This is a curious phenomenon. Are we seeing the gallery encroaching on the web, or the web encroaching on the gallery? It seems ambiguous. The boundaries become blurred.

It seems like a great way to draw attention to the gallery, turning it into something of a gallery blog, in the sense of easy participation by the artists.

The daily kos is an example of a participatory site where visitors vote ("recommend") on blogs. Anyone can add a blog, but the recommend ones have a longer lifetime. Combing that concept with the online gallery might be useful. Perhaps it has already been done?
 

I've signed up and found the Saatchi web site very easy and simple to use. The end result looks very good. Recommended. You never know *who* might be looking :-)
 

Yeah, it seems to be turning into an art portal Karl. It's definately not a bad thing for traffic, as Im sure the site is pretty busy each day.

It looks like they're working on new features too. One seems to be allowing artists to start their own blog. Which means hundreds of new pages of content written by artists everyday, and a lot more visitors to the Saatchi site.

I think it adds value to the art community online, so good luck to them.

The daily kos is a good idea too, which is also super popular!

And youre right Gareth, even the man himself must browse his own website sometimes ;-)
 

The Wall St Journal reported Oct 10 that the Saatchi Online Gallery has 65,000 artists participating now. It also gave info on what is actually selling from this portal---yes, they are making sales and no, they don't take commissions from the artists. It's definitely worth uploading your paintings if you're a pro and you want to widen your exposure. With more than 500 people each night looking through the artist portfolios, that's way better traffic than most of us will get even in a live gallery.
 

Hate to break it to you but Saatchi’s site, www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk, including STUART is a scam. There traffic ranking is very deceptive. Go to www.alexa.com and you will see that the largest group on the site based on country is India making up 16.5%. Most art sites and websites in general have the United States, United Kingdom and Germany as their three top countries for traffic. Saatchi has India, Thailand and Indonesia which all happen to have a market for pay-per-click services.



So my guess is that the marketing brains behind Saatchi’s art site has paid some of those companies to visit the site in order to fudge their numbers. Need more proof about Saatchi’s little white lie? The United States and United Kingdom each make up less than 0.6% of the membership. Germany makes up 1.1%. Russia only makes up 1.2%. So that means most of the hubs of the international art world are hardly represented on the site. Anyone else think that is strange? When compared to other popular art sites?



People have said it before and I will say it again, the only reason people put work on Saatchi’s site is because his name is on it. His site looks like it came from the mid 1990s. You tell me how a poorly designed site with an outdated look has become one of the top 300 websites in the world. Don’t bother. I know the answer. Millions of hands paid to visit and Saatchi’s huge bank account to pay them.
 

Charles Saatchi the bully and fraud/comment part 1
sandalphon1 wrote:
Thursday, 17 September 2009 at 07:26 am (UTC)
Will the real Charles Saatchi please stand up, and is there a newspaper in the UK that is not influended by him being a member of the St. John's Wood Maffia that will dare to print a not so glowing story about him!

Just like all the other articles, you are afraid to show the other side of Charles Saatchi, Saatchi the bully, Saatchi the destroyer of artists.

My prospects for further my career as an artist has been shot to pieces by Charles new toy his online gallery. For almost four years I have been the victim of his online gallery. Virtually on a daily basis by reputation has been destroyed in his online chat room, forum and magazine blogs. Until i got the uk police and my lawyer involved two years ago he allowed anyone to anonymously publish libel and defamation on his website, and there it would stay forever in cyberspace, endlessly turning up in google searches on my name! Why you can even break the law and impersonate the police, as some anonymous poster did almost two years ago in publishing a Dorset police wanted poster with a photograph of me on appropriated from a local newspaper, encouraging readers to report me to the police for the careless actions of my impostor. You could even at one time publish the grossest libel and name your victim in his front page online magazine blogs and forums, until a lawyer and police investigation gets them to moderate and review all publications for their approval before publishing!

The truth is Charles Saatchi is a well known bully. Apart from saying to his brother Lord Maurice Nathan Saatchi that he could not believe that they came from the same womb, he bullied Maurice. At one time in the boardroom of their advertising offices, Maurine was reviewing a current ad campaign and Charles got up onto the table and walked across to Maurice and hit him over the head with a chair. In a bitter dispute with his landlord at county hall, the pop impressario Pete Waterman, Waterman describes a phone call from Charles as being simply a diatribe of abuse, and in a court case Charles gets hold of Watermans colleague Peter Caselton by the throat and tells him he would make sure that he went to bed with Waterman in jail!



Still, I need not rant on in an online comment. I invite you to view several of my video diaries showing what saatchi-online is truly like, abusive, homophobic, racist, and more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRkuJnX-DHc

In the following video you can see how his director Philly Adams implied blackmail to me if i did not stop visiting their website. A website where just anyone can surf into their chatroom http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/chatlive. Where, despite them having a notice claiming that they have email registration to chat, you can totally ignore this and choose a thousand different id's a day and supply a totally made up email address, and be given instant access to chat and abuse, especially as one can also use the firefox browser and instal the Tor Vidalia proxy button into it, and then get into the chatroom on a proxy server, replacing their own ip address with one on the other side of the planet, and you can just press a button in Tor and change the ip address six times a minute, thereby encouraging the grossest abuse one could possibly imagine :-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTJ6HEfXjSw

contd
 

Charles Saatchi the bully and fraud/comment part 2
sandalphon1 wrote:
Thursday, 17 September 2009 at 07:26 am (UTC)

In the following video from over two years ago you can see a comedy noir comic strip i made of just a little of the abuse i received on his toy :-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGSA3tkDojQ

In the following video you can listen to one of his website stalking abusers in a voicemail threat :-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H210-BaeP7c

and in the following four part video diary, you can see screenshots of the abuse published on his website by an arrested stalker. Two people, one an artist member of his website were arrested for their stalking and abuse on his website in april 2008 :-

http://www.archive.org/details/RonnieHobbyHomophobicHateCampaign2001-2009PartL

http://www.archive.org/details/RonnieHobby2001-2009HomophobicHateCampaignPartLl

http://www.archive.org/details/RonnieHobbyHomophobicHateCampaign2001-2009PartLll


http://www.archive.org/details/RonnieHobbyHomophobicHateCampaign2001-2009PartIvThis is me :-

http://www.artreview.com/profile/ChristopherJohnHobby

ps. i do find one of your comments in this article highly amusing :-

"Johnny Craddock to Nigella's Fanny"

Who amongst the media fraternity has the courage to paint the proper picture of Charles Saatchi !