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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

Up in Smoke

Our Lady Has Left the Building

14:56 / 26.05.04

It would be mean of me to say Saatchi's loss is art's gain then? It would make a fantastic piece of art though... 'The Ashes of The Tent of Everyone I slept With' or something...

22:03 / 26.05.04

What loss? He insured them at their peak value. Age will not dim them nor time...or something like that. Or, to lose one YBA masterpiece is tragedy, to lose two is just carelessness.

Christ, is this an audience or an oil painting?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

06:42 / 27.05.04

Jonathan Jones auditions for job as The Day Today's art correspondent in an article from today's Guardian:
'Was it just rubbish?' some have asked of the works of art destroyed in this week's warehouse fire. Emphatically not, says Jonathan Jones - we have lost at least one irreplaceable masterpiece.

I feel a bit embarrassed and awkward, standing by the red and white tape, and not merely because a policewoman is watching me as if I might be the Saatchi arsonist. (She does subsequently decide to interrogate me.)...

British art in the 1990s insisted on the here and now, never caring much about the future and perhaps never destined to exist there. In a way, this might be its best fate - to go up in a blaze of glory, never having to be exhibited in some provincial museum in 30 years' time, as dull as most 1960s pop looks today...

Future generations are unlikely to mourn the lost masterpieces of the Saatchi Collection as we mourn the ancient manuscripts that perished when the library at Alexandria burned...

I can't prove it was great. But anyone who says it doesn't matter that it was destroyed has no claim to say they care about any art...

It is therefore an exaggeration, but one I can't resist, to say that young British art has ended in flames in an east London warehouse. The setting seems singularly appropriate for its Viking send-off. Leyton is part of the post-apocalyptic east London landscape this art always mythologised... Now, some of the best recent British art is ash where Lea Bridge Road opens on to the Dantean wastes of the Hackney Marsh...

11:06 / 27.05.04

I am actually sorry to think that about 50 paintings by Patrick Heron have gone... and some by Patrick Caulfield as well. I like those two... how odd that coverage has focussed on the YBA works instead (i.e. not odd at all).

22:23 / 27.05.04

I am sorry about the whole sorry lot, not for Mr Saatchi since he is very comfortably insured, but for the artists themselves. It doesn't matter whether I, or you, or 'the media' thought any particular piece of work was trash or lovely, or really moving, or inspirational, or utterly dire. The fact of the matter is that each and every one of the artists spent (lots of) time creating work they believed in and were proud of, which has now been completely destroyed.

Wouldn't you be just a little bit gutted if it were you?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

09:48 / 28.05.04

Well, that's why I took the attitude I did, my general unexamined attitude is negative towards a lot of YoungBritArt, Lord Saatchi, and Lord Saatchi's effect on BritArt but, like you, I recognise this is a genuinely sad event for other people who have a deep attachment to these pieces.

Last night the author Shirley Conran and the artist Gillian Ayres (who lost pieces worth an estimated £1m) said they had hired a lawyer to establish whether Momart had been in any way negligent. "We need to establish how the fire occurred and whether items were being stored next to combustible items, as rumour has it," said their lawyer. "If it was a result of negligence then it is not just about money. It is about compensation for a job badly done."

Aren't Chinese whispers great? Newspaper reports as the blaze was still being brought under control was that the warehouse was next to one filled with flammable liquids and it's now become that they were in the same warehouse!

16:49 / 28.05.04

Art is still art and it's still a loss

Goodness Gracious Meme

20:36 / 28.05.04

hmm. Flowers, can you expand on why the loss of what is probably the biggest collection of British contemporary art in the world is art's gain?

I'm not a huge fan of Saatchi's status on the British art scene either, but I think the loss of so many works is a hugely sad/unfortunate event.

Goodness Gracious Meme

20:37 / 28.05.04

and bjacques is right on the insurance/Saatchi not losing anything financially.

So he's only really losing, surely, if he actually genuinely loves the work, isn't he?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

21:24 / 28.05.04

Because anything made in the last ten years that a Tory likes has to be wank, obviously.

Martian FM's take on the incident.