Road to nowhere ... Your Gallery
Charles Saatchi's online project Your Gallery, which provides a space for - to put it bluntly - any idiot to show work with the Saatchi imprimatur, made plenty of headlines on Thursday for its attempt to find the Arctic Monkeys of the art world.
In creating a site that offers to exhibit exactly the kind of outsider who will have spent the last two decades years reviling Saatchi, the millionaire collector appears to have done something innovative, even generous. But it's only after, ooh, about ten minutes at Your Gallery that you see the emptiness of the exercise.
One clue is the inclusion of an artist named Dick Head. Mr Head's only exhibited work is a pink-tinged photo of a lake at sunset, a work he calls Dick Ghead. He offers no artist's statement (if only some of the others were as taciturn, such as the apparently real Marty Bee, who informs us that "as you can see I am very interested in the mystical/spiritual side of images in the Bible"). Another featured artist, NoName NoName, has managed to get a position on the site without even providing any images at all.
Creativity, democracy - or just not caring? Is anyone actually curating the site or taking responsibility for it? Real generosity would be to take an active interest in these artists, to offer advice, criticism, and filter out, well, the Dick Heads.
As it stands - and of course it's early days yet - Your Gallery is little more than a freak show. Many will no doubt feel this seems a strangely appropriate space for a man whose last convincing contribution to British culture was a good 20 years ago.
