From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
A Bonfire of the Vanities
The fire that destroyed the Saatchi collection was no catastrophe.
"Pseuds Corner" is a regular feature of that great bastion of British civilization, Private Eye. It lampoons intellectual pretension by publishing a roundup of the most pompous, fatuous and self-indulgently obtuse pronouncements of the preceding two weeks. The section normally features a half-dozen or so items, but the magazine's editors may want to consider doubling the space allotment next time to accommodate the gusher of nonsense lately emanating from Britain's art establishment.
On Monday, fire destroyed a London warehouse containing more than 100 works of contemporary art belonging to Charles Saatchi--all of it created in the past 10 years or so by the so-called Young British Artists. These YBAs, such as Damien Hirst, were seen on this side of the Atlantic a few years back in the (in)famous "Sensation!" show at the Brooklyn Museum.
Among the works destroyed in the fire were Tracey Emin's "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963-1995," a tent embroidered with the names of her lovers and other friends, and "Hell" by Jake and Dinos Chapman. The brothers had departed from their usual idiom--life-size statues of naked children with genitals where their noses should be--to create a sprawling installation of custom-made toy soldiers committing atrocities.
Art disasters normally have a visceral impact. Such incidents as the looting of the Baghdad Museum last year and the ravaging of Florence's art treasures by floods in 1966 set the mind reeling at the thought of pieces of man's cultural patrimony permanently lost or damaged.
This time, though, I was strangely unmoved. It's not that I think incinerating art is a good thing. It's just that the work of these artists--as of all contemporary artists--is too new and untested to have acquired the cultural heft that makes it seem an indispensable part of one's existence. I regret the fire happened, but I can't quite see it as a body blow to civilization.
Listen to the wailing that followed the conflagration, however, and you'd think the world had come to an end.
"Taken as a whole, the fire represents a national artistic tragedy, a cultural loss on a massive scale," said Katherine Heron, daughter of the late abstractionist Patrick Heron, to the Guardian.
" 'Hell' was a modern masterpiece," wrote Jonathan Jones, that newspaper's art critic. "And now it is legend." Then he went further, declaring that the works had been enhanced in importance by being destroyed: "The loss of art is a strange thing, in this instance conferring on this art that always seemed so hard and ugly and tough the beauty of something gone forever. Loss can make the vanished object more, not less, meaningful. Art history is full of phantom masterpieces, some of which have a more real and powerful existence than many an unloved Old Master that survives in an obscure corner of a museum. Leonardo da Vinci's 'Battle of Anghiari' and Holbein's Whitehall Mural both blaze in the memory."
In keeping with that spirit, another critic, Danny Serota (no relation to Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota), suggested the burned-out warehouse be preserved as a "shrine" to conceptual art.
You'd expect this kind of ditsy hyperbole from art dealers (who are paid to be enthusiastic) or from Mr. Saatchi himself. Instead it's come largely from art critics.
Criticism used to be about detachment, discernment and making rigorous judgments about artistic quality. Critics used to refrain from applying the word "masterpiece" to any work less than a few hundred years old.
But if the above-quoted comments show anything, it is the extent to which criticism is now subordinated to market hype: It's assumed that because these YBA works are trendy and outlandishly expensive (Mr. Saatchi reportedly paid $72,000 for Ms. Emin's tent and almost $1 million for "Hell"), they must be important. These critic-promoters give their pronouncements a veneer of respectability by specious comparisons between contemporary artists and the Old Masters.
All of which makes Monday's disaster not so much a cultural catastrophe as a kind of bonfire of the vanities.
Sanity did reign in one corner of the art world, however, and an unlikely one as well. In place of the kind of post-Diana rending of garments favored by her art-world colleagues, Ms. Emin offered a more sober assessment. She told The Independent that although she was "upset" over the fire's destruction of her work, she was "also very upset about those people whose wedding got bombed last week [in Iraq] and people being dug out from under 400 feet of mud in the Dominican Republic [flooding]."
Who says modern artists know nothing about perspective?
Mr. Gibson is The Wall Street Journal's Leisure & Arts features editor.
