Lord Saatchi has joined forces with the former chief executive of Dixons John Clare and the web business expert Michael de Kare- Silver to set up MyFaveShop. com, a site that claims to unite the two main internet trends of the moment: shopping and social networking.
The site, to be launched in the summer, will allow shoppers to design their own store, choose the products that fill it, and then invite friends and family to shop there, while also posting reviews, comments and tips.
Brands and retailers, meanwhile, will pay a monthly rent for each shop whose virtual shelves they appear on, as well as commissions on subsequent sales.
Mr Clare said he hopes the site will revolutionise a "very functional" existing online shopping market. "For the first time, online shoppers will be able to create their own favourite shop with all their favourite shops in it. In the real world you can't do that. That's why it will be the ultimate shop - the future of online shopping."
The project's backers are targeting 500,000 unique visitors per month in the first year, rising to 5 million by the third. Lord Saatchi explained why he believes they are on to a winning formula. "What brands want most is repeat business from loyal customers. In the internet world, that means being added to someone's favourites. MyFaveShop will give advertisers the opportunity to be considered when someone is building their favourite shop."
According to a survey carried out by Foviance Research, 69 per cent of people spend more than 30 minutes a day on their favourite sites, where they are 65 per cent more likely to spend more money than anywhere else. On top of that, net shopping in the UK is booming, with sales rising 54 per cent in 2007 to 46.6bn.
As brand expert Jonathan Gabay pointed out yesterday: "Amazon has launched WebStore, which charges brands $60 [30] a month and 7 per cent commission for selling on its site. For Saatchi and co to move clear of the pack, they'll have to give people the chance to order products custom-made to their own tastes."
From The Independent (London), February 15, 2008 by Daniel Igra
One of the visitors to Freeze was Charles Saatchi, a major contemporary art collector and co-founder of Saatchi and Saatchi, the London advertising agency. Saatchi then visited Gambler in a green Rolls Royce and, according to Freedman, stood open-mouthed with astonishment in front of (and then bought) Hirst's first major "animal" installation, A Thousand Years, consisting of a large glass case containing maggots and flies feeding off a rotting cow's head. (The installation was later a notable feature of the Sensation exhibition.)
Saatchi became not only Hirst's main collector, but also the main sponsor for other YBAs–a fact openly acknowledged by Gavin Turk. The contemporary art market in London had dramatically collapsed in mid-1990 due to a major economic recession, and many commercial contemporary galleries had gone out of business. Saatchi had until this time collected mostly American and German contemporary art, some by young artists, but most by already established ones.
His collection was publicly exhibited in a series of shows in a large converted factory building in St John's Wood, north London. Previous Saatchi Gallery shows had included such major figures as Warhol, Guston, Alex Katz, Serra, Kiefer, Polke, Richter and many more. Now Saatchi turned his attention to the new breed of Young British Artists. There was much concern when Saatchi divested himself of some of his earlier collection, since it had a significant downward effect on the value of some of the artists whose works he sold.
Saatchi invented the name "Young British Artists" for a series of shows called by it, starting in 1992, when a noted exhibit was Damien Hirst's "shark" (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living). In addition to (and as a direct result of) Saatchi's patronage, the Young British Artists benefited from intense media coverage. This was augmented by controversy surrounding the annual Turner Prize, (one of Britain's few major awards for contemporary artists), which had several of the artists as nominees or winners. Channel 4 had become a sponsor of the competition, leading to television profiles of the artists in prime-time slots.
The Young British Artists re-vitalised (and in some cases spawned) a whole new generation of contemporary commercial galleries such as Karsten Schubert, Sadie Coles, Victoria Miro, Maureen Paley's Interim Art, Jay Jopling's White Cube, and Antony Wilkinson Gallery. The spread of interest improved the market for contemporary British art magazines through increased advertising and circulation. Frieze launched in 1991 embraced the YBAs from the start while established publications such as Art Monthly, Art Review, Modern Painters and Contemporary Art were all re-launched with more focus on emerging British Artists. The British art establishment was solidly validating the pre-eminence of the YBAs. Hirst had become an internationally recognised major artist, with shows in Europe and the USA.
