HOW TO BLOW A MILLION Luxury Goods Special

You've been framed

David Lee on how a cabal of 17 manipulate the art world to their own financial benefit

LET us suppose you are a man or woman of taste, and not short of a bob or two. All you lack is credibility; and so, if sir, madam, you will allow, I will direct you to exactly what you need. A Damien Hirst spot painting, judiciously hung between drawing-room sconces, will immediately identify you as a person of appropriately with-it interests, and filthy rich to boot.

Whether it is a spotty one or one of the swirlers he makes by pouring paint on a revolving canvas, a Hirst-brand image will set you back about £100,000 — far more than most of the best Old Master land- scapes. His museum-size picklings cost even more, up to half a million, though, if you're feeling mean, you can adorn your mantelpiece with a codling or a haddock in a Perspex box (let's call it a sketch for the shark) at the price of a mere sports car.

The only questions you may ask your- self, as you reach for your wallet, are why this supposedly avant-garde stuff has been lapped up by corporate collections, and even by Downing Street, in the first, hot flush of Cool Britannia? What happened to all the conventional art, to which this was supposed to present an irreverent alternative? And why the hell does it all cost so much?

Welcome to what one might call the State Academy: a cruel, exclusive tyranny in con- temporary art, in which state sponsorship is turned to private gain for an intelligent handful; and welcome, of course, to the Turner Prize, the State Academy's annual Salon, which has just opened to the usual and desired — indignation. The centre of attention has been Tracey Emin's installa- tion, 'My Bed'. Many will be attracted to this display in the same way that they would be teased into a fairground tent to see The Hairiest Woman in the World, and the Tate, in its perverse way, will take the crowds as a sign of popularity. By the way, one of Emin's 30-second smutty drawings, complete with four-letter words (or five; she's no speller) would have set you back four grand before the controversy. It'll probably be double that by the time you read this. How has it hap- pened? How have we got here?

The collector should perhaps tinder- stand, before he buys, that the Turner Prize, ,and the entire world of contempo- rary art, is dominated and manipulated by a handful of individuals. By my count, the whole racket is run by 17 people. There are three art dealers: Anthony d'Offay, Nicholas Logsdail of Lisson Gallery and Jay Jopling of White Cube, who represents Hirst and Emin. There are three Tate employees: Turner Prize chairman, Sir Nicholas Serota, Lewis Biggs, head of the Liverpool Tate (and also on the Arts Coun- cil and British Council) and Lars Nittve, a Swede appointed to head the new Bankside Tate. There are three from the Arts Coun- cil: artists Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, and the head of visual arts, Mar- jorie Allthorpe-Guyton (who, like Serota, also serves on the British Council and has judged the Turner Prize). There are six directors of Arts Council-funded galleries in London and the provinces (Serota is for- merly a director of two of these); one critic, the reliably uncritical Richard Cork; and one influential Tate trustee, Michael Craig- Martin, an artist-professor at Goldsmiths', the country's main production line for self- styled conceptual artists.

These are the fixers, who make or influ- ence every important decision in the con- temporary visual arts; and then there is Charles Saatchi, but we will come to him later. First, as you prepare to stump up for your formaldehyde fish, and you marvel again at the price, you should understand how these people use taxpayers' money to inflate the market. You have to understand the protracted orgy of mutual backscratch- ing which is the Arts Council.

Thanks to the Lottery, the Arts Council's funds have now doubled to about £500 mil- lion, which is a bit like entrusting a drug addict with keys to the dispensary. The eight art galleries which receive the bulk of their revenue from the Arts Council, and whose directors are always former employees of the Council, show only avant-garde work. They are uninterested in and probably unaware of anything else. Older, even well-established artists, especially if they are conservative enough to be painters, need not apply. Like- wise, young artists of a conventional bent. In these state-subsidised seedbeds are nurtured the careers of potential Turner Prize nominees — and not only them. In the last year, the publicly funded South London Art Gallery has staged major shows of two successful young artists, Gavin Turk and Marc Quinn, both repre- sented by the ubiquitous Jay Jopling's White Cube. It is debatable whether public money should be spent boosting the repu- tations — and the prices — of those who have already made it.

Two of the Arts Council's all-powerful controlling panel of ten are artists: Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor. A pamphlet could be written on each, demonstrating how their careers were nurtured by publicly funded galleries and commissions. As for- mer Turner Prize winners, both are repre- sented by plush dealers (Gormley by, you guessed it, Jopling); dealers whose other artists may also be hoping for exhibitions in Arts Council venues and Lottery money for public art schemes. The scandal is that recipients of state money are also responsi- ble for handing it out.

Take the current exhibition at the pub- licly funded Serpentine Gallery (£350,000 p.a.), which features Jane and Louise Wil- son, twins who make multi-screen videos of stultifying banality. In order to make the most tedious of the lot, which was shot in the Palace of Westminster, they were awarded an Arts Council lottery grant of £19,140 (incidentally, they also received £10,000 last year from the Arts Council). The Wilson twins are already successful, widely exhibited artists who were nominat- ed for the Turner Prize on the back of exhibitions in Hanover and the USA. They are represented commercially by Nicholas Logsdail's Lisson Gallery, one of Europe's richest and most successful dealers in con- temporary art. Five of the Lisson Gallery's artists have already won the Turner Prize. So, why didn't the Lisson Gallery accept normal business risks and fund the new Serpentine video?

It seems that for the handful of dealers who supply' artists to the Turner Prize shortlist, the process may be made risk- free. Public money buoys up new work, which is eventually sold for the profit of artist and gallery alike. Does this not repre- sent a misuse of what we are insistently told are scarce resources for the arts?

