Saatchi Gallery's Website Snarks the Shark

I just had an I-don't-know-what-to-make-of-this moment.

The website of collector Charles Saatchi's own gallery has just posted a screed by one Steve Pulimood, an Oxford doctoral candidate, about the recent fortunes of Damien Hirst's shark, which was a star attraction of the "Sensation" show of Saatchi's own collection.

Either the website's blog operates with editorial independence or Saatchi is happy to provide the forum for someone to take digs at rival collector Steve Cohen (who bought his shark for $8 million, only to have to replace the disintegrating beast) and at the Metropolitan Museum (which decided to put the shark on longterm display, almost seven years after its director penned a NY Times Op-Ed piece debunking "Sensation").

Pulimood writes:

It's startling how quickly the bristling avant-garde becomes the banal picture-postcard. Why a museum that is slow to the mark on contemporary art...should be so interested in pandering to the market is evidence of the rapidly expanding scope of what is considered establishment art. Central Park's new shark will make more than a splash. Even if the beast belly flops in the long run, right now it seems to be a veritable coup for the Met over their peer institutions....

Since the time of the industrialists, nothing has changed in the American, milk-mustachioed envy of the European avant-garde. This move by the Met alters our sense of what America's grandest museum considers within its often shortsighted, conservative bounds.

Milk-mustachioed? (Got formaldehyde?)