Last year, Charles Saatchi became notorious outside of art circles for all of the wrong reasons: he was caught, on camera, throttling his then-wife, TV chef Nigella Lawson during a lunch at Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair. Following a much-publicised court battle (not with each other, but it seemed that way at the time), more of their dirty laundry was aired as he accused her of drug use and nicknaming her ‘Higella’. She emerged looking pretty dignified, using her best sass in court to show that her name wouldn’t be muddied by him. He, however, looked like a bit of a dick.
You’d think that after all that, he would like to put the incident behind him. But as well as insisting on still dining at the same table outside Scott’s (this time with new girlfriend Trinny Woodall), his website is stocking piss-takey artwork depicting that throttle incident.
One of the pictures is a pop art rendition of the throttle, mounted on a chopping board and entitled ‘Last Course’ (£17,600). Another is a black and white line drawing called ‘Art Collector Throttling a Cook’ (£1,170), and a third is a caricature of Saatchi, dressed up as Homer Simpson throttling Nigella, who’s dressed up as Bart in front of a swirling background made to look a bit like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Going for £5,870, Darren Udaiyan said of it: ‘It’s not really controversial. Saatchi is strangling Nigella but it’s also about him squeezing the art market.’
‘It works on many levels. It’s a comment on the art market and how people control it,’ he told The Independent. Obviously, Saatchi himself didn’t upload the entries for the art – he’s far too busy and important for that – but surely someone should have noticed, and maybe decided it wasn’t a great idea? After all, he ends up making money from the incident, for which he received a police warning.
However, he’s fairly unrepentant about the whole thing, and his only comment on the imagery has been: ‘Would it have been a better story if I had censored artists whose work might be personally disobliging?’ made to the Mail On Sunday.
And his chief curator, Rebecca Wilson, said: ‘Saatchi Art does not believe in censorship unless the material is pornographic or incites racial hatred.’ Hmm. We might not know all of the ins and outs of the artworld, but it doesn’t take a calculator or a good eye to know that effectively making money from claims of domestic violence probably isn’t that much cooler than porn...
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.