“Everything you need to know about art, ads, life, God, and other mysteries.”
“Read his brutally frank responses to a battery of questions.”
Well, since we’re being brutally frank, let’s get to the point: you won’t learn an awful lot about advertising if you read this book. Or much about Charles Saatchi, come to that.
My name is Charles Saatchi and I am an artoholic is a short, small paperback that consists of a series of questions and answers with the man who, with his brother Maurice, founded famed agency Saatchi & Saatchi, then later M&C Saatchi, and who has a played a defining role in advertising over the past four or five decades.
Communicate is not going to go into literary criticism mode. The lack of narrative structure, indistinguishable reasoning of questions (not to mention the origins of the questions themselves), his motivation behind writing the thing – we’ll let all of that pass. Saatchi is a creative guy, and a private one too, and creative private types are prone to be difficult. The man himself avoids all interviews, and that’s why this book has created such a fuss. At last, the iconic figure in both advertising and the art world (he has been a contemporary collector of significant influence for years) has answered some questions.
The format is a straight Q and A. It is at times diverting, occasionally enjoyable and often frustrating, and you are left in no doubt this is probably exactly how Saatchi wanted it. As he says in the book, “I’d rather eat the canvas than have someone paint me on it.”
This book is, in the end, about art, not advertising. It does touch on some wider stuff, like politics, religion, and even cooking. But mainly it explores his various exhibitions, his influence on the art market, his relationship with dealers and more. The brief insights into Saatchi’s own creative mind are few and far between, and are constantly undermined by his own sense of (or perhaps determination to believe in) his unimportance in the scheme of things. “Clutching at immortality is of zero interest to anyone sane,” he says.
As marketing professionals, though, we are aware of Saatchi’s achievements and significance in the advertising world. That has, after all, been his career, his purpose, for half a century. The book only briefly touches on these subjects, although when it does it can be luminescent. “If all other businesses cared as much about providing satisfaction as ad agencies, we would have no need for automated Customer Service Helplines everywhere,” he writes. And Communicate’s particular favorite: “I recommend advertising to all, especially if you have no apparent academic skills.” Take that, school careers office.
There are other exciting flashes. Early in the text, he is talking about some of his younger days in advertising – golden years, when he worked at the renowned CDP (Collette, Dickenson Pearce & Partners) in London. He describes how he found himself working with the likes of David Puttnam, Alan Parker, and Ridley Scott, and you can’t help but smile at the thought of some of those creative meetings. As well as being himself a talented ad man, Saatchi has been blessed to work with some real greats throughout his career.
Mainly, however, Saatchi’s coy and brief answers deflect us from start to finish. Artists, collectors and cultural aficionados will appreciate this book for its collected rare insights into one of the key figures of modern contemporary art (whether he wanted to be one or not). Marketers, however, will get little more than a peek at the creative mind behind such milestone campaigns as the UK Conservative Party’s “Labour isn’t working” effort, which helped sweep Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979.
In the end, a potentially fascinating character is glimpsed here through a rather one-dimensional telescope. Though he’d hate to admit it, if he were ever persuaded to pen an autobiography or a book on marketing, it could really be an interesting ride. He probably won’t though; so this will have to do.