museum of new art

THE SAATCHI 10: The Second Coming

Charles Saatchi is arguably the most important art collector in the world. He can make or break an artist's career by merely dropping his hat. Saatchi Online was launched in 2006. The website currently has over 100,000 artist’s profiles and receives over 68 million hits a day. It provides a free platform enabling artists to promote their work to a global audience.

Although lauded and celebrated from cyber-space, this small group of Saatchi’s best artists was never intended for a real exhibition. It’s a virtual world we’re living, after all. And how can anyone create a dialogue between art that was chosen on merit, yes, but without true thread or any other "real" connect?

Eager to conflate these distinctions between a labored exhibition and random pairings, Cesar Marzetti immediately grabbed at the opportunity to curate just such a show for the Museum of New Art:

“In the end, all of art hinges on a twist of expectations.”

Hans Arp ripped up his drawings, threw them in the air and glued the fragments on a piece of paper in the order they hit the floor. Tristan Tzara composed poems by picking words from a hat. William S. Burroughs invented the cut-up technique: the random rearrangement of text in order to decode it's hidden meaning.

"From my point of view there is no such thing as coincidence," Marzetti flatly states. "All of art is an accident. And each of these ten are just that - an accident waiting to happen."

Charles Saatchi seems to agree:

"The art world is dominated in people's minds by the thousand artists that are very successful, that are handled by the top 50 dealers around the world. They're the ones that get all the attention, but the real art world is hundreds of thousands of artists around the world who don't have dealers and are pretty much unrepresented."

"I see some very talented artists among these and I'm pretty sure many on the site are going to be some of the big names in five, six or seven years' time," Saatchi predicts.

Second Coming:  

From over 100,000 international artists at Charles Saatchi's Online Gallery, ten were chosen as the "best" over the last week in October 2009. These ten were selected by Charlotte Bonham-Carter, an author, art critic and assistant curator at the ICA in London. Cesar Marzetti, chief curator at the Museum of New Art, has now curated these ten artists into an exhibition of their own.

Artists:  Suse Bauer, Alex Burdiak, Toby Christian, Marsilio Diteramo, Jessica Drum, Megan Jacobs, Plan b, Mandy Williams, Women's Rooms, Mehran Zamani.

*Charlotte Bonham-Carter is an author, art critic and a curator. Formerly assistant curator at Barbican Art Gallery, she is now assistant curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. She is a regular contributor to Flash Art and recently co-authored (with David Hodge) 'The Contemporary Art Book' (Carlton, 2009).

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