LONDON—A compelling contemporary myth goes something like this: you discover a young artist at a degree show, you buy his or her work for nothing, and, presto! it’s suddenly worth thousands. I call it the Charles Saatchi effect. But it is very difficult to do; going round to all the degree shows and tiny little galleries in the East End is hard, time-consuming work, and a Damien Hirst doesn’t come around every day. Luckily, now there’s a team that will do it for you.

Flora Fairbairn, Kay Saatchi, and Catriona Warren have the sharpest eyes in London when it comes to truffling out the best new talent from local art schools. Kay Saatchi ran the contemporary department at Waddington Galleries before talent spotting with former husband Charles; Fairbairn, an art advisor and curator, has mounted sell-out shows for artists such as Annie Kevans (whose new show “Swans” opens in early June), Rachel Kneebone, and Jason Shulman. Warren, former editor of Art Review, produced indispensable, right-on-the-nail, annual guides to the best new young artists, including Idris Khan (Victoria Miro Gallery), Katy Moran (Stuart Shave/Modern Art), and Christopher Ward (Max Wigram Gallery). The fruit of the three curators’ meticulous research is “Anticipation,” which has just opened at property developer and collector David Roberts’s new gallery One One One, at 111 Great Titchfield Street.

Opening night was a human zoo. Anyone who is anyone in London’s incestuously small contemporary art world queued in the street to be let in two by two. And what did they see (when they could see anything over the crowds)? “One of the important trends is the way students have returned to the idea of making art which is beautiful and skillful,” said Warren. The show bore this out. Everyday objects—socks, cups, a light switch—are frozen in marble by Tatsuya Kimata. Maria Kontis (who is already very hot) makes detailed drawings of books and family photographs. More carving comes from Tom Price, who makes tiny heads in wood. Jodie Carey’s 8-foot-high baroque chandeliers are made out of fluff from vacuum cleaners. Douglas White’s exquisite Owl is the ghostly imprint of an owl that flew into a pane of glass. Prices range from £500 to £5,000; if this isn’t exactly entry art, it comes very close. Perhaps the best thing about the show is that, though it has three curators, everything hangs together really, really well. Hopefully “Anticipation” will become an annual event.

In another part of town, starting on June 6, the venerable Old Bond Street gallery Agnew’s is celebrating 190 years as art dealers. The gallery has asked Gina Agnew, the seventh generation of the family in the business, to curate a lively show of 25 British artists—mostly classic 20th-century modernists—who have exhibited with Agnew’s over the years. They’re being shown together with such well-known contemporary artists as Sam Taylor-Wood and some new-ish artists—well, new to Agnew’s.

Agnew’s is hardly a newcomer to the contemporary art scene. The gallery’s first contemporary art show was in l906, and anyone who bought the work of a young unknown in one of their 1930s shows would now be the proud (and very rich) possessor of a very early Francis Bacon.

There are few surprises in this show, but it’s good nonetheless, with lovely work from Andrew Gadd, an unusual “artist’s model” by David Inshaw, and glorious Australian landscapes by Sarah Raphael, who sadly died very young. Adding to those are works by the new-ish artists: John Kelly’s Deconstructed Monument, Tim Pomeroy’s wonderful, transcendental stone carving Shrine, and, my favorite, Christopher Wood’s exquisite, almost Tanguy-esque Uranus, a dreamlike landscape. The show isn’t by any means cutting edge, but it springs coherently from the English painting tradition of landscape, objectivism, and memory.

Annely Juda Fine Art’s upcoming show, “Annely Juda—A Celebration,” could easily be titled “The Poetry of Abstraction.” For over 40 years, this visionary gallerist, who died last year at the age of 92, showed non-objective art from Europe to a largely uncomprehending British art scene, together with such new artists as Anthony Caro, Prunella Clough, David Hockney, and David Nash. Some 50 works in this show are a roll call of major 20th-century art, from Constantin Brancusi’s bronze and steel fish to El Lissitzky’s suprematist forms, and much, much more, through July 28.