Oh yes, by the way, Anish Kapoor, like the Wilson twins, is represented by the Lis- son Gallery. Which brings us neatly to a long-time supporter of the Serpentine Gallery, and also coincidentally a buyer of work by the Wilson twins: Charles Saatchi, a man who, in his importance in the new State Academy for the Arts, is second only to Serota — and perhaps even beats him.

Despite his flamboyant claims of reclu- siveness, Saatchi's activities always manage to leak. As we know, he is an advertising magnate, one who instinctively understands that promotion, hyperbole, branding and the visibility of a commodity are more important than reality; superficiality more important than substance.

Damien Hirst, for example, is virtually the creation of Saatchi, who owns the artist's most important pieces. Saatchi has used his considerable wealth to corner the market in Turner Prize art, which he has bought and sold in staggering quantities, often carting off entire exhibitions. Barely any artist on the State Academy's books has not had their work owned in bulk, at some stage, by Saatchi. Over the last 15 years, precisely that period during which the institutionalising of conceptual art has taken place, he has probably bought and sold more work than any other individual in the entire history of art. He is referred to as a collector, but he shows no particu- lar instinct for discrimination or discern- ment.

Reports of his buying sprees would rather suggest that he suffers from a chronic addic- tion to shopping. Ten years ago he jetti- soned a massive holding of blue-chip 20th- century art and fashionable British work and began volume purchases from unknown artists, in some instances coming to own vir- tually their entire oeuvre. He loans and donates work to the Tate Gallery. The Arts Council received 100 works by 64 artists from the Saatchi warehouse last year alone. Rapidly, Saatchi has assumed a position akin to a stock-market guru: when he buys an artist's work it is a conspicuous endorse- ment and others follow suit; when he sells, the artist is dead in the water.

We will probably never know exactly how the great trick has been done, how reputa- tions have been stage-managed and mar- keted in the Nineties; but you can take it from me that the few art dealers who mat- ter, and especially Jay Jopling, have learnt from Saatchi the value of publicity for its own sake. So we have arrived in this bewil- dering world, where an artist is only as good as the publicity he or she can gener- ate. Tracey Emin is a star because she has a modest genius for self-advertisement. That she can't draw, can't write, is thick and has no creative imagination, are imma- terial because in today's populist Britain these are not impediments to success.

7 think the sheets were by John Lewis.' In her way she is the personification of State Art in the 1990s: a complete nonenti- ty, promoted as the champion of all possi- ble accomplishments. Naturally, Saatchi owns Emin's most famous work. It has been awe-inspiring to watch the way the Saatchi-favoured artists have had their careers charted and controlled by gossip and manipulated newspaper features. It was recently stated that the first thing a graduating art student should do is sign up with the most expensive PR consultancy he or she can afford.

As auction records tumbled around him, Saatchi has been selling works by those artists featured in the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997. It was a considerable coup for a dealer to have his stock exhibited so prominently in the capi- tal's finest galleries. The same show is cur- rently attracting record crowds in Brooklyn, following a publicity campaign of exquisite cleverness, which even suckered Mayor Giuliani of New York. One can only guess at the real influence of Charles Saatchi in the evolution of the State Academy, but, wherever one probes, there he is, pulling strings in the background.

When the winner was announced a fort- night ago of the John Moores Prize, Britain's major painting award and one which has been taken over by the State Academy, it came as no surprise that almost all the work of the unknown winner, Michael Raedecker, was already owned by Saatchi. Incidentally, the Moores was judged this year by the Times art critic Richard Cork, who was until last year chair- man of the visual arts panel of the Arts Council, and by another State Academy member, the director of an Arts Council- funded gallery in Birmingham. Needless to say, both are also former judges of the Turner Prize.

A few days after the Moores winner was announced, a press release was published heralding large sculptures planned for the outside of the Millennium Dome. Who were among the winners? Kapoor and Gormley, of course, and all but two of the seven artists were former Turner Prize nominees. Who were the judges? Richard Cork, naturally; the director of the Ser- pentine Gallery; a former employee of the Serpentine Gallery; the Tate's Lewis Biggs, who sits on the visual arts panel of both the Arts Council and British Council and who himself received £1.7 million of Arts Council Lottery money last year to curate the abysmal Artranspennine 98 sculpture sprawl; Richard Calvocoressi, formerly of the Scottish Arts Council and currently a member of the British Coun- cil's arts panel; and, finally, none other than Saatchi himself.

It had already been announced a fort- night earlier that Saatchi's ex-wife, who happens to be a rich collector of State Academy work but has neither critical nor art historical credentials, selected works for the Dome's interior. Are there so few capa- ble of discrimination that a speculator like Saatchi has to do the choosing? He is, after all, a dealer with financial interests in cer- tain artists, including, you won't be sur- prised to hear, three of the seven (he's already unloaded a vast holding in a fourth) whom he helped select for the Dome project.

Rarely a week now passes without an example of the State Academy consolidating its influence. Permutations of the same few judges select/curate/promote/advance per- mutations of the same few artists. The story of their byzantine workings and wheeler- dealings, of how this cabal managed to insti- tutionalise avant-garde art, so much of which exhibits so little discernible merit, to the financial advantage of so few, will doubt- less be written by those with the time to probe deeply. For the time being, let me end with a word of reassurance for you, the potential buyer. The art of Damien and his pals is as secure an investment as gilts. Both, after all, are state-sponsored.

David Lee is editor of Art Review.