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.

In fact, it’s interesting to wonder how Saatchi’s act will adapt over the next few years to fit the changing zeitgeist. All we know is that he has India and Middle East shows lined up, fun stuff we’ve heard about and seen in reproduction, which like the Chinese version seem to be either tailor-made to fit the needs of the international art market or accidentally appropriate for such a market, having been hanging around in dusty storage cupboards for decades with signs on the door saying Also-ran and Derivative. (Now the signs are changed to Urgent Expressions of Identity.)

Go for it
In the 1960s, Pop art caused a little revolution in the UK: at last, a "popular" form coming out of high culture. It didn’t last long (just a few years), and then it was back to the old impasse: the majority of Brits, intimidated, basically kept out. When Saatchi started his popular-art revolution, it was very different. The effect was much more long lasting. Going around "The Revolution Continues," I was struck by the great mass of people there, and I spoke to several of them who said this was their second or third trip, and that in some cases they’d come back with friends to spread the good news. But the meanings are still weird; what is the quality of the experience that these unpretentious nonexperts are getting? Are they really gaining higher awareness of important matters? Has art become popular because of market success or because we are all so much more soulful now?

On the top floor of the gallery is a display of new blobs by Julian Schnabel on a Japanese theme (once again proving what a good, if mannered, blobbist he is) in a room given over to the auction house Phillips de Pury (whose sponsorship enables visitors to the gallery to get in free) and a Projects Space with a display of outsize drawings of newspaper headlines by the New York-based artist Aleksandra Mir, who was born in Poland. And nearby, photos and paintings by a mixture of schoolchildren, art-school graduates, and striver-artists who haven’t made it big time yet, which all have something to do with Saatchi’s open-ended populist online empire, where anyone can have a go at playing the contemporary-art game. (There’s no particular character to the website; no look, no design, no mood — just a barrage of information and a multitude of participants. My personal feeling about it is that I’m amazed at the democracy, and I want to take part too.)

Give me more free trips
All current art tastes seem to be covered at the new gallery. Keeping your finger on the pulse of now: hot art from China. More-or-less aestheticism: Schnabel. Asinine conceptual solemnity: Mir. Fun random art diversions for amateurs: everyone else. The main thing is the Chinese art. However, I’ve no idea what the proper way is to approach it. With shock, awe, or pity. I’ve been to Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Beijing and Cairo. I loved those trips. I don’t want to say anything here that would jeopardize my being invited to go on some more. But I admit I had the same feeling about the art on offer in those places as I have in the Saatchi show: harmless cartoons for anyone.

Is the big issue that comes out of the Saatchi phenomenon the evil of commercialism? A striking thing about the present is that we often hear about a return to seriousness that art-market collapse might bring on, but the seriousness always turns out to be some kind of conceptual gag with an idiotic political meaning, or inane questioning of what "art" is, not seriousness as in something genuinely worth looking at. Complaining about commercialism in this context is meaningless: all this recently emerged, global art-market product is commercial, of course, but so is anything genuinely serious, beautiful, or powerful that’s happened in art for many centuries.

Why shouldn’t China have an art market? UK critics at the highbrow papers have been negative about this show, complaining the art is junk, as if they had a uniformly good record for sensitive radar on the difference between junk and refinement, which they don’t. I don’t care much about the art, either, but I mistrust the motivation of the bad reviews. I think it’s more about economic resentment than aesthetic judgment. On so many levels, the UK has been trounced by China. Now we see even our own YBA junk China-fied. We find it a bit rich.

Cruise and be happy
Saatchi’s taste is hard to pin down. With this show, you’re offered mockery of authority and staging of eruptions of disturbing fantasy in a context of repressed order, done in a conceptually glib way. The art market is very new in China, and its sudden success is part of China’s current world leadership. On the other hand, who cares? The art market is a pretty boring subject unless you’re a market insider of some kind. It’s to his credit that over the years, Saatchi has made out of his collection an ongoing spectacle that is accessible to anyone. You can see how such visual gestures might interest him. He isn’t just an art-market man. He’s a former advertising man. And economically visually witty meanings are what he knows about and is good at. "Saatchi's Open-Door Policy" originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' February 2009 Table of Contents.