Saatchi Promotes Porn

The forthcoming Saatchi exhibition USA Today is already embroiled in controversy before it opens to the public next month at the Royal Academy of Arts. As one expects from the doyen of tasteless tripe, it's a collection of rubbish; but this time some of it is rude rubbish! Take Lara Shnitger's "sculpture" I Want Kids. Please do: the farther the better. She reckons it's a "sort of fertility symbol". To everyone else it looks like a crass joke about paedophilia. (Lack of communication here, Shitger?) Then there's Gerald Davis's Monica, a painting of a young girl with pompoms on her socks engaged in oral sex. Academicians are furious about the pompoms! "Bloody Yankee pompoms," you can hear them muttering. Sculptor Ivor Abrahams accused Saatchi of "scraping the barrel". Doesn't he always? (I'm thinking unmade beds and stuffed sharks.) The morons will flock to see it at the Royal Academy of Tripe. Read all ab-aart-it in The Evening Standard's online London Guide. (My thanks to Selby Whittingham for this story. I couldn't find Brian Sewell's comments on the Mond Bequest, but spotted Shnitger instead.)