Many members of the moneyed crowd always dabble in art on a personal level, on a business level or both. But not many people of this crowd turn their focus full time to collecting and even jump starting a movement. Charles Saatchi who once ran the world's biggest ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi did just that.
He opened his first gallery in 1985 in an old paint factory in St John's Wood, London, and filled it with the sculptures of American minimalist Donald Judd and the abstract paintings of Cy Twombly and Brice Marden. A few years later he turned his attention to a group of young Goldsmiths graduates who had hit the headlines with a small exhibition called Freeze. It was the start of a long, sometimes notorious, relationship between Saatchi and the artists who became known as the "YBAs". Of these, his affiliation with Damien Hirst is the most famous, and the artist's sculpture The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, featuring a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde, is still Saatchi's most recognised acquisition.source: Guardian
