Later this year Charles Saatchi will attempt to repeat the formula of the most successful contemporary art exhibition in living memory, "Sensation." He is lending a large number of his latest acquisitions for an exhibition of new American painting at the Royal Academy in October. "USA Today" will profile the work of a new generation of American artists.
"Sensation" was the exhibition of Saatchi's collection of yBas, the young British artists, at the Royal Academy in 1997. It included Damien Hirst's sliced and pickled cows, Tracey Emin's tent, the Chapman brothers' Tragic Anatomies and Marcus Harvey's portrait of Myra Hindley, made from the imprints of children's hands, which caused a spat of media outrage. In 1999, the show went on to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, where Chris Ofili's painting of the madonna, containing elephant dung, caused yet more sensational media coverage, and which put the yBas firmly on the international collectors' circuit.
Saatchi's achievement was remarkable: one man's buying power had been transformed into an art market trend; his personal taste had become art history. He was to 1990s London what Lorenzo il Magnifico was to quattrocento Florence, although without Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Botticelli, the British version wasn't quite as good. Today the most famous work in Saatchi's collection, Damien Hirst's shark in the tank, is widely described as the most important work of art of the 1990s, and was recently purchased by an American collector for $12m. At the beginning of the 1990s, Britain was considered a backwater on the international contemporary art scene. By the beginning of the new century, it had become a centre. Some of us think the quality of much of the art was so low that this shouldn't have happened, but there is a moment when art becomes so closely associated with its era that art history simply becomes history.
The parallels between the work of the new American artists and that of the yBas in the 1990s is uncanny. Like the yBas, the new American artists are producing the kind of art whose concept can be grasped as quickly as a billboard ad. Kelley Walker, for example, produces a kind of Warholian pop derivative—newspaper photos of police violence against a black protestor are painted over with abstract splatters of paint. In Love Poem, Adam Cvijanovic imagines suburban LA as if torn from the ground by a tornado. SUVs, nice homes and malls crunch together, Katrina-style.
Like the yBas, the themes of the new American artists are consumerism, popular culture and the media. Josephine Meckseper's chosen form is the shop display cabinet, in which she combines perspex legs clad in pringle-pattern stockings with photographs of political protest, fashion adverts and an occasional toilet plunger. In the Whitney biennial, the curators said of her: "Deconstructing the media's strategy of mixing advertising and editorial content, she exposes how we have become consumers not only of products but also of news and politics"—so now you know.
As with the yBas, the work is brash, colourful, glossy and meticulously executed, but often a bit too knowing about where it should slot into art history and whom it follows from. Banks Violette, for example, produces mininimalist interpretations of heavy metal and gothic pop culture. Shiny black cones and rectangular planes are laid out in an echo of a drumkit in Hate Them. It's the first contemporary art version of all those newspaper stories of teenagers who listen to death metal and then go out on a killing spree.
And also like the yBas, among the obvious and predictable, there is an occasional moment of brilliance. One artist we will be hearing a lot more about is Wangechi Mutu, who studied sculpture and anthropology, and produces beautiful collages of magazine photos, African masks and medical illustrations.
So will Saatchi do it again, this time with his American sensation? There are obvious differences between the yAas and yBas. The latter were already familiar to British audiences through previous shows at Saatchi's north London gallery and headlines in the Sun. Few of us (myself included) have heard of the new American artists. Nor is Saatchi the only collector in the market, the way he was in the early days of the yBas.
But there may be a second, commercial difference between these two sensational exhibitions. In the 1990s, Saatchi was a collector, who treasured his acquistions by young Britsh artists; nowadays he seems to be becoming ever more of a speculative dealer (the term the art world use for him is "market-maker"). Informed sources say that Saatchi has already put up for auction a number of the paintings by artists that he has exhibited or presented in the catalogues of his "Triumph of Painting" shows. The Art Newspaper reports that he bought Cecily Brown's oil painting "High Society" for £10,000 in 1998, and had it auctioned at Sotheby's last month for half a million pounds. So Saatchi is using his private museum as a sales room. That's his business, but what if he immediately starts selling off the young American artists he's showing at the RA? That would mean that a renowned public institution has become Saatchi's own financial instrument.
