He's gotta have it

Charles Saatchi's buy 'em cheap, stack 'em high policy has never been more evident than in New Blood. But with so much on show, it's getting harder to see anything to like
New Blood: Francis Upritchard
Save Yourself by Francis Upritchard: funny, almost

New Blood: New Young Artists, New Acquisitions
Saatchi Gallery, London SE1; opens on Wednesday

New, new new! It's come to be Charles Saatchi's big thing. New art, new names, new movements to spin, new careers to boost and inflect. Getting ahead of the others, snatching the early bird's worm, stealing a march on the rest. Newness may have no value in its own right, but you can see how it could become an end in itself - pursued in a race against rival collectors, dealers, maybe even lumbering curators, as a form of competitive sport.

No value, come to think of it, may not be quite right. The newness of a work of art does offer the buyer certain advantages. It makes him or her look a bit bold, a bit adventurous, a bit devil-may-care, maybe even a touch philanthropic.

As buzzwords go, art-world-wise, it is also wonder fully bland. It doesn't say anything other than the obvious and irrefutable about a fresh-minted work of art. It doesn't say good, for example, or even quite interesting, about which everyone can disagree from the start. In fact, it more or less issues a mollifying plea for the suspension of all critical judgment.

Saatchi says it three times in the name of his new show, or collection, or outlay of recent shopping trips: just new blood, new youngsters, new purchases. No attempt to invent specious labels or groups. No irony or self-promotion (remember Ant Noises, anagram of Sensation?). Just going back to where it all began, with an echo of that first neutral title, Young British Artists, which gave the name to that whole phenomenon.

So it's both modest and jokily immodest all at once, but with a main aim of disarming the visitor. And to a certain extent, just for a while, it may even put you in the mood for picking through jumble. A mood of curiosity - this is new, haven't seen this before, didn't know they were doing this in Tokyo/ Copenhagen/Leipzig - and happily of benign indifference.

Only a real Santa of a patron would sign a cheque for that rope made of loo paper or all these terrible ballpoint scribbles filling sheet after needless sheet, you might think, as you wander through the emporium, but maybe Saatchi really is that cheery Maecenas.

An emporium is what it feels like - piled high, stacked deep. If one more work was tacked to one more inch of wood-panelled wall, the building would surely collapse. The central pantheon that guarantees the box office remains more or less intact: the shark, the dung, Myra and the bloody head, dead dad and the famously unmade bed.

But all the other rooms, halls and corridors are jammed. By my count, there are more than a hundred new works on display, plus several more classics from Saatchi's collection. You get three shows for the price of a ticket.

So what did he buy next? From last year's Becks Futures, the one piece everyone remembers, if they remember anything at all: Francis Upritchard's little bandaged mummy lying helplessly on the floor, one marble eye revealed, an empty fag packet tucked into its bandages, moaning and gurning like a terrible old codger. Funny, almost.

From the latest Venice Biennale, Berlinde de Bruyckere's very queer and striking sculpture, or so it seemed from a distance - hirsute and black and humped around a central hole, like a work of old modernism. Or old surrealism: it turned out to be the rejigged carcass of a horse.

From a show held only last month, the bleary painting that clinched so much free press coverage for a mere £600: Stella Vine's Diana in extremis calling up her butler, Paul Burrell, captioned across the canvas in lipsticky scarlet: 'Hi Paul Can You Come Over I'm Scared'.

I can't see anything con troversial about this picture at all, except that the media doggedly claim it to be so. It is as bad as it wants to be, and quite a bit worse, but you would have to say it catches the People's Princess at her most recognisable - brimming eyes heavily rimmed in kohl for that intimate moment with Martin Bashir and the world.

If further furore is needed, I guess the gallery's PR needs only ring the tabs and point out that in addition to that botched horse there are several other dead animals on show, including two skinned pets - a cat and a collie, no less - hung like jackets on the wall. All new, all good copy and nicely reminiscent of the last time round (sliced pigs, pickled lambs). Plus Vine can be marketed as a variant Emin - the troubled past, the days as a stripper, the emotional candour. But she already has been. What else?

