Saatchi over kunst, verf en olifantenpoep

Blake Gopnik, the chief art critic for the Washington Post, has stated that ‘painting is dead and has been dead for 40 years. If you want to be considered a serious contemporary artist, the only thing that you should be doing is video or manipulated photography.’ Do you agree or disagree and why?
lt’s true that contemporary painting responds to the work of video makers and photographers. But it’s also true that contemporary painting is influenced by music, writing, MTV, Picasso, Hollywood,newspapers, Old Masters. Unlike many of the art world heavy hitters and deep thinkers, I don’t believe painting is middle-class and bourgeois, incapable of saying anything meaningful anymore, too impotent to hold much sway. For me, and for people with good eyes who actually enjoy looking at art, nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting, whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

With your ‘Triumph of Painting’ show [2005], do you think you are setting a trend or following one? Haven’t we all been here before with the 1981 show ‘A New Spirit in Painting’?
You point out that ‘A New Spirit in Painting’ was nearly a quarter of a century ago. So I am tickled by your suggestion that another survey of painting now is over-egging it. I don’t have a particularly lofty agenda with ‘The Triumph of Painting’. People need to see some of the remarkable painting produced, and overlooked, in an age dominated by the attention given to video, installation and photographic art. Just flick through the catalogues the mega shows, the Documentas, the Biennales,the last 15 years. But, of course, much of the painting in our exhibition has itself been profoundly affected by the work of video and photographic art. In any event, who’s to say what will one day appear to have been trendsetting? Sometimes artists who receive breathless acclaim initially seem to conk out. Other artists, who don’t register so keenly at the time, prove to be trailblazers.

Looking ahead; In 100 years time, how do you thing British art of the early 21st century will be regarded? Who are the great artists who will pass the test of time?
General art books dated 2105 will be as brutal about editing the late 20th century as they are about almost all other centuries. Every artist than Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd and Damien Hirst will be a footnote.

Saatchi over kunstenaars;
If you study a great work of art, you’ll probaply find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So lets’s have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbent and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.

What’s the point of art?
To stop our eyeballs going into meltdown from all the rubbish TV and films we happily look at the rest of the time.

If you were commissioning your own portrait, in which medium would you choose it to be represented?
I’d rather eat the canvas than have someone paint me on it.

Is there any artist you regret failing to snap up before they became famous?
Vermeer, Velasquez. Van Gogh. And that’s just the V’s

Has photography rendered figurative art pointless?
No art is pointless. I Had Immanuel Kant round for a bit of a chin-wag the other day and he told me that the meaning of art was that it had no function.

Is painting dead?
Yawn

Is elephant dung as valid a medium as gouache?
Elephant dung is so last season, darling