He bought his first painting in 1973 on a visit to Paris with his first wife, Doris Lockhart. This was a realist work by David Hepher, a British artist, and was a detailed realist depiction of suburban houses. His taste has mutated from "School of London", through American abstraction and minimalism, to the YBAs, whose work he first saw at the Freeze exhibition. His renown as a patron peaked in 1997 when part of his collection was shown at the Royal Academy as the exhibition Sensation, which traveled to Berlin and New York causing headlines and much offence (e.g., to families of children murdered by Myra Hindley) and consolidating the position of the YBAs.
The political symbolism of Saatchi's oeuvre was reinforced by curating an exhibition with the title "New Labour" at the Saatchi Gallery in 2001 (an obvious reference to the strategy of the same name adopted by Labour Party leader Tony Blair). In 2003 the Saatchi Gallery moved to County Hall, the former home of London Mayor Ken Livingstone's (Labour run) GLC (that was abolished by Margaret Thatcher in 1985), with Damien Hirst's "Hymn" (a giant sculpture of a flayed corpse copied directly from a commercially-available children's anatomical model) being installed in the former council chamber of the Labour GLC.
The gallery's tenancy of County Hall had ongoing difficulties with Makoto Okamoto, London branch manager of the owners, who Saatchi complained had kicked artworks and sealed off the disabled toilets[1]. On September 27, 2005 the gallery announced they would be moving to new premises. On October 7, 2005 a court case began against the gallery, brought by County Hall landlords, Cadogan Leisure Investments, and owners Shirayama Shokusan Co Ltd, for alleged breach of conditions, including a two-for-one ticket offer in Time Out magazine and exhibition of work in unauthorised areas. The judgement went against the gallery, who were forced to relinquish the premises, though the gallery had already announced it was moving to take on the entire Duke of York’s HQ building in Chelsea. There is currently a halt to London shows while these new premises are being prepared.
Although the event was openly celebrated by much of the media and general public, Charles Saatchi was said to be devastated when, on 24 May 2004, a fire in a storage warehouse destroyed many art works, worth millions of pounds, from the Saatchi collection. One art insurance specialist valued the burned work at £50m.
He makes numerous visits to exhibitions, as well as seeking out artists' studios and little-known galleries, particularly in East London, in order to purchase new work. Saatchi claims he is shy, to explain why he rarely gives interviews and makes few public appearances, not even the openings of his own exhibitions (despite having awarded the Turner Prize one year, and answering readers' questions in The Art Newspaper). In 2005 he began work on a new gallery in Chelsea, London, to open in 2007, which occupies the entire 50,000 sq ft (5,000 m²). Duke of York Building. In October 2006 he collaborated again with the Royal Academy, while his new building was being prepared, with the show USA Today. The exhibition featured many young US based artists, some largely unknown, who Saatchi believes will be the next generation of art stars.
*Taken from WikipediaCharles Saatchi was born into an Iraqi-Jewish family in Baghdad, Iraq (the name "Saatchi" means "Watchmaker" in Persian, Turkish and Iraqi Arabic). The family moved to Hampstead, London, when he was four and he attended Christ's College in Finchley, a suburb in North London. During this time he developed an obsession with US pop culture, including the music of Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. He also manifested his enthusiasm for collections, building up from Superman comics to jukeboxes. He has described as "life changing" the experience of viewing a Jackson Pollock painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 1970 he started the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi with his brother Maurice; which by 1986 had grown to be the largest agency in the world, with over 600 offices. Successful campaigns in the UK included Silk Cut cigarettes and the promotion of the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher through the slogan "Labour Isn't Working". Eventually, he and his brother Maurice departed the agency and together founded the rival M&C Saatchi agency, taking the huge British Airways advertising account from their former company.
He is a notorious recluse, even hiding from clients when they visited his agency's offices, and has, until recently, never granted interviews. His first wife, Doris Lockhart, became known during their marriage as an art and design journalist, with particular knowledge of minimalism; his second, Kay Hartenstein, was a Conde Nast journalist. He married celebrity cook Nigella Lawson (his third wife) in 2003 and they live in London with her two children Cosima and Bruno by journalist John Diamond.
*Taken from Wikipedia
