Enjoy the welcome
If Charles Saatchi seems to keep discovering only one kind of art — immediately impactful, conceptually simple, entertaining — and this limitation makes him a bit questionable as a totally lovable guy, no one can dispute that he has completely transformed the UK art scene. Contemporary art is a popular subject here. There’s still nothing like this excitement in the States or anywhere else in the world.

Does he love art or is he just a cynical market manipulator? Do such distinctions even matter? How can one productively discuss a concept so clumsy as "loving," particularly when it applies to such a vastly differentiated thing as art? The point is the stunning social change his good or evil attitude toward art has brought about. Art is now at the center of social life in the UK, at least at a certain educated level, whereas previously it was remote to all but an elite few.

A social genius: not necessarily insisting that nonexperts should educate themselves, get more thoughtful and sensitive about art’s evolution, its interior life and its visual traditions, none of which seems to interest him, but simply opening up a congested situation — insiders versus outsiders. Since 1985, when Saatchi launched his huge gallery in north London, he has democratized the artworld by showing art that appealed to a wide audience, rather than a select group of aesthetes. By making art seem to have less to it than a previous elite audience might have assumed, he drew people in — he made art less intimdating. The deep stuff exists somewhere, seems to be his attitude, and whoever wants it is welcome to it, but it’s the hot stuff that counts.

Feel the energy
For a while after he closed the first space, he had one on the Thames in County Hall, the former office of the mayor of London. Then for two years, following rows with the landlords, he had no gallery at all — but as if to compensate, there was a huge surge of publishing and online activity. Saatchi Online, a virtual museum, is tapped into by millions every day. They post their artworks and CVs, read articles by art critics, look at illustrations of Saatchi’s collection, and enter competitions. Two recent big Saatchi-collection books, one of German art and one of American, are full of so many color pictures of hot new stuff that when I saw them I found myself thinking, "I give up — I just can’t keep processing all this somewhat average-looking new art that’s obviously been created more for a market than for reasons internal to art." And then I was struck by his energy; faced with the same thing, he thinks, "Great! I’ll buy it!"

Read the signs
Last October, he opened his new place. The whole of a former army barracks in Chelsea (a posh but bland area of London) has been converted into a series of immaculate modern-art spaces. His first show there is "The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art," a lot of nutty bids for attention by virtuosos who are introduced in an inexpensive "picture by picture guide" with such startling observations as "Liu’s practice is uniquely varied" or "Li is interested in the power of images" or "Cang is a bona fide shaman." We also learn that the work of Yue Minjun constitutes "a self-ironic response to the spiritual vacuum and folly of modern-day China," while we can see for ourselves that this surely goes for everything in the show, not just this artist’s paintings of multiple pink grinning self-portraits.

Black humor reigns. Everything must be crazy fun immediately. A city made of dog-chew rawhide, a giant dog turd, hyperreal life-size world leaders in wheelchairs on a random collision course, monsters, nudity, and English royalty; in local terms, Young British Artists of the 1990s coming around again: shocks plus a vague sense of politics and history (or politics and history processed as mildly shocking dream fragments). If you see amazing industriousness and a racked-up sense of institutionalized avant-gardism as unproblematic product for new consumers, and you feel stunned at the high production levels, this is an odd sensation to be having right now, as we leave a period of art gloss and enter a new era of hard times.