Mick Hartley

If you've long suspected that most people in today's art world simply follow the herd in terms of which artists to praise; that they're incapable of telling a good work of art from a bad; that they cover their insecurity and lack of taste with a reliance on ponderous politicised postmodern jargon; that money inevitably triumphs over taste….well, you have an unlikely ally. Here's Charles Saatchi:

[M]y dark little secret is that I don't actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art and simply cannot tell a good artist from a weak one, until the artist has enjoyed the validation of others – a received pronunciation. For professional curators, selecting specific paintings for an exhibition is a daunting prospect, far too revealing a demonstration of their lack of what we in the trade call "an eye". They prefer to exhibit videos, and those incomprehensible post-conceptual installations and photo-text panels, for the approval of their equally insecure and myopic peers. This "conceptualised" work has been regurgitated remorselessly since the 1960s, over and over and over again.

Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity. The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn't….

Of course his own gallery is not immune from the effects of this over-reliance on conceptualisation and explanation in place of visual appeal, but in general I still think the Saatchi Gallery is one of the best places for art in London, and the exhibitions always interesting. 

It's good to hear someone with a degree of influence in the art world finally come out with these home truths.