Networkism is alive and well and living in the UK. Its name is Charles Saatchi.
You know, the billionaire art collector and dealer who with his brother a life peer of the realm in the UK, Lord Maurice Nathan Saatchi used to own the advertising organisation Saatchi & Saatchi, the ones responsible for changing the UK forever by manipulating the media with their advertising campaign to persuade the UK public to vote Margaret Thatcher and the conservative government into power a few decades ago, changing the UK forever.

Charles Saatchi is a member of a cliquey network known as The St. John's Wood Mafia, a group of powerful and influential men that between them control the UK media.

The Saatchi brothers were bought out of their own advertising company, and now Charles Saatchi artworld megalomaniac seeks to dominate the artworld via his website http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk which they claim currently receives over 63 million visitors a day.

A site with over 75 thousand free artist galleries. Saatchis is known for discovering some of the biggest names in art of recent years, like Hirst, Emin and the dubious Doig, etc., etc.

The site has amongst other areas, an international artists chat room, a forum debates section, and a mag/blog. He even has a seperate Chinese website. In the age when China controls the internet for its people, how has Charles Saatchi managed to be allowed to have his own Chinese version of saatchi online, together with a chinese chatroom that internet users in the west have been able to access, surely this goes against Chinas dictate to control their populations communications with the west. But, in saatchi it is possible to communicate with them, I have done so. So, it seems that saatchi, in some way is on a crusade to transfer his influence in the media in the world outside of cyberspace, to cyberspace itself. A dangerous path if he is allowed to continue. The man who recently purchased Jasper Joffes painting of the Nazi Heinrich Himmler to hang at the opening of his billion dollar new art gallery in the spring of 2008. What is a prominent jew doing, purchasing such a painting to display publicly, has he no feelings. I know he does not.

A little over 18 months ago Saatchi ventured into political areas in his predominantly art website. He allowed a petition to be published to the world, calling for support to attack iran. To my mind, this was inappropriate for a art website. I always believed, like myself, the majority of real artists would have some degree of pacifism, there we to, unavoidalbe i am afraid, another ism had to creep out. So, why was such a petition allowed to be published. The petition caused an outright war on the website, with equal amounts of artists supporting the petition and not supporting it. The debate got very hot indeed. I decided to post a do not attack Iran petition, which saatchi admin removed in minutes, followed by my reposting it twice more and it being removed again twice more. So, deliberate attempt by Saatchi to manipulate public opinion in his favour. We have to ask why Saatchi allowed it to be posted. It is well known that Iran has vast populations of Arabs, and Saatchi is a jew, and it is well known the two rarely mix. So is his agenda personal motivation,with allowing the attack iran petition to remain online, whilst removing my petitions, and what is such a petition doing on an international art website anyhow.

The latest thing on saatchi is Racism against the Romanian people. The last few days has seen a saatchi scam manipulation of votes. Lots of forum debate threads have been started about it and removed very quickly by saatchi. The threads get reposted, and removed again.

This is the gist of it.
BRANCUSI VOTES ON TOP 500

by Anonymous

Of course it was right to stop the completely false pushing of romanian votes to push Brancusi,however great he was,to top spot from number thirty overnight,because a romanian newspaper got its readers to put patriotism above fair play.If admin hadnt stepped it ,you would have made all other artists votes meaningless.

By Anonymous at 2008-03-21 16:02 | 's blog | add new comment
Why even vote...

What is the purpose of this vote if you are not considering it ... this is just stupid.

By Anonymous at Fri, 2008-03-21 22:14 | reply
the self-righteous crusade against "false" voting ...

the sheer idea of making a top-of-the-pops type poll of human sensitivity as expressed in art, well ... it completely goes by me, not to say more :-)

however, once done, and with the whole surrounding chutzpah of the vote shuffling, I'd have a question :

why bother organizing polls if we can alter the results as we please ? what does a poll mean, anyways ? and, if we agree the results are to be amended, what logic can we use to alter them ? do we multiply the numbers by some secret weights ? do we reverse the results by a day, a week, to the first 7 days... ? or can we simply add the dollars in the estimations of each artists portofolio ?

to go over the top with the burlesque I propose that we hand out a voting card only to the ones that can prove that they can vote "right"; how ? it's easy, all we have to do is to organize a test of sorts on the site (with arts related questions, mind you) and depending on the results we could hand it out or not;

and we could proceed in similar manner for the real voting card, make everybody take a test in politics, just the basic facts... how would that be ?

as for the "push", no, I did not think there was a _campaign_ going on in "Cotidianul", just a note... or should the existence of the poll be kept a secret to the masses ?

tudor, ploiesti, romania

By Anonymous at Fri, 2008-03-21 21:44 | reply
> Of course it was right to

> Of course it was right to stop the completely false pushing of romanian votes to push Brancusi,however great he was,to top spot from number thirty overnight,because a romanian newspaper got its readers to put patriotism above fair play.If admin hadnt stepped it ,you would have made all other artists votes meaningless.

I think you have no grounds to determine whether 'patriotism' or 'fair play' had any role in it (let alone your qualifying a bulk of votes as 'completely false'). This is the effect of advertising, in case you missed that: people see a TV ad for strawberry icecream, they learn that there is such a thing as 'strawberry icecream', and they rush to buy it. In this case, Brancusi's 'fans' just learnt there is a vote going on somewhere, and some of them reacted - what is 'completely false' here? :) And why the 'fans' of Miro (for example) did not know there's someone asking somewhere for their votes? Shouldn't they?

