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGSA3tkDojQ

In the following video you can listen to one of his website stalking abusers in a voicemail threat :-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H210-BaeP7c

and in the following four part video diary, you can see screenshots of the abuse published on his website by an arrested stalker. Two people, one an artist member of his website were arrested for their stalking and abuse on his website in april 2008 :-

http://www.archive.org/details/RonnieHobbyHomophobicHateCampaign2001-2009PartL

http://www.archive.org/details/RonnieHobby2001-2009HomophobicHateCampaignPartLl

http://www.archive.org/details/RonnieHobbyHomophobicHateCampaign2001-2009PartLll

http://www.archive.org/details/RonnieHobbyHomophobicHateCampaign2001-2009PartIvThis is me :-

http://www.artreview.com/profile/ChristopherJohnHobby

ps. i do find one of your comments in this article highly amusing :-

"Johnny Craddock to Nigella's Fanny"

Who amongst the media frater

Comment by Christopher John Hobby on 19 September 2009 at 1:16pm

Comment by CAP on 20 September 2009 at 1:10am: Chris no-one believes all the crap posted in chatrooms, comments threads etc.

But I can second the anecdotal evidence of Saatchmo's bullying.

At a Slade Post-Grad show some years ago, he tried to buy an artist's entire show, and then beat her down on the price, (a kind of bulk discount) claiming inclusion in the Saatchi collection would 'make' her career. As it was, she had sold one or two things to colleagues and was not about to reverse those red dots in order to accommodate Mr Greed, but she was not asking a fortune for them in the first place!

She has gone on to have a respectable career, but there definitely is this other side to Saatchmo.