Charles Saatchi takes on Blake Gopnik

The father of YBA art and one of the world's best-known art collectors is Charles Saatchi.

And the Art Newspaper has recently interviewed Saatchi with questions submitted via email by people from all over the world.

From what DC Art News readers info'd me as they sent emails to the Art Newspaper a few weeks ago through the announcement in this posting, at least two of the questions that Saatchi chose to answer came from DC Art News readers. They are:

Question: Did you personally burn, or did you contract with a professional arsonist to burn, your warehouse filled with your art?

Saatchi: It wasn't terrifically amusing the first time dull people came up with this. Now it's the 100th time.

Question: 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?

Saatchi: It'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.

But, 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.