An important detail regarding Brancusi: while most artists in the 'top 500' are known only to people knowing their way in a museum or a gallery, Brancusi was a sculptor - and two of his (important) monumental works are 'out in fresh air', in a city park in his native Romania. This means they are an essential part of some urban landscape, therefore part of the lives of at least two generations of inhabitants of some Romanian city (pop. - some 130k+). Those from Barcelona who'd vote Gaudi (rather than Picasso) should understand...:)

pegassus

By Anonymous at Fri, 2008-03-21 18:07 | reply
saatchi sucks

completely false ? is just a vote, what is false in it ?

By Anonymous at Fri, 2008-03-21 21:35 | reply
"right" actions, "false" voting - the self-righteous crusade

well taken, Pegasus;

in addition, why bother organizing polls if we can alter the results as we please ? what does a poll mean, anyways ?

to go over the top with the burlesque I propose that we hand out a voting card only to the ones that can prove that they can vote "right"; how ? all we have to do is to organize a test of sorts on the site (with arts related questions, mind you) and depending on the results we could hand it out or not;

and we could proceed in similar manner for the real voting card, make everybody take a test in politics, just the basic facts... how would that be ?

as for the "push", no, I did not think there was a _campaign_ going on in "Cotidianul", just a note...

and lastly, the sheer idea of making a top-of-the-pops type poll of human sensitivity as expressed in art ... it completely goes by me, not to say more :-)

By Anonymous at Fri, 2008-03-21 21:34 | reply
Plain lousy

I am am romanian, but i don't have much to do with art. I have touched and photographed Brancusi's works because I live in that town where they are displayed (and btw, they are 3 major works there, not 2 like some1 said). I don't care much about this poll, it hasn't that much imortance. It is not official, guinness book or something. After all, Brancusi was a romanian only by birth, because he gave up his citizenship when the romania government refuzed his work, and moved to France, with his final will to be that he was FRENCH and NOT ROMANIAN. But anyway, we now pop and burst when we step on his will only to have something to be proud of. Typical. And back on course, IT MAKES ME SICK TO WATCH HOW A POLL IS MANIPULATED WITH AGREEMENTS ALL OVER. Come on, just because more romanians knew about the poll and voted for brancusi than others voted for picasso, what's the deal? Advertise more and then will see. It is only an internet poll, those who know vote more than those who don't know or don't care. By what criteria can you determine if a vote is true or false? As we are here, thy don't you give picasso a few thousand votes, maybe those taken from Brancusi, so he won't have to worry about loisng poll position. Where is the right of free speak, free willing, free voting? "IT wasn;t fair" so this means that YOU already knew the position of Brancusi in your list, maybe you shoul just gave him 14k votes and disable vote option, just to make us aware of his rightceous rank.

Don't get me wrong, I really don't care if he is first or last, I am glad because I have the PRIVILEGE to walk by his masterpieces every once in a while and that is enough for me. A vote like this just makes me wonder...All my life I thought "OMG, Romania is still a comunist country, corupt, unfair, full with bad people. I have to get out of here" But now i stand in a dillemma: Where to go? If you can't stand to watch the results of an internet poll and jump to modify it, how are you in real life? If the red light makes you be late for work, jump on it and break it? After all, it is not fair to make you be late.

So...SHAME ON YOU!

And next time you make a poll, make an additional list with the maximum number of votes for each one, so we know where to stop voting without this kind of manipulation.

Farewell, you great minds of the world.

Avram LiviuMasa Tacerii (Table of Silence)Poarta Sarutului (Kissing Gate)

Coloana Infinitului (Endless Column)

By Anonymous at Sat, 2008-03-22 06:38 | reply
saatchi the manipulator

Romanian newspapers are trained in journalistic ethics and integrity
Twenty managing editors and editors in chief of regional newspapers took the Journalistic Ethics and Integrity course, which Free Voice/MMA organizes together with her Romanian partners Startmedia and Independent Journalism Center. The course took place in Bucharest from February 3-11, 2006. The aim of the course was to develop a code of conduct for journalists and to make an agreement about the implementation of this code in the newsrooms.

SOMEONE IN A POSITION TO DO SO, SHOULD MAKE A BIG COMPLAINT IN UK AND EUROPE ABOUT WHAT CHARLES SAATCHI ALLOWS TO HAPPEN ON THIS WEBSITE.

SO, THEY HAVE ETHICS AND INTEGRITY, THEY DID NOTHING WRONG. SAATCHI IS THE PROBLEM. THEY HAVE NO ETHICS AND NO INTEGRITY ANY MORE.
All the romanian article did was make their public aware that such a list was here, and they voted. For you, and others to maintain this is a fix is preposterous, they are all individuals and gave their personal vote. To have them then removed is a crime, a fix by saatchi, and should not be tolerated. It is only because charles saatchi is a member of the st. johns wood mafia that the disgraceful things that happen on this website do not make the mainstream, real world media. I am going to get in touch with the romanian newspaper and suggest they run the story of the real world of saatchi online. For, I am sure that the st. john's wood mafia have no control over the media in romania.
What none of the idiots that post here in support of saatchi realise, is that the man can control and manipulate events and control public opinion, he did it decades ago with his advertising agency, and manipulated public opinion to bring margaret thatcher to power in government in the UK. That is only one example. Through the st. john's wood mafia he has an element of control over the mainstream uk newspaper industry. Saatchi is a control freak. Not only does he seek to be a world wide art megalomaniac, but the ultimate intention is to control the media on the internet, but this will never happen.

suggested reading by Max N Herman

http://www.geocities.com/genius-2000/wamlink.html

Strange how this max fits in very nicely with this debate topic, I wonder if he is a relation to the famous romanian artist of the same name.