We went to the Saatchi Gallery today. The current exhibition, Newspeak, is a survey of current British art. The verdict is that it is pretty poor. I agree with Brian Sewell in the Evening Standard:

… Newspeak is at best cliché, kitsch and the ironic subversion that is the joke so often played by the post-postmodernist. It demonstrates how swiftly the energy of the YBAs evaporated, leaving no useful legacy for their successors, nothing on which they could build.

One might reasonably conclude that British art is dead.

However in two rooms upstairs were the remnants of a Korean exhibition. I wish that I had gone to see the whole thing as the two rooms left are amazing:

I love it when Brian Sewell in the Evening Standard is on a roll. Imagine the following in his acidly acerbic aristocratic tones:

Sigrid Holmwood’s work, however, as a pasticheur of early Van Gogh in ghastly fluorescent paint, is fit only for the bonfire — a kindly critic might just manage to apply the pseudo-compliment “robust” to it, but to the sane man it is the product of an Australian sensibility. Miss Holmwood is perhaps not quite the worst artist represented here; for that accolade she is in competition with Phoebe Unwin, a monkey-see, monkey-do artist who can mimic badly anything done better by others, with Clunie Reid, a creature of shallow glistering vulgarities, and with Lynette Boakye, in whose portraiture one could perceive merit only if it were the work of an infant.

The man is a genius – shame the Newspeak artists are not…