The Shape of Things to Come at SAATCH GALLERY

Devoted followers of the fads and fashions of immediately contemporary art may recall that, at the end of May this year, Charles Saatchi mounted Newspeak, an exhibition subtitled British Art Now. Some of us may not then have realised (as I did not) that there was more to come, that he was revealing only Part I of his wide-ranging survey of art in Britain here and now, this very minute. Now, five months later almost to the day, we have Part II.

Between the parts, I discern no significant difference and the division makes no particular point. In terms of quality and interest, Part II is, if anything, wagging the tail of Part I and I doubt if many of those critics who write with inevitably unreserved enthusiasm of the wilder reaches of contemporary art will feel much challenged by it, or be inclined to say of it that it is groundbreaking or cutting-edge. As for innovative — another cliché that drips so readily from their pens — this must be the last word to come to mind. For me, imitative is the first, with derivative closely on its heels, and then begged, borrowed and rehashed, for old de Kooning, Basquiat and Twombly are among those who lurk at elbows here, their small values diminished in transmission. That is the trouble with these borrowings, for they enfeeble rather than enhance in their faint resemblance, with nothing of the borrower’s own to lend strength to the dying echo.

Elegantly balanced in the hang and brilliantly lit (much better than ever in Tate Modern), these paintings and sculptures are given every chance to convince us of their quality — indeed, one might argue that the circumstances are seductive — but they leave me filled with misgiving. Do they in any way truly represent British art now? Are they not as far from that mark as the annual farrago of the Turner Prize and its whimsical orthodoxies, or the amusements exhibited in the Tate Triennial? I have long since ceased to trust the taste and intuition of the Tate in either its heart or its outstations — it has, like the BBC, too many panjandrums, too many layers of authority, too many backs to scratch, too many vested interests to serve, too much kowtowing to perform and too much self-aggrandisement to achieve. Saatchi, on the other hand, has none of these obligations and, as the only authority, the unique panjandrum, driven by neither orthodoxies nor political pressures, can do what he will. He did it brilliantly in his first gallery in St John’s Wood, brilliantly too in Sensation at the Royal Academy — a ghastly revelation never matched by the Tate — and in many exhibitions since. It is to Saatchi, not Nicholas Serota, that we owe our awareness of so much contemporary art. Whether we like it or not matters not a jot — we needed to know what we now know and his galleries, rather than the pair of Tates, have been the essential sources of information and instruction.

Perhaps luck played a part in Saatchi coinciding with the generation of Hirst and the Chapman Brothers and we shall never know quite what he owes to them in his personal preferment as guru, or they to him in their exaltation as geniuses.

They were, it might be argued, the Beuys and Duchamp of their day — that is, offering something unexpected in art and, like them, impossible to follow without blatant mimicry in their chosen genres, even if many of us found these genres distasteful and incomprehensible as art.

Thirteen years on from Sensation, it is now clear that the 42 artists he chose for that exhibition divide into three categories: the handful of Hirsts, Emins and Ofilis who have made it so big that they are grist to the gossip columns of the popular press; the much larger group who are kept in the public eye by extravagant commissions for the Tate, the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square and with the support of the Arts Council; and those who have virtually or altogether disappeared. The ratio is 9:17:16.

From these figures, it might seem apparent that, even in the heyday of the Young British Artists (YBAs, as they were dubbed), Saatchi was not particularly good at picking winners — but was that what he was trying to do? I thought so at the time and saw him as an impresario, part Svengali, part Barnum and Bailey. Now I am inclined to see him as the man who, in the mid-Nineties, stepped in to do what the Tate should have been doing — that is to show us, not what had happened in art that, though recently made by living artists, had already become historical (Hodgkin, Auerbach and Freud, for example), but art almost at the moment of its happening in art schools (then still very individual institutions with different traditions) and amongst those newly emerged from them. That much of it was bonkers rubbish of neither intellectual weight nor technical skill, with not so much as a tincture of aesthetic pleasure to be derived from it, was neither here nor there — it was what a new generation of art students had convinced themselves was art.

In so short a time since, however, it has all gone off the boil. A handful of Sensation artists, having made their millions, have become the obvious choices for public commissions and are making even more, one-trick ponies repeating their one trick, and the successor generation wholly lacks the ability to perform free of their influence. Look about you at Saatchi’s Part II, then turn to the Sensation catalogue and you will see the forgotten Paul Finnegan as a precursor of its sculpture, Fiona Rae as the presiding genius of its painting and Martin Maloney’s daubs as the justification for those of Carla Busuttil, who deserves the wooden spoon for her total lack of talent and technical ability. With so much so weakly derivative of Sensation, I began to wonder if the criteria on which Saatchi based his judgments in the Nineties still provide his benchmarks now.

The probable answer, however, is that he was compelled to choose from what is currently available — an answer supported by the dreadful falling-off in quality of the annual prize exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and by the dire offerings submitted in hope of other annual prizes. I used to think that, up and down the land, there might be thousands of worthy painters and sculptors ignored by the Arts Council, the Tate, the sophisticated London trade and Saatchi because of their concern for the aesthetic purposes of art and the skills and techniques with which to communicate them, because of their refusal to work within the fashionable new parameters of shock, revulsion and perplexed astonishment. Now I begin to wonder if, after half a century of near invisibility, there are more than the half-dozen or so whose work I know and value.

In Part I of Newspeak, I found three things of interest — one of which I would willingly possess — but in Part II I had no such acquisitive response. It contains nothing to excite, or even to offend, and far too much painting that is as dully derivative as the work of Dexter Dalwood now on view in the Turner Prize show at Tate Britain. In short, within Saatchi’s generous parameters, it is neither better nor worse than any random cobbling together of current British art that might be achieved by other curators in the field. It has no peculiar Saatchi stamp to it. I do not suppose for one moment that his discerning eye has dulled — only that British Art Now has fallen into a slough of dreadful sameness and is now stuck (pace Coleridge) with neither breath nor motion.