School of Saatchi
BBC 2 mondays at 9pm
You may have seen my post last week about this. It’s another ‘apprenticeship as prize’ type show but this one is for artists. Not the ‘able to paint really well’ type artists, it’s the ‘place a stick of celery in a large empty room and call it Art’ type of artist. The prize is a so called ‘Dream Ticket’; a slot in a prestigious exhibition and a three year patronage with your own studio.
Do I sound biased already? Yes. Trouble is I actually like contemporary art.
You learn two things from this show
1. the process by which the artist comes up with his/her piece.
2. NEVER meet the artist.
When you see art you like you bring your own thing to it and why you like it may have nothing to do with the thoughts behind creating it. I really liked the beach huts built in this episode. They looked great but I spent the whole show wanting to smack the lead artist on that team for being so self obsessed!
The Battle of Hastings
In episode 2 of School of Saatchi, the students were split in three groups of two. Their remit was to create ‘bold and accessible’ pieces of public art for the coastal town of Hastings within a small budget and two week time frame. Each piece of art would then be marked by the public with either a like or dislike vote.
Team 1: Sam and Suki find a small radar reflector and fascinated by the geometry of its shape set about making a Giant one (in reflective chrome) to sit in a row boat on shore. It didn’t have a very in-depth story to it but gained interest through its sheer shininess and usual shape. The artist says “by losing its function it becomes art”.
Public vote - 83% like it.
Team 2: Saad and Ben discover two buildings from a set of beach huts had burnt down many years before. They set about building shadow versions of the missing hunts in black scaffolding and mesh. These looked good. They looked like they had a story and a reality to them beyond what you saw (which makes for good art in my book).
Public vote - 91% like it.
Team 3: Matt and Eugenie chose to do something on the islands of a boat lake. They created a ‘zoo without animals’. Island 1, for apes with a climbing frame and tyre swing. Island 2, the seal island, had a big rock (aka some rock painted canvas hammered over a wooden frame). One artist fretted “am I just a kind of weird amateur builder?” Public vote - only 65% like it. But it is Saatchis favourite.
A little boy looking at the art summed up the public’s view nicely:
“I like the climbing frame and swing island [art piece] cause it makes me feel like a monkey. But I don’t like the rock”
“why not?”
“I dunno, It’s just a rock”
In week 3, on tonight, the artists have to create a contemporary piece of art to be housed in the room of an old english stately home. I’m just waiting for one of them to accidently destroy some national treasure in the process!
The BBC site and related links can be found here.
‘This is not art’ photo by Mat Honan
