Recent History: Charles Saatchi, Rudy Giuliani and the Brooklyn Museum

Extremely rich ad man and art collector Charles Saatchi is a wonderful blabbermouth, and he is expert at using his blabber for his own ends. So take this story that he told to the Telegraph about how he insulted the masthead of the Times and they got revenge on him and how it is a wonderful piece of self-image-making.

Here is his hilarious and surely oh-so-factual party version:

I was once in the New York Hamptons mansion of a publishing tycoon and it was one of those dinner parties where the host guides the conversation so that the table as a whole has to discuss a topic. As the visitor from Britain, I was asked to express my views on the US press, which amounted to an unrestrained mad-dog attack on The New York Times, its pomposity and overweening self-satisfaction, its complacency built over years of being a lofty monopoly, easily illustrated by its arrogance in asking readers to "now turn to page B21" or wherever, to continue reading most of their stories.

My fellow guests looked at me curiously, even pityingly. They turned out to be the editor, news editor, features editor and arts editor of The New York Times, and it didn't take them long to show me how robust the US press can be.



When the Sensation/Giuliani controversy became a leading New York news story, I got given the steel-toe-cap kicking I obviously had coming.

Ha! It's wonderful how he 1. Doesn't name the "tycoon," and 2. implies that the (unnamed) editors of the Times were total toadies for being there (well that could be true!) and then 3. calls them petty-minded revenge-takers.

For those that don't remember 1999, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, of work from the Saatchi collection, enraged our fine idiot then-mayor, setting him up to tee off, in 2001, on another Brooklyn Museum show to declare there should be decency panels to judge all artwork that would appear in publicly-funded institutions. Which, LOL, SOCIALIST HITLER ART DEATH CAMPS.

Now, there was some stupidness in the Times, sure. Take William Safire's take on the "Sensation" exhibition was so stupid that doctors should have come round Safire's house to get him some attendants to help him feed himself and stuff, really. And actually, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg weighed in, for some reason, in the magazine, very dimly. ("The various participants play parts as ritualized and predictable as those in Japanese No drama or commedia dell'arte. Stock characters feign emotions of hurt and outrage." Actually, no! In large part, this debacle really was about a freakshow mayor run amok. Sheesh.)

But apparently Saatchi missed, oh, everything else? There was the very clear editorial in the Times in September of 1999, whose headline is self-explanatory: "The Museum's Courageous Stand." The paper continued in this vein, up to and including, in 2001, Gail Collins ripping Giuliani a new one on the op-ed page:

Critics were quick to point out that Mr. Giuliani, who has a wife in Gracie Mansion and a girlfriend who he takes to official events, is not in an ideal position to anoint himself guardian of the city's morals. The mayor's team retorts that private behavior is beside the point, that the museums should be sensitive to public mores because they receive public money.



Unfortunately this argument is going to force us, much against our will, to note that the mayoral girlfriend is guarded by city police at taxpayer expense, while the wife has both guards and a taxpayer-supported staff that helps her with her duties as estranged first lady.

Ha, she really hated Giuliani. That was fun.