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All sorts of paths can lead to an art career—and a nation-wide media frenzy never hurts. Francesca Grillo hit the headlines last year, when she was accused, alongside her sister Elisabetta, of defrauding über-collector Charles Saatchi and his former wife Nigella Lawson of £685,000 ($1,140,500) with company credit cards. The sisters were found not guilty in December 2013.

One might have thought that Francesca had seen enough of the art world at the Saatchi-Lawson residence to want to start afresh somewhere else. Quite the opposite. She has teamed up with another former Saatchi employee, Sharrine Scholtz, to launch a gallery-without-walls, Laissez Faire Art.

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It is considered one of the most important contemporary art collections in the world, featuring Tracey Emin’s bed and Grayson Perry’s pots.

So when Charles Saatchi offered to donate the cream of his private collection – valued at upwards of £30 million – to the nation for free, he might have been forgiven for thinking it would be gratefully accepted.

But two years since announcing his generous gift, the collection has yet to find a home.

Instead, the Government has bungled attempts to secure it while a national museum has also passed on the offer.

Saatchi’s bequest includes more than 200 works by several of the world’s leading contemporary artists, among them Jake and Dinos Chapman, the Indian artist Jitish Kallat and Emin, whose unmade bed, My Bed, which came to symbolise the Young British Artist (YBA) movement of the 1990s, is included.

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