the recent fire at a saatchi warehouse has been in the press a lot of late. today i came across some images of the chapman bros. “hell” which was one of the pieces evidently destroyed in the fire

...along with a slew of others (damien hirst is said to have lost 16 paintings). many of the works are touted as being “very important”. works like the ?40,000, turner prize nominated everyone i have ever slept with 1963-1995 by tracey emin. i am an artist, an art worshipper, etc, but the “devastation” of losing the work of all these contemporary artists really leaves me cold somehow. is it just that the work is new and so not as revered? is it that the work is really just o.k. stuff thats been over-hyped and made to seem important by the resulting bloated price tags? is it pure schadenfreude? i don’t know. but evidently i am far from being alone in my great big shrug of “eh”. (read some of the decidedly tepid, and occasionally gleeful reactions here, here, here, and here). there were so many unsympathetic reactions in fact that emin (mentioned above) got upset. not at the loss of her own work mind you, just by the reaction. in any case i have enjoyed pieces by some of the artists in question. hirst and the chapmans mainly. as far as the chapmans’ piece “hell” goes though it’s nothing that david levinthal

hasn’t already captured more elegantly on film. in my opinion at least.