Charles Saatchi's Brit Art collection has an irresistible force, but the same cannot be said of his new gallery, writes Aidan Dunne
Many of the moveable objects in the Saatchi Gallery, newly installed in London's revamped County Hall, exert an irresistible force. It is the force of their accumulated fame and notoriety, and over the coming months it is likely to draw many thousands of visitors into the oak-panelled space.
They'll come to see Damien Hirst's shark and Tracey Emin's bed, Marcus Harvey's infamous portrait of Myra Hindley, Marc Quinn's sanguinary self-portrait, made from his blood, and Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary, dotted with collaged fragments from porn magazines, a painting that earned the wrath of Rudolph Giuliani when he visited as mayor of New York.
All of these things and more have, over the past decade or so, become icons of contemporary British art, and to encounter them in the flesh is an oddly diminished experience, like rushing around the Louvre and ticking highlights off a checklist. The idea overshadows the reality.
It's hard to see them on their merits when they have come to represent so much, even come to typify their era in some respects, and much of the credit for that is down to Charles Saatchi. That isn't to deny that some of the artists, notably Hirst and Emin, have become minor celebrities in their own rights.
Even to approach the gallery prompts a degree of respect for the ad-man's flair - and chutzpah. In plumping for County Hall, former lair of Red Ken Livingstone, as a venue, he has his art collection strategically poised not only between the two London Tates, Britain and Modern, but also in the centre of one of the city's main tourist routes.
Across the bridge from Westminster, next to the London Eye, London Aquarium, a Salvador Dali theme park and other fairground attractions, the fledgling Saatchi Gallery has an unbelievable amount of passing trade. You almost have to elbow your way to the entrance.
Apart from location, location, location, however, the building boasts little if any charm as a gallery. A stolid, Edwardian municipal structure designed by the architect Ralph Knott, it features parquet-floored, oak-panelled corridors and offices, plus a few larger spaces, none of them particularly neutral, versatile or appealing. Although it must have been quite a handsome, comfortable place to work, it is overbearing.
There is a well-established trend for finding a cultural role for buildings that have outlived their previous functions - witness the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, in Dublin.
But almost everything about County Hall is listed, including that ubiquitous oak panelling, and the sheer atmosphere of the place rests heavily on the cheeky-chappie nature of a lot of the art on view.
Despite the thought involved, the money spent and the effort expended, it's hard not to feel the art has been randomly dispersed throughout a setting that squeezes the life out of it.
Given that Saatchi is known as the Medici of Young British Artists, it might come as a bit of a shock to encounter a roomful of paintings by John Bratby, an artist from another era and another tradition. In fact, Saatchi is a real fan of Bratby, and of other relatively traditional artists. Sad to say, the paintings look fairly lacklustre, and they're not helped by their poorly lit setting.
There is, though, something canny about juxtaposing the work of a 1950s kitchen-sink realist painter with the in-your-face 1990s realism of Emin's messy bed and Hirst's monumental ashtray, filled with thousands of cigarette butts.
The inaugural display at the gallery is billed as a Hirst retrospective, with selections ofother artists' work. In practice, the Hirsts are distributed throughout the building, often interspersed with other things.
By the time of Sensation, the Royal Academy's exhibition of the Saatchi collection in 1997, Hirst's shark or, to give it its correct title, The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living, had begun to look a little faded and dilapidated. And that is the case now, not only with the shark, but also, with other examples of Hirst's penchant for dissecting and preserving animals.
A lot of his dead animal sculptures, the cows and calves, sheep and pigs, are sad in a more pathetic way than he perhaps intended. His liking for bravura gestures and macabre jokes sits awkwardly with the reality of exhibits that might come across as profound in the antiseptic framework of a white-cube gallery space but have a distinctly tawdry, sideshow quality in this incongruous setting. The more of them you see, the more they seem indicative of quirky personal obsessions than great art.
Yet despite his shortcomings and his ability to turn out empty nonsense, Hirst is an artist of vision. His most recent piece, Love Lost, typically heavy on the logistics, is an aquarium bizarrely, but intriguingly, equipped with a computer terminal, a gynaecologist's couch and live fish. It's certainly a coup de théâtre.
His shoal of disparate fish species, Isolated Elements Swimming In The Same Direction For The Purpose Of Understanding, is compelling, and offers more interpretative possibilities than are suggested by the irritating caption that accompanies it (every exhibit gets a prescriptive, jaunty caption).
But Holidays/No Feelings, one of the oldest pieces by Hirst on view, remains one of his best. A glass cabinet packed with pharmaceutical products, it is a subtle and eloquent work, much better than the banal dot paintings that reflect his continued interest in pill-popping culture.
Saatchi is candid about liking work with instant, shock appeal. Hirst, Emin, the Chapman brothers, the overrated, overexposed Sarah Lucas, even Jenny Saville's monumental paintings of flesh, are right up his street. In fact, his interests are broader than his avowal might suggest.
Saville's work, for example, although quite confrontational, is also conspicuously painterly and made with considerable skill. This also applies to Peter Doig, whose remarkable paintings, mingling elements of memory and movies, stand out in the show.
His work, with its complex surfaces, engages the eye and the mind, and when you come upon two of his paintings in a room you realise you have something to really look at. Equally, the sombre, richly toned black-and-white photographs of Craigie Horsfield come as something of a surprise, slowing you down and drawing you in.
Actually, that may not be universally so. Many visitors were giving only cursory glances to anything other than the collection's iconic pieces.
It seems unlikely he did, but if Saatchi harboured any intent to goad Nicholas Serota, the Tate supremo, it won't work. With his austere, fine-tuned sensibility, Serota would likely recoil from the hucksterish aspect of the Saatchi Gallery, with its "roll up, roll up, see animals diced and sliced" approach.
It is true the Tate's Turner Prize spent the 1990s trying to catch up with Saatchi, sniffily snubbing his artists, then trying to make good their omission - but always too late. Equally sniffily, Philip Dodd of the Institute of Contemporary Art recently suggested the Saatchi collection was already old hat, saying younger artists had moved on to new things.
Perhaps they have, but Saatchi should worry, with kudos and instinct to spare. So far, he's been well ahead of the game. The experts have been scrambling to catch up, and while he's still buying the work of young artists, there's no sign of that changing.
The Saatchi Gallery, County Hall, London, is open Sun-Thu 10 a.m.-6 p.m. and Fri-Sat 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Admission is £8.50 (€12.50), concs £6.50 (9.50); 0044-20- 78232363, www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk