Charles in Charge

Charles in Charge
by Lauren Collins May 28, 2007

The art dealer Charles Saatchi spends a lot of time sitting at his desk. You might, too, if your desk were more of a table, capacious enough to occupy almost an entire wall of a parlor-floor room in your Belgravia town house; if its placement allowed you to hear snatches of birdsong and to look onto leafy Eaton Square; if its surface were laden with monographs, notebooks, a pewter platter of cookies, several bright-colored plastic cigarette lighters, and a Mrs. Potato Head toy.

In the midst of this tableau, Saatchi’s computer, a black flat-screen desktop, occupies a clutter-free zone toward the front. In the past, he didn’t use it much—“I can Google things up, and that’s about the extent of it,” he said—but, lately, he has been spending three hours a day pecking away at his gallery’s ever-expanding Web site. “This site happened only because I had nothing to do,” Saatchi, who is sixty-three, said. He has been waiting almost a year for the construction of a new gallery in London, and, in the meantime, he explained, the young people in his life suggested that he stake a claim on the Internet. “Oh, yes, I see, this is the modern world,” he recalled, of his awakening. “I was kicked by my staff, who said, ‘Oy, wake up,’ and by my daughters, who called me a double loser,” he said, splaying both thumbs and forefingers into L-shapes, and smacking them against his forehead.

A year ago, Saatchi launched Your Gallery, a free online forum where anyone in the world can create a profile page and display his or her art work. “I’m hoping that the site is encouraging to people who find the art world a little daunting,” he said. Within a month, thirteen hundred artists had signed up, and Saatchi followed with STUART, a spinoff page focussing on student artists. Next came a magazine, a street-art gallery, a debate forum, and Showdown, a biweekly contest at the end of which two pieces of art are voted on by viewers. “We stole Showdown from the most fantastic site, Hot or Not—the one where you put people up and say, ‘Would you or wouldn’t you?’ ” Saatchi said. “We think of something, and we just stick another box on,” he went on, stubbing a Silk Cut cigarette into a silver chalice.

By January, the online galleries were drawing more than five million hits a day, but Saatchi noticed a problem: a quorum of artists from China were attempting to communicate with their English-speaking contemporaries, without much luck. Saatchi tried an automatic translation service, but the results were spotty: a section that ought to have read “New Art from China,” for instance, was interpreted as “New Art from Porcelain.” Saatchi said, “That’s what makes Chinese translating systems so frustrating—the language comes out as gobbledygook.” An improved Mandarin site went live last month.

“I don’t do business travel,” Saatchi said, announcing his intention to create similar sites for speakers of Russian, Hindi, Japanese, and Spanish. “I haven’t been to America in five years. I’m very good at feigning terrible wasting diseases at the last minute. Nigella”—Saatchi is married to the cook and writer Nigella Lawson—“gave me this great thing where if you’re in the middle of a phone call it makes the noise of a baby or a deliveryman.” When he launched Your Gallery, Saatchi pledged, in the name of giving others a chance, to desist for a year from buying artists he discovered there. The year is almost up. “I’ve got a list of people I think are very, very good,” he said. “It fills up two sides of an A4 envelope.”

Lawson, wearing an apron, popped in and said, “Can I get you anything?”

“Hello, darling, what are you up to?” Saatchi responded.

“It’s a madhouse in here,” Lawson said, and explained that she was doing a photo shoot downstairs. Nevertheless, she gamely agreed to give a demonstration on her Pilates machine for a curious visitor. “I need my stirrups!” she yelled to Saatchi, who was happy to help.