A picture of a bent-over backside. Two of David Falconer's heaps of patently plastic vermin. Four oil paintings, in black and white, and with a really rebarbative glint, of beer cans, old tabloids and socks drying on a radiator. Five of those ballpoint doodles by the young Danish artist TAL R, which I somewhere saw praised for their 'energy' (sure sign of cultural fatigue). Six self-portraits by Japan's (male) understudy to Cindy Sherman. A dozen works by the German painter Jonathan Meese, better left aside for the moment.

How it mounts up. Works that come with a handy anecdote - made by a security guard, or a Mexican tattooist called Dr Lakra (surely a spoof, but life's too short to guess the true identity of this Mexican who doctors magazine covers). Works that are weird, trashy, nasty and kitsch. One-gag works. Works that fill a whole room, like the massive cardboard edifice that unites all the locations in The Trial in one superbly crafted, and supremely dull, architectural model.

Nothing you could stand to look at for long, nothing made to sustain you. Or so it goes for much of the time (and a really thorough visit would take several hours), except that in among all this stuff, treated like so much stuff, there is work that doesn't need parlaying in terms of its newness.

Conrad Shawcross's gigantic wooden contraption, The Nervous System , beautifully analogises its title. Two vast wheels, gearing smaller spindles of brightly coloured yarn, are rotated by a crankshaft - or is it the other way round? - that keeps them in perpetual motion. Twitching and quivering as it ticks away on its ratchet, the machine twines, even as it gradually untwines, its mortal coil.

There are raw new paintings by Marlene Dumas in heavy frames that nod (frames as well as paintings) to early Picasso. A fine needle-piece by Michael Raedecker, long stitched shadows and trees scissored out of space, very eery, that nearly gets lost in the general clamour.

At the end of a specially tawdry corridor is a whole room full of Peter Doigs, including a very beautiful white-out where the paint seems to have settled on the canvas in powdery snowdrifts.

Why doesn't he buy more of this? Answer: he has. New Blood is full of old artists. Classic Paula Regos (some of her best). That sharp Patrick Caulfield of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as seen from the rear, nicely subversive in the middle of all this wood-lined bankers' baroque.

Richard Wilson's sea of oil through which you walk, waist-height, miraculously untarnished, watching the room doubled and halved in its glittering surface.

Duane Hanson's marvellous counterfeit people: the old guy hunched on a bench, paper bag in hand, speechless with a life's exhaustion. The amateur photographer who grins and raises his camera - as you step out of the way.

Wilson's work is about the only thing that actually looks better at County Hall than it did in the pristine white ballpark of the old Saatchi Gallery. Pretty much everything else is degraded by the cursed architecture - in and out of the disused offices, bottlenecking in the corridors - and the terrible lighting conditions that disable some of the sculpture. Not much can survive this busy congestion except by shouting incredibly loud.

Which is Jonathan Meese in one: raucous, swaggering, attacking the thick paint with his frenzied fin gers, all huff and puff and ridiculous bluster. The young Berliner mocks himself up as mad old Ludwig, or a teutonic knight, or Antonin Artaud with faint hints of SS insignia. You're supposed to find it a little comic, all this egotistical bombast, but it doesn't seem genuinely absurd.

Saatchi has gone overboard for Meese, this German exhibitionist, for his quotations from Basquiat, Kokoschka, Picasso, horror movies, graffiti, for his nerdish recitations of other people's fury.

Which is where the old question recurs: does the collector really like what he buys (as if we'll ever know)? Does he believe that we really will, such that he has created a museum in which to display it?

Newness is all, in this case, or all that is needed by way of modest cover. It says that this bulk buy, baffling as it may seem to you, was made out of an interest in, and support for, the new. Heck, it could even turn out to be a mistake in the future.

But by then, a distant prospect, as long as the competitors have joined in with this game, as they so often do, the artist will have turned 35 and the prices may well have gone through the roof.

Three to see

Philip Guston
Royal Academy, W1, to 12 April
Tremendous retrospective of the great tragicomedian of American painting.
El Greco
National Gallery, London WC2, until 23 May
Electrifying and mysterious works.
Royal Academy, to 12 April
Infinite riches in little rooms: French intimisme at